"Our game is mostly survival - it is not a horror game. We do not try to suddenly frighten a player at all costs. Instead, we wanted to create an atmosphere of sustained uncertainty and fear that eventually leads to paranoia. We believe that John Carpenter's movie The Thing is a brilliant example of such an atmosphere, and we really tried to convey this vibrant atmosphere in our game."
In the survival/strategy game Distrust the player finds themselves stranded in an abandoned arctic base after a helicopter crash. They're given control of two characters in a randomly-generated scenario and tasked with finding some way of staying warm, staying rested, and escaping their predicament. The need for test is the troublemaker in Distrust, though, as sleep makes a monster draw ever closer. Staying awake causes madness, though, with the character losing their mind in several ways.
Distrust's inspiration from The Thing doesn't lead to a showdown between characters, but one between the player and the characters they control. Is what they're seeing in the game real? What new challenges are created in surviving when you cannot even believe what the game is telling you?
Producer Artem Bochkarev, designer Vladimir Kovtun, and Stanislav Stepchenko, head of development studio Cheerdealers all weighed in on creating this breakdown of trust between player and game, and what it meant for their survival game.
Distrust borrows the idea of a remote polar setting and a strange alien force from The Thing (1982)
Surviving The Thing
"In the movie The Thing, the characters cannot trust each other because anyone may be a monster. We separated the unknown aggressive force as a standalone antagonist and introduced an additional game feature – madness."
The developers at Cheerdealers were looking to create a survival game, and in many ways, The Thing felt like a perfect inspiration.
"First of all, we are fans of this movie. When we decided to create a survival game, it was the The Thing that came to mind," says Bochkarev. "Moreover, we are all from Novosibirsk, Siberia, so we are no strangers to snow, cold, and other severe climate conditions. In addition, the setting of the film – some polar base, lost in snow in the middle of nowhere – is almost a perfect setting for a survival game."
Freezing cold, blowing snow, and an abandoned base made for an excellent setting where players would need to work hard just to stay alive. Even better, the film had a hint of a neat mechanic already buried within its story. Having several people at a frigid base all trying to figure out if any of them were infested with an alien life form would breed distrust between them, which gave the developers an interesting idea.
"We did not aim at making a game out of the movie," says Bochkarev. "We were greatly inspired by it, but we wanted to make something new out of this inspiration. In the original movie, the characters cannot trust each other because anyone may be a monster. We separated the unknown aggressive force as a standalone antagonist and introduced an additional game feature – madnesses. This reflects in the title: a player sees the scene through the eyes of a survivor; by 'distrust', we mean that a player cannot trust a character who is mad."
"We are all from Novosibirsk, Siberia, so we are no strangers to snow, cold, and other severe climate conditions."
What is something the characters would need that the developers could play on? Sleep. Survivors would need rest in this difficult climate on top of warmth and food, and it's one whose lack could cause certain psychological effects. By making players choose between rest where they could potentially die, or staying awake and developing a dangerous mental effect, they could add not only a complex decision for players to make, but also create a distrust between the player and character, emulating that important part of The Thing's atmosphere.
"The intention is pretty simple – there are tons of great survival games on Steam, and we wanted our game to have something new; some feature that would make our game more attractive and interesting," says Bochkarev. "Instead of working on some other setting or creating some additional monsters, we've come up with an idea of adding another gameplay dimension to the game."
A different kind of survival
"By staying awake too long, players can developer different mental issues, false visions of monstrosities and other perception-altering afflictions, all of which obscure useful information that the player needs in order to stay alive."
"The verb ‘survive' means to go through difficult circumstances and not let them affect you very much - to continue to exist even after being in a dangerous situation. Therefore, a true survivor should reach the very edge and then overcome whatever threatens their lives."
Surviving a randomly generated snowswept abandoned base and finding the means to stay alive within it would already be the challenge that the developers mentioned, but madness adds another twist of the knife. By staying awake, players can developer different mental challenges, from visions of monstrosities to other perception-altering afflictions, all of which obscure useful information from the player that they need to stay alive. These madnesses can be avoided by resting, but that can bring the attention of a monster that kills them.
"In addition to surviving in severe climate conditions we also added this element of balance between sleeping and staying awake," says Bochkarev. "This is another edge that we put the survivors at. Of course, through these very mechanics, we also implemented the interactions between the survivors and the aggressi
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