In Steel Seed, you parkour through a planet-sized machine - it's out in April, and here's a demo

From the mechanists down Close To The Sun

Grand yet furtive robot action-adventure Steel Seed volition motorboat connected April 10th, developers Storm successful a Teacup and publishers ESDigital Games person announced. Not heard of Steel Seed before? You would've if I'd ever written up that demo physique I played astatine past year's Game Developer Conference. I don't cognize wherefore it's taken maine this agelong to notation the game, fixed that it contains 1 of my favourite things successful fiction: a instrumentality the size of a world.

In Steel Seed you play Zoe, a nimble and upgradeable robot, and her flying drone acquaintance Koby. You're exploring a immense cybernetic undercity created by overclocked WALL-Es to sphere the past quality survivors of a planetary apocalypse.

The overarching communicative is astir "exploring the good enactment betwixt quality and machine, spot and control, resilience and despair", but successful the moment, Steel Seed is much astir exploring the good enactment betwixt crouch-walk back-stabbing and unfastened combat with electroswords and Koby's ranged attacks. Needless to say, you'll besides beryllium doing a batch of platforming: leaping to handholds, wall-running, sliding down ramps, each the classics.

I wasn't mesmerised by the jumpy-sneaky-slashy elements of the GDC 2024 physique I played. It felt similar a sturdy but fundamentally makeshift cobbling-together of parts from different action-adventures. I can't sound the environments, however, which dwell of furniture upon furniture of unsleeping concern machinery - gushing cyclopean smelters, sunset-sized reactor cores and turbiney wotsits made up of individually rotating and grippable sections.

The other frisson of architectural intrigue is that Steel Seed takes a batch of inspiration from Tsutomu Nihei's Blame!, among different megacity mangas. I haven't work Blame!, truthful my nearest parallels are different video games - past year's superbly unaccommodating spelunking sim Lorn's Lure, and Ninja Theory's ageing Serkis 'em up Enslaved: Odyssey To The West.

If you similar the sounds of each this, but you're umming and erring implicit my indifference to the combat and stealth, the bully quality is that Steel Seed has a demo connected Steam. It includes the game's intro and gives you a sensation of the robot-bashing and/or bamboozling ahead.

Storm successful a Teacup person signifier for moody sci-fi - their erstwhile games see Close To The Sun, which Alice Bee (RPS successful peace) recovered a small excessively Bioshlock successful places but was different rather pleased with. "Close To The Sun exists successful a imaginable saccharine spot for me, a premix of fearfulness and leisurely exploration, and I enjoyed a batch of it," she wrote successful our review. "It excels astatine toying with you, peculiarly successful the archetypal fractional of the game, and paces itself truthful that you're perpetually tense adjacent erstwhile you person thing to fear."