![]() ![]() Check out this video on their metabolism system. Every edible item in the game is coded with some true-to-life macro nutrient data to help you plan ahead. High strength characters need high protein diets, for instance. Now, you dont just regulate that you’re eating food, you also need to make sure you’re eating the right kinds of food to maintain a diet that can sustain the sort of character you want to build. SCUM ups the ante, by not just adding a hunger mechanic, but an entire nutrition system. A bar gets low, and you get weak until you eat some food and it goes up again. How about hunger? We’ve all played survival games with hunger meters, and the system is pretty rudimentary. Yeah, I’ll say.īut on a meta-level, all of these mechanics go hand in hand with the overall message of the SCUM’s core design - meticulousness. Maybe you’re getting too good with a rifle or bow from long distances, so they need to conjure up a rainstorm to dampen your edge. Maybe you aren’t being active enough, so they cause a random wildfire to smoke you out of a hiding place. Specially modified bugs may bite you and make you dramatically ill. Well, they control everything, from the wildlife to the weather. What else will these producers do to make your life hard? You really have to be careful about those guys. Massive mobs of them can swarm a location and bring it down in unison without too much struggle. It’s a gross display of power by the producers of the show, who use these so-called “puppets” as everything from scouts to siege weapons. There’s good reason to believe that they were morphed into this state by a similar neck-chip situation as your own. Outside of the bright-eyed and bushy-tailed hardened criminals stuck on the island with you, there are also mindless, zombie-like people who wander the area looking to kill. But the path to do that involves monitoring and managing health, scavenging for gear and crafting materials, avoiding the occasional zombie, fighting other… Wait, back up. Most of your time will be spent attempting to get the tracking chip out of your neck that’s being used to monitor you, and then trying to escape. Not to mention you have to survive nature and all of its dangers as well. ![]() Not only are the inmates being incentivized to kill each other for their freedom, but the mysterious controllers are manipulating and sabotaging the world around you. Your journey to figure out who’s doing this and how to stop them is rife with danger, though. It becomes clear pretty quickly that your sentence is being turned into some sort of bloodsport for the television watching public. Yes! You are in the shoes of an inmate trapped on a prison island. The micromanagement is at a level that’s hard to comprehend. ![]() But once you engage with the systems, you realize its something much more than that. On the surface, it looks like something you’ve seen before. Gamepires and Croteam describe SCUM as “an open-world survival game with unprecedented levels of character customization, control, and progression.” They aren’t wrong. So what exactly is SCUM, and what do players find so compelling about it? That’s what this article is for. Tens of thousands of players are blasting each other concurrently, but the game and its popularity seem to all have come out of nowhere. It’s already publisher Devolver Digital’s biggest launch ever, selling 250,000 copies in its first day. Despite some controversy, survival shooter SCUM is lighting the Steam charts on fire in the few weeks since its Early Access launch.
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