Indie publisher Oro Interactive has always had the penchant for weird, silly “friendslop” co-op multiplayer games. From dark Mario Party to aliens pretending to run a gas station.
But this time, it’s by the indie developers at Happy Volcano that has now shipped three games in three different genres and they have two that are also of different genres.
Happy Volcano previously released a narrative puzzler (The Almost Gone), a racing game about stopping at the right place the fastest (You Suck At Parking), a modular factory builder (Modulus), and also currently working on a cosy cyberpunk diorama building game (Midnight Moments). They are also making Grave Mistakes.
Grave Mistakes isn’t a pun for that previous sentence (we wish the folks all the best and rooting for their success), rather it’s the name of Happy Volcano’s next new indie game, an online co-op “frienslop” comedy game, with a horror theme.
In Grave Mistakes, you as part of team of up to four players run a family business of the local funeral home, aptly named Good Mourning.
So the day-to-day activities should be about preparing the departed’s body to be aptly presented for the occasion, usher in their grieving families for the ceremony, conduct said ceremonies (including giving an eulogy and playing the organ).
However, the twist is in the title of this post.
Your Grandma is the boss of this whole operation, and her dietary demands you and your team of funeral runners to prepare not just a body for a funeral, but a meal for sweet ol’ Grandma.
Chop up parts of the body (they are physics-based, so expect them to flop around when it’s fresh), as your elderly demands you every morning to feed her what she wants, and hope that you can deceive the families that their loved had always had a funny-looking pumpkin head, or a shovel for right arm, or whatever item you got in hand to replace the missing hand and/or other body parts.
Fail to prepare dinner, and Grandma would eat one of her loved ones instead. That’s one of you players getting chomped alive.
Yeah, “Cannibal Grandma” is also something a burglar won’t want to see when they break into your house.
Like many of these sort of “friendslop” games that are currently popular, Grave Mistakes feature online co-op and proximity chat and is played through a first-person perspective.
If you like the idea of a macabre take on Overcooked! that somehow is partly Surgeon Simulator, and not too squeamish about dead cartoon bodies, Grave Mistakes will be out on PC on Steam later this year. An option to sign-up for future playtests is available on the Steam page.