The stars are going out. We shed some light on Caretaker Sacrifice

Whilst at PC Gamer Weekender we met Byron Atkinson-Jones. We had the chance to talk to him about his upcoming release, Caretaker Sacrifice.

“The stars have gone out, you’re completely alone – everyone else is dead and you have a mission that will decide the final fate of humanity”.

Caretaker Sacrifice is the first instalment in the Caretaker Chronicles. You will play as Commander Andy Carolan who is sent on a mission with your co-pilot Alan Purdy, to discover why stars all over the universe are disappearing. Together you infiltrate one of the vehicles that is extinguishing the stars and your partner is tragically killed by a group of drones. The mission now falls solely on your shoulders and you venture on, alone. Sounds a bit like a Doctor Who episode, right? Well, that’s because it almost could have been but unfortunately the BBC didn’t want to back it. Thankfully, Byron was determined to make it anyway and thus Caretaker Sacrifice was born.

The demo began with an opening from Stargate Atlantis’ David Hewlett and then a voiceover from Commander Andy Carolan as he filled us in on what had happened so far. Oh, and did we mention that you’re hovering around thirty metres above the floor? So you’re flying around the interior of what can best be described as an alien ship and you are free to explore it. One thing that we found particularly interesting about the demo was that you could spend the duration just exploring the area – you didn’t have to engage in any combat at all, if you didn’t want to. Carolan states that the drones will only attack when provoked so you are completely safe to just drift around and soak up the atmosphere. However, if you do decide to attack, be prepared to take on a few waves of drones.

One of the selling points of Caretaker Sacrifice is that it’ll work in VR from the get-go. Unlike many games that have been introduced for the Oculus Rift/HTC Vive, this game has been designed with VR in mind. Byron, originally a sceptic of VR, was converted when he tried the Oculus Rift himself, “I’ll be honest with you, I didn’t really think it was going to take off, but I tried it and I went ‘Yeah, okay, this is really good”. Byron began to focus on the VR experience. He found that players naturally wanted to explore more when using a VR headset and so he changed the gaming experience to accommodate these players. This really came across in the Caretaker Sacrifice demo and it was awesome to see people huddled around the booth, waiting to experience a game that was built with VR in mind. In addition, Byron has even taken the concern of motion sickness into account when designing Caretaker. As a sufferer of motion sickness himself, he has tried to create horizons at every point the player can look at, in-game as a way of tackling this issue – something that we were very relieved to hear about!

Unfortunately, we didn’t get to spend very long looking at the Caretaker Sacrifice booth however, we cannot deny that the game has an interesting concept. With two more instalments to follow, it sounds as though this story is continuously expanding as Xiotex Studios moulds it. We feel that this will be a unique VR experience that will experiment how far VR can really be pushed. If you’ve ever wanted to fly around a sci-fi environment while blasting nodes and drones, this is definitely a game worth sacrificing some time for.

Caretaker Sacrifice will be released on 6th April, 2016. It will be available on PC (with Oculus support), Mac and Linux.

Most Anticipated Feature: Flying in VR!