Some artists sculpt with clay, others create beautiful landscapes with watercolors. Misshapen, the upcoming body-horror game from Argentine developer BRUTO, gives players the ability to craft terrifying sights using the flesh of their enemies. The full game still lacks a release date, but a new demo provides a sneak peek of the “draw-with-lumps” technology that drives Misshapen by way of a creepy greeting-card maker.
The premise of Misshapen’s Greeting Card Simulator is simple: Choose your background, pick from a variety of pre-determined enemy locations, and go to town spawning beautiful lumps. A right-click will helpfully erase any errant flesh blobs, and the minigame also includes a photo mode to capture your horrific creations. You can even insert your own custom backgrounds to draw lumps on your friends or the logo of your website.
After playing around with this demo, I really like how your flesh sculptures have a heft to them. It’s not like drawing in Paint; if you load a monster up with too much excess baggage it’ll lean and sway, turning your moving work of art into an actual moving work of art. It’s currently pretty hard to do any fine-tuning due to the low sensitivity of the cursor, but the developers say they are working on a future update to address this.
“This little app [has helped] us improve our draw-with-lumps technology and improve [Misshapen], so we’re really happy with it,” a BRUTO rep told Kotaku. “In the real game, there are two modes of lump-creation, one with a 2D plane similar to the one in the app and another in 3D, adding depth into the mix. One of the biggest challenges we had in the development of the game was to come up with a control scheme that feels good, and we are still tweaking it.”
Misshapen is currently in development for a forthcoming Steam release. You can download Greeting Card Simulator for free from itch.io.
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