Every ten years, the button gets pressed. Ten years in cryosleep, a few minutes awake, press the button, and then Kent heads back to sleep until the button needs to be pressed again. There’s probably an important underlying reason behind human supervision of the button-press, making sure the related systems are running properly and nothing has gone haywire, but more important than all of that is that it’s boring. Boring enough to make tinkering with the ship’s software seem like a great idea, and so far a longer sleep-cycle hasn’t had any bad effects. The next logical step is to jump from a dozen years to fifty, which predictably enough turns into almost eight thousand years. Kent is now alone on Earth with the ship’s AI still considering him under contract, and survival is going to be far less boring than pushing a button every ten years.
The End of the World is No Excuse To Break a Work Contract
Kentum is an upcoming side-view base-building survival game, and while the demo from last February is sadly no longer active it was a good time while it lasted. A little base-building, some automation, survival elements, and metroidvania exploration made for a good couple hours' play, helped along by a decent sense of humor giving the game a strong personality. Humanity may be gone but Kent and his corporate AI companion are still kicking, complete with a small habitat’s worth of tech that includes a handy cloning pod for when things go disastrously wrong, so restarting the human race may just be possible after all.
Starting off with little more than a staff made from the remains of Kent’s only living companion on the ship, a bonsai that had plenty of time to grow during hibernation, the reluctant adventurer sets out to find anything he can use to get better tech and avoid starvation. Mysterious ruins, hungry creatures, and plenty of resources to keep an eye out for in the wilds keep Kent busy when away from base, beating up rocks and wildlife in equal measure. Back at home the crash-landed capsule makes a nice starting point but it’s going to take more than a bunch of rocks and ore to restart humanity, so it needs to grow in every direction in order to hold planters, cookers, furnaces, and various manufacturing machines. Eventually automation kicks in so you’re able to dump in the basic resources in one side and get a useful product on the other, all without needing to shepherd the bits from one crafting station to the next.
While the new Kentum gameplay trailer dropped today it doesn’t yet come with a release date, other than some time in 2025. Which is suddenly a disturbingly short period of time, so it shouldn’t be too much longer a wait. There’s a ruined world that doesn’t particularly miss humanity waiting to be explored, complete with mysteries and weirdness, and seeing as a little matter like the end of humanity isn’t enough to break Kent’s work contract he might as well spend the time seeing everything it’s got to offer.
