You may remember Sunburn!, the sickly-sweet puzzle game about launching a crew of stranded astronauts with a suicide pact into a nearby star. I first wrote about the game last month, but the premise still makes me a little queasy if I think about it too long.
Since then, the three designers behind the game have officially formed a hatchling development studio, called Secret Crush. Their first act was to release a trailer for the game, which more-or-less clearly sketches out the kind of spatial gravity puzzles you’ll need to solve in order to successfully liquify your crew in the corona of a red giant.
If you look closely, you’ll notice that the goal is to tether your entire crew together with space-rope by using nearby asteroids as jumping-off points and floating planets as gravity wells. At one point, the crew’s connection is severed by what looks like a fireball, so it’s not just aimless cosmic floating.
In most games, one of the general, over-arching goals is to not die, but in Sunburn!, success is defined by dying in a very specific way: all trundled up together. Presumably, punting lone astronauts into black holes or vortexes is bad, but frying them five at a time. That’s an inconsistency, sure, but the implication is endearing enough — it’s better to die with friends than alone.
In any case, Sunburn! is almost done. After a final visual pass, some bug fixes, and a set of optimizations for iOS 8, Secret Crush will be ready to submit the game to the App Store, with a release coming sometime later this fall.
