“We strived to make a combat system with turns that had a focus on sensory mechanics - enemies listening for you, moving to your last known position to investigate, and so on,” say Whalenought Studios. Mechajammer, going by the title Copper Dreams, was kickstarted successfully in 2016 and outside of the retitle (and a lot of iteration to the combat and turn-based system), it’s largely the same game since then. Mechajammer was already in their heads as that game shipped, and while they had a few ideas for what was next, they fancied going into some hard sci-fi for a change of pace after releasing a fantasy game. Whalenought’s last game, the fantasy-based Serpent in the Staglands, was released in 2015. As a genre it should act as a – sadly verging on reality – warning, a broken society, and the filth and grunge acts as a sort of on-the-nose reflection of that, but makes for a sort of cozy atmosphere when it’s as low-res as Mechajammer, at least we hope.” Workers with weird cybernetic implants they used for their old job as they try to get by on the streets, rather than flashy cars and walls of neon-lit buildings and swirling advertisements. “Cyberpunk has the tendency to lean so digital and flashy, but the low-life aspect is the more interesting part to us. “Movies like Robocop, Escape from New York are messy and sweaty, and we wanted to capture that - it’s so easy to make a clean-looking 3D sci-fi game but the sweaty dirtiness certainly adds a challenge,” they add. There’s beauty in the mundane, after all. Here, while you and your party are trying to escape, most people are just getting on with their day-to-day routine. That jet-black streak running through the movies above is clearly visible here, in addition to the feeling that ties the three together: despite the bleak dystopia all around them, people are just trying to survive in the society they’re in.
“ Escape from New York was probably the big atmospheric and premise influence, Robocop and Brazil inspired how the syndicates have created a galaxy-spanning maze of unmanageable, indecipherable hierarchy and command that is hanging on by a thread,” say the pair, via an email interview. The husband and wife team of Whalenought Studios, comprised of Hannah and Joseph Williams, say that whilst the game is somber and dark, there are actually “pretty lighthearted” parts to it, too. READ MORE: Why ‘Deathloop’ is wrong: meaning and morality within a time loop.
This grimy cyberpunk-horror RPG has had two cracking demos released through the Steam Next Fest. You have probably already heard of Mechajammer.
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