Back in December a super unique game called Nimoyd caught my eye when its developer Nudge Nudge Games sent a trailer in our direction, and I spent the rest of the day diving into the history behind its making and falling in love with everything I learned. Nimoyd started as a side project between two friends who felt that the state of crafting survival games was a bit stagnant, and so they set out to build their own game that solved the problems they saw in the genre. Work on the game began as far back as 2016 but the duo spent the next couple of years struggling to make things work how they wanted. In 2018, on the brink of just scrapping the project altogether out of frustration, they tried a pretty unique idea and switched to a 3D voxel engine for the game’s environment while keeping their lovely 2D pixel art assets. This proved to be the key moment where things turned around for Nimoyd and things have been progressing wonderfully with the game ever since. Here is their debut trailer from December in case you missed it the first time around, or if you simply want to watch it again because it’s so darn stunning.

So the deal with Nimoyd is that the developers know that it will take a long time to polish up a game with its kind of scope, and the plan has always been to release the game in Early Access on Steam and then spend however long it takes iterating on and polishing it until it meets their standards for an official release. Once that happens then they’ll be open to bringing the game to more platforms like console and mobile. It’ll for sure be a long process, but the good news is that step 1 of that process is finally happening as Nudge Nudge has released the first alpha demo of Nimoyd on Steam in anticipation of the Steam Next Fest (previously the Steam Game Festival) that kicks off next week. So if you’ve got a Windows PC and want to take this very early version for a test drive then head over to the game’s Steam page to download the free demo.

I’m going to try and find some time to check it out myself this weekend, but regardless I’ll continue keeping a close eye on how Nimoyd continues to develop as this has definitely shot up to become one of my most anticipated games. Be sure to read our previous coverage for a bit more detail on the game’s history, and check out a number of super interesting dev log videos over on the team’s YouTube channel for some cool behind the scenes stuff. Finally, I’ll leave you with this brand new 20 minute gameplay video of the new alpha demo of Nimoyd so you can get a good idea of what the game is like even if you’re not able to take the demo for a spin yourself.