American McGee’s Spicy Horse studio just launched a Kickstarter for a new game where you play as Dorothy going up against the Tinman. And it looks a lot cooler than it sounds.
Well, what there is looks cool. Sadly there’s only really art to go on, and nothing more substantial, but unlike indie startups on the service at least there’s the knowledge that, as an established studio, Spicy Horse will probably actually get this game done.
Provided it hits its $US950,000 target, anyways, which, boy, is a lot.
Designed for PC/tablets, OZombie is a predominantly singleplayer game with “an emphasis on role-playing, tactical combat, exploration and story telling”, which imagines Oz as a remote Pacific island, with Dorothy teaming up with Tinman and Lion to bring down Scarecrow’s army of… zombies.
It’s clear the team are drawing a lot of inspiration from all of Robert Heinlein’s Oz work, not just The Wizard of Oz, which you can really see when you check out their complete fiction guide below.
OZombie [Kickstarter]
Comments
7 responses to “A Zombie Steampunk Wizard Of Oz? Sure, Why Not”
I thought his Alice game had a great concept. I’d buy this for sure.
Yeah i’m in. Alice, while lacking in areas, was a visual treat.
Backed it yesterday, was always a shame his original Oz game never got made.
Love Spicey Horse, backed and cannot wait.
…so which is it?
The second. Luke done goofed.
Heinlein set part of one book in Oz, but I’m pretty sure L. Frank Baum wrote the Oz books in the first place.
Otherwise, the game looks great – never thought of Scarecrow as a zombie before.
A few pages in the Number of the Beast, then.
I know that this is a blog and editorial standards aren’t high, but c’mon, Luke – the kickstarter was talking about using themes from Heinlein’s literary work – specifically his optimistic view of libertarianism – not the world of Oz. Which was, of course, written by L. Frank Baum.
And it didn’t mention that “you play as Dorothy going up against the Tinman”, either. As you’ve noted, the adversary is Scarecrow.
After seeing generally poor reviews for Akaneiro, I think I might stay right away until after this comes out. Which is a shame because both games sounded really interesting in concept.
I tried America McGee’s last game, Akaneiro: Demon Hunters, and was very disappointed to find a very shallow, always-on, pay-to-win Diablo clone. Even though I only wanted to test single player there was a chat window at the bottom of the screen with people chatting in a language I can’t read. This chat window could be shrunk but not closed. Glad it was free to play, because I uninstalled after 10 minutes. I don’t know why people actually contributed to kickstart a free-to-play game in the first place. Later I received an email from Akaneiro asking for players to come back to the game. Seriously!
I like that this new one has an offline mode and no drm. Still suspicious of the in-game shop though. But at least they seemed to have backed away from many of their previous decisions.