Love, Life And An American Chainsaw - Auroch Announces Chainsaw Warrior Game

Auroch Digital, the Bristol, UK-based studio, are best known for their recent "Game the News" initiative, in which they produced games based on recent news events including the Syrian civil war.uncaptioned

With this in mind, it might be slightly concerning that they have turned their hand to a game based on Games Workshop's relatively unknown 1987 single-player board game, Chainsaw Warrior*, suggesting as it does that on October 30 2032 a dimensional rift will be opened up in a New York slum (Williamsburg, I'm guessing), and a single man with a chainsaw will be the only thing standing between Earth and a zombie apocalypse.

Which, frankly, would pretty much leave the current generation of newsgames looking rather pedestrian. Take note, molleindustria.

Chainsaw Warrior the original, notable for its beautiful Brett Ewins artwork, was a tense, card-based game for one player. Moving through the house, the player would draw cards for each new room, scavenging equipment from his fallen advance guard, fighting monsters or encountering hazards. Tension was added by a timer - 60 minutes of game time elapsing would lead to an automatic loss. It was nail-bitingly difficult, and the temptation to cheat was almost overwhelming.

It was also very clearly an attempt by Games Workshop (best known in the US for the Warhammer 40,000 and Blood Bowl franchises) to respond to the threat of computer games, still very much a genre in its infancy but already one starting to challenge their board game and war gaming empires. As such, it is a natural for the self-contained world of mobile gaming - especially as we have seen gaming come full circle, to an extent, to the point where the computer is seen as the natural home for a game like Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble, which would classically have been a boardgame with a prohibitively high material cost.

Auroch Digital, a small games developer in south-west England, may seem an unusual choice of partner for Games Workshop, who have deep relationships with larger game publishers - after THQ's bankruptcy, Sega snapped up its Warhammer 40,000 licenses. However, a mobile-and-web studio for this sort of relatively small, self-contained game makes considerable sense. Also Auroch's consumer-facing games arm, Red Wasp Design, made the diverting turn-based strategy game The Wasted Land, based on Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu games - published in the UK by Games Workshop. So, signs point to this being a potentially interesting product, albeit on a smaller scale than the next Warhammer 40,000 game.

The game is set to release on iOS and Android at the end of summer (that is, probably late August), with a PC and Mac release promised thereafter. Whether it be accompanied by a T-shirt that will make a man of you is as yet unclear:

