Bring Your Dog On A Quest To Save The World

Ashen Rift isn’t about surviving a mysterious apocalypse. It’s about what the hell you do with yourself ten years after you’ve survived.

You can check out the trailer for the game above, which will give you a good feel for the game’s world. You play a survivor in an apocalyptic world caused by a science experiment gone wrong (think Half-Life, but you’re not Gordon Freeman). The opening of this “rift” caused most humans to turn into these monsters called “feeders”. It’s been ten years sine the incident and it seems that the feeders are running out of… food. I asked Barry Collins, the game’s lone developer about the character’s motivation for trying to save the world instead of just holing up somewhere and surviving:

Its hard for me to want to explain much more about him, his origins and to a point even his motivation without spoiling things I want to keep quiet. It’s safe to say tho that He’s watched his home planet come to within an inch of its life and things are pretty rough out there now, Not many people left to even do anything about it, and he figures maybe, just maybe it’s possible to bring earth back from the edge.

Deep down, Bounder, his little pride and joy has a lot to do with his longing for things to get better… Even if just to see him live a good life or perhaps in the sense that it’s a reminder of how things were and could be.

Keep in mind that I also have a distaste for overly ham-fisted story lines… I feel like if this was a AAA title by a major publisher, he would be a cartoon of the sort of real person he could be. I don’t need him to have some massive heart breaking story like “feeders killed my mum, dad, wife and children and now I’m going to get REVENGE!!!” y’know, its not like that, everyone has a shitty story… He’s a little more of a realist, like you’n me, right, He understands that the world is the way it is, came to terms with it and is now determined to at least try.

What gave him the idea to _go_ for it was that since almost everything is dead now and even the Feeders have less to eat, the world and hostiles in it are going into a sort of hibernation… Now is probably the best time.

The game is a shooter, but built less around the idea of blowing away hordes of enemies than getting creative with your environment. There are a few ways the developer plans to do that. The most interesting isn’t that you can find and throw explosives, but that those explosives can deform the environment, or even cause huge pieces of rock to collapse on your enemies.

The latest update video shows off examples of how you can use some of these features in the game:

I got to play an early build of the game, and even with only 2.5 months of development, it already looks surprisingly good. The developer is aiming to have the game done by December, which is ambitious, but after seeing what he has so far, I’m hopeful to see where it ends up. Check it out for yourself on kickstarter here and vote for it on Greenlight here.