As a former delivery guy, I have a fondness in my heart for videogame trucking. It lets me reclaim the simple satisfaction of moving things where they need to go without needing to endure all the things that make people glad they aren’t a delivery guy. There’s just one problem: Videogame truckin’ isn’t weird enough.
My six years of delivery work regularly involved surreal events, uncanny individuals, inexplicable decisions, and plenty of other inscrutable encounters. Videogame trucking, however, tends to be extremely scrutable—until this week, when developer Code Wakers launched an open playtest for Prospice: Anomalous Logistics, an upcoming driving and delivery sim that’s properly unfathomable.
In Prospice, you play as an employee of an organization that would be right at home alongside the SCP Foundation, the Federal Bureau of Control, and any number of groups poking around the Backrooms. Its mission is researching an island that is, in the Steam description’s words, “cursed by the corpses of ever rotting gods” and “a place where the world itself unravels.”
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Unfortunately, the open wilderness isn’t the best environment for researching the remains of a massive, mouldering entity—which is where you come in. As a logistics driver, you’ll undertake delivery tasks to support and supply the expedition, all while managing fuel, navigating unpaved terrain, and ensuring whatever still-twitching godflesh might be weighing down your flatbed gets to its destination unspoiled. Ideally while surviving, which—in my experience—isn’t guaranteed.
When I started the playtest, I was just yards away from a massive, partially unearthed corpse, its hand already removed and waiting in my truck for transport—cargo that was, I’ll admit, somewhat eerier than anything I’ve delivered in person. But still, despite how much that severed hell-hand continually quivered throughout the drive, I completed my inaugural delivery with only some passing clumsiness as I juggled gears to get my truck over and through some swamp mud and rocky inclines.
When my next run went just as smoothly, it was almost enough to convince me that this Anomalous Logistics business might not be all that bad. Sure, the island’s ambient energies mean my PDA’s map can’t always triangulate my position with full precision, and I did have to stop and wonder whether the hovering, bleeding orb I found in the woods would do anything untowards once I strapped it down for transport. But my first day of work was going great!
Until ten minutes later, when a huge, twitching monstrosity crawled out of the trees, and “dissolved” my “dreambody” in “the labyrinth of collective death,” according to the text that briefly appeared on-screen following my immediate and grisly undoing. Which, I can confirm, is an accurate description of the actual deliveryman experience.
Prospice: Anomalous Logistics doesn’t have a release date yet, but Code Wakers says its playtest on Steam “will remain open for approximately one week.”
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