I have a boat (I don’t, but stay with me). Eventually a mast needs replacing. Then the deck needs new planks. Now it needs a new rudder. Finally, after many years, every single piece of wood, nail, and sheet of cloth has been replaced. Is it the same boat? That’s the question at the heart of The Ship of Theseus Paradox and it’s also something new survival horror RPG Graft is exploring.
From Harebrained, the studio behind The Lamplighters League, the Shadowrun trilogy, and Battletech, Graft is an RPG that’s got some extremely weighty stuff going on under the hood. As you play through its dystopian world you’ll graft body parts from fallen enemies onto you to gain new abilities or enhance existing ones. That on its own is intriguing, but in Graft each of these parts contains a mote of the previous owner, infusing you with a tiny part of their soul and personality. So after you’ve replaced nearly every body part you own with those you’ve found on the corpses of foes, are you still you?
Set in a space station called the Arc, things have gone very wrong and you’re looking to make your escape. As you progress through the failing metal moon it begins to fail and fall apart, leaving you often stranded in the darkness with dark horrors – both flesh and machine- stalking you. Of course, you’re not entirely alone up there, as other survivors exist who you can ally with or betray, depending on who they are and what you need from them.
Harebrained has done some wonderful things in the RPG space before but this looks to be a much bleaker, darker experience than anything it has produced before. You can see in every screenshot that this is a grim, dystopian world where danger lurks in the gloom. Not that the Shadowrun games, for example, were devoid of darkness – but they did often counterbalance things with bright, neon light.
This also marks the first game Harebrained has announced since parting ways with publisher Paradox Interactive earlier in the year, following layoffs and the announcement that the studio’s previous title, The Lamplighters League, had not achieved its sales targets.
There’s no release date for Graft just yet but you can head over to Steam to add it to your wishlist. If you’d like to know more, and check out the game for yourself, you can do so over here.
While you wait for its release, our guides to the best horror games and the best survival games will keep you full of terror – in all the right ways – for a long while to come.
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