Somewhere out in space, on an asteroid tumbling through its orbit around a distant star, a small rover-style robot woke up. The amazing thing about the situation is that, prior to this, there was no consciousness to awake. The rover was a rover doing rover-ish things, exactly as programmed, every bit as sentient as a fork. Something happened to bring it to life, or at least self-awareness, but it’s pretty clear that finding answers won’t be as simple as hitting the nearest terminal for a SpaceGoogle search. The asteroid may not be dwarf-planet class but it’s still plenty large enough to house a few secrets, and the path to understanding will require poking around in every nook and crater.
Gears of Eden is a robotic survival game featuring a perky little rover trying to figure out what it’s doing here. Drill for resources or scavenge them from ruins, craft kits to keep the power and repairs flowing while out and about, create new gear back at home base, and avoid weird alien bug-life that’s none too fond of robotic explorers. While Gears of Eden hits all the survival-gaming checkboxes it does it in a unique style and setting, which goes a long way towards setting it apart from the crowd.
The Gears of Eden Kickstarter just launched today after a fairly long period of gaming gestation. The long, slow development path has gone about as far as it needs to, and a successful Kickstarter will enable the small team to bring in the needed help to get things moving at a more realistically sustainable pace with the end goal being completing the story up to the end of the first asteroid. While the alpha won’t be available to backers until the campaign hits its initial funding target, I can say from having played it that it’s got a huge amount of potential that I’d love to see it reach, plus it’s easy to have faith in a team that’s kept on going as long as this one has while remaining in regular communications with its fans. Head on over to the Kickstarter page to take a look, and maybe help a newly-sentient robot figure out what this whole “awareness” thing is all about.
