Space hospital game Galacticare gets demo next week
Slapstick comet-y.
A demo for space hospital game Galacticare will be released next week as part of Steam Next Fest.
From indie developer Brightrock Games, Galacticare is a management game that tasks players with running a hospital in space teeming with alien life - and alien afflictions.
As announced a couple of months back, the game is set for release this year on PC (Steam and GOG), PlayStation 5 and Xbox consoles, plus it's coming to Xbox Game Pass.
I've had access to the demo early and it's an amusing and intuitive experience with a heavily sarcastic tone.
The demo consists of a couple of levels that let players try the basics of management. It's as you'd expect: create treatment rooms and hire doctors to cure incoming patients of disease; decorate the hospital with parody posters and bizarre flora; ensure staff and patient satisfaction while sticking to budgets.
All of this is achieved through simple menus and clean readability, making it easy to jump in and start building. Missions offered by hospital AI H.E.A.L provide focus.
Like Two Point games, Galacticare delivers its gameplay with a healthy dose of satire, but that's enhanced by the space setting that allows the developers to flex their creativity. Afflictions include Space Invasion, where patients become cosmic figures and must have their skin rebuilt in a Skinlab, and Regolithic, where they disintegrate into planetary deposits and must enter the Boning Chamber - a great metal monster that violently tr(eat)s its victims.
Later afflictions include Spacefright, the fear of spaceflight: a psychological condition that's treated in a Dreamarium hooked up to some strange cosmic being. Patients and doctors have silly names, too, and professions like Internet Troll or Floor Licker. The retro 80s musical jams only add to the interstellar atmosphere.
So far, so Two Point. But Galacticare has a few additions that set it apart from its obvious inspiration (and competition).
Away Missions take place outside the hospital. During the first level, you're visited by a colossal tentacled alien who must be treated via shuttle. This in turn provides access to new materials. Each mission will have its own setting in which the outside world impacts the hospital. The second mission, for instance, takes place above a music festival where attendees become afflicted with literal metal heads and developments during the festival slowly impose upon the hospital.
There are some other great touches: robots do all the janitorial and receptionist work so players can focus only on hiring the right doctors; staff and patients make up alien species with their own needs (the plantlike Dyonai improve the mood of those nearby, while the Saurian are hulking beasts needing more space); and VIP consultants are permanent additions across all missions, adding both personality and progression to the game as a whole.
That's how Twiggy Pop arrived in the hospital - a popstar-cum-physician suffering from Festicrosis. And I thought the muddy fields of Glastonbury were bad...
Wishlist Galacticare and download the demo on Steam from 19th - 26th June.