RocketWerkz has released an eight-minute-long documentary-style trailer “Icarus: No Rescue” combining live-action and in-game footage to introduce players to the world of the sci-fi survival game Icarus.
Developed by DayZ creator Dean Hall’s studio RocketWerkz, Icarus takes a session-based approach to survival games. Players take limited-time drops onto a broken planet in search of rare exotic matter, which fuels advanced tech and player progression in the game’s gritty sci-fi universe.
Filmed in a vivid documentary style with live actors, Icarus: No Rescue is told from the perspective of the earliest prospectors to come to planet Icarus after its terraforming failed, looking back twenty years later. Their search for exotic matter pushed them to their limits as they survived off the land in this brutal alien world. Those who missed their dropship’s return to orbit were left behind forever, while others grew rich crafting exotic matter into new technologies.
Icarus is a session-based Player vs Environment survival game for up to eight co-op players or solo play coming to Steam PC in 2021. Bringing limited resources with them, prospectors must explore the damaged planet, gather resources, craft tools, and machinery, build shelter, hunt wildlife, extract the exotic matter and return to their dropship in time.
“Icarus was humanity’s greatest mistake,” explains game creator Dean Hall. “It was to be a second Earth, the first planet we terraformed and colonised in space. Unknown to us the exotic matter reacted and corrupted the planet’s terraforming, but once we realised their true value the exotics sparked an interstellar gold rush.”
RocketWerkz has a multi-year plan for Icarus, adding chapters with additional playable content and lore. The first chapter, The First Cohort, begins in Icarus’ most Earth-like biomes before the game expands to more alien and threatening zones.
“A great survival game experience needs to provide tension and dread, and a sense of people overcoming extreme odds in extreme conditions,” says Hall. “A failed terraforming scenario lets us mix familiar elements that players resonate with alongside unsettling alien elements.”
A variety of drop missions could last from hours to days or weeks. “Taking a session-based approach gives us the flexibility to combine hand-crafted survival tools with advanced tech trees, while offering a big variety of missions, adding gameplay variations, and expanding the game for years to come. All while your characters constantly progress and evolve.”
Built-in Unreal Engine 4, Icarus features handcrafted maps, an online multiplayer, two tech trees, a character attribute system, weather events, destructible buildings.
“We know that players really want to see the game in action next,” says Hall. “So rather than another gameplay-oriented trailer, we plan to start regular developer streams on Twitch and just start playing it with our community.”
