The Splendid Tweedpunk Sandbox of Sir, You Are Being Hunted

Do you fancy a pleasant stroll in the British countryside? You could take time to admire the green and pleasant land with it’s winding country lanes and tranquil rolling hills. But what if it suddenly became a survival horror as the landscape darkened and begun being scoured by gentlemen robots out for your blood?

That is the gloriously British premise of Big Robot’s Sir, You Are Being Hunted, another Kickstarter success story spooling up for release later this year (tentatively July). Sir, You Are Being Hunted (or just Sir to its friends) has just the right amount of sinister and wacky that, if the concept wasn’t being made into a game, it would have ended up as an episode of Doctor Who or Wallace & Gromit.

The fundamental game play concept is described as a “Tweedpunk S.T.A.L.K.E.R.”, so creating an open-world environment in which to roam is a central design concern. In the most recent Kickstarter update, Big Robot shows more of the procedurally-generated wizardry that will breathe life into their rural hunting grounds. Which will see the player searching for pieces of the Strange Device in order to escape the archipelago filled with roving bands of posh big-game hunting androids.

In the update, Big Robot explains how the essence of the British Countryside is captured;

The way we do this is to first place villages, then connect them with roads, then suck the field cells around the road segments into line to create coherent boarders of walls, hedges, fences and so on. Combined with some other cleverness, you end up with a sort of Platonic British Countryside. The essence of the place without actually being a 1:1 simulation so to speak. A distilled impression of the UK. You can tell we’re very proud of it.

The player will have a great degree of control over the parameters of the game world, with sliders controlling the prevalence of fields, forests, hills, lakes and buildings on each of the game world’s five islands.

There does not presently appear to be a slider to control the temperature of the Earl Grey, but presumably the game will feature tea-making facilities lest it be considered a treasonous act of un-British game design.

However, given the oodles of witty, sinister charm evident even in the August 2012 Alpha teaser at the top of the page, they’ll probably get away with a suspended sentence.

For a more up-to-date look at the development state of Sir, You Are Being Hunted, check out the Kickstarter page.