At Summer Game Fest, I tried a game that was bold enough to ask: Why doesn't Stardew Valley have more murder? Grave Seasons, due out next year, is a cozy farming sim with a morbid edge: It's about all the friends (and romantic partners) you make along the bloody way to stopping a serial killer.
A little bit into the short demo of Grave Seasons, I took to the fields to clean up the run-down farm I'd broken into and decided to adopt, only to find a severed hand. It's fitting for an indie title published by Blumhouse Games, a division of Blumhouse Productions, which, with the gaming unit, began expanding beyond its work in horror films to publish titles like last year's Fear the Spotlight.
Grave Seasons is a cozy horror game that seems like it will deftly mix the serene and gruesome, appealing to fans of Dredge and other calming games tinged with the sinister. Players take on the role of a prison escapee who breaks into, and adopts, a farm in the town of Ashenridge, only to find that it's riddled with dark secrets.
But it wasn't just occult labs in the basement and body parts unearthed from the fields that made the game feel delightfully grim. After I'd made some early friends, my demo ended with a shocking twist: One of my new pals, who asked me to join them for a midnight walk in the nearby woods, got ambushed by a hideous monster and brutally murdered. Even the game's charming sprite graphics didn't spare my eyes from the ick of dismemberment.
"We are huge fans of games that blend that sort of coziness mixed with a sense of unease," said Emmett Nahil, narrative designer at studio Perfect Garbage, which developed Grave Seasons (Blumhouse is the publisher). Nahil cited games like Dredge, Into The Woods and Cult of the Lamb as inspirations.
In Grave Seasons, these murders happen seasonally, said lead programmer Nicky Armstrong. But you have enough time between sowing crops and cleaning up your farm to figure out what might be happening. You can try to befriend the many people you meet around town, and even discover who the killer is.
But if you're playing Grave Seasons alongside real-life friends, don't worry about them spoiling the killer's identity for you -- the game's inspired design randomly assigns the murderer from a subset of the approximately 40 characters you encounter in the game. Like any good cozy farming game, you can romance many of them, including the hunky Hari that I met first in the demo. And in an even better twist, the person you're romancing might end up being the killer, too.
Perfect Garbage Games
Beyond video games, Nahil cited folk horror and monster films as inspirations that led to Grave Seasons' unique tone.
"The original Wicker Man is actually a huge inspiration for me," Nahil said. "We have some really cool events [in Grave Seasons] that tell you a bit more about the lore of the world. Obviously, creature features like early Hammer Horror are a huge one for me, where you get to see different monsters, different creatures, and there's a sort of sense of pathos that goes along with those creatures."
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