Icarus Receives Documentary-Style Trailer

The upcoming session-based PvE survival game, Icarus, recently received an eight-minute-long documentary-style trailer. Titled, “Icarus: No Rescue”, the trailer features a combination of live-action and game footage. Icarus is being developed by RocketWerkz, the studio of DayZ creator Dean Hall, and will support up to eight players in co-op. The game sees players take limited-time drops onto a broken planet where they need to scavenge rare exotic matter.

Icarus: No Rescue was filmed in a vivid documentary style and features live actors playing the roles of early prospectors. In the trailer, these prospectors look back on their experience with Icarus twenty years earlier when its terraforming failed. In their search for exotic matter, most of them were pushed to their limits as they survived the brutal alien world.

According to Dean Hall Icarus was humanity’s greatest mistake. It was to be the first planet terraformed and colonized in space. However, the exotic matter on Icarus corrupted the planet’s terraforming and put an end to dreams of it becoming a second Earth. Once the true value of the exotics was discovered the planet also became the focus of an interstellar gold rush. Icarus will kick off with the first chapter, The First Cohort, where players get to experience the most Earth-like biomes on the planet. RocketWerkz has a multi-year plan for the game, so addition chapters with more playable content and lore are planned. These will see the game expanding to more alien and threatening zones. According to Hall the failed terraforming scenario allows RocketWerkz to mix familiar elements that players resonate with alongside unsettling alien elements. The session-based approach in the game also provides the developer with the flexibility to combine hand-crafted survival tools with advanced tech trees and a big variety of missions.

Icarus is being built in Unreal Engine 4 and features handcrafted maps, online multiplayer, two tech trees, a character attribute system, weather events, and destructible buildings. The game will launch later in 2021 on Steam. Hall has also promised regular developer streams on Twitch to keep fans updated on the game. Check out the Icarus: No rescue trailer below and be sure to wishlist the game on Steam if you like what you see.