Dinosaur Polo Club has shadowdropped a new game today, for free.
Called RTFM, it’s short for “Read The F*cking Manual” as two players, one of which has to RTFM as the Operator, in order to solve puzzles the other other player, the Troubleshooter, is seeing—delivered in a mostly white on black, CRT screen-style visual.
It’s recommended that the aforementioned “f*cking manual” (a PDF file) be printed out. It’s full of odd instructions and is annotated with… interesting scribbles, let’s just say. As if working in the corporate world isn’t enough of a horror setting.
So far, so Keep Talking And Nobody Explodes. The twist to RTFM’s brand of co-op is can the two players trust each other. And there’s some horrific abomination going on while the two of you try to solve puzzles only one can see. The X-Files, Portal and Control are cited as references for the tone here, which explains the “comedic horror” bit.
Dinosaur Polo Club’s debut game, Mini Metro, was borned out of a Ludum Dare game jam. RFTM is the result of the studio’s week-long internal game jam, dubbed the Creativity Week. This experimental shadowdrop of a free game was developed by a core team of seven.
“We love game jams!” says Amie Wolken, CEO of Dinosaur Polo Club. “Since before my time, DPC has embraced Creativity Week, a time where you can express yourself in imaginative ways that there isn’t time for in an ordinary work week. During Creativity Week, we spend time making things together but without the constraints of project work, and it’s not just game jams; we’ve had dinos who will paint, or make physical prints, or other wildly cool creative things. RTFM is just one of the awesome results born of the passion and creativity in the team, sparked during one of these weeks.”
RTFM is a small passion project created in three days, hence why it’s been shadowdropped for free and described as “a side quest from Dinosaur Polo Club.” It’s not an April Fool’s prank if it’s an actual thing being released.
“We always do something for April Fool’s, so this seemed like a way to let others have a play with something the team enjoyed making while also getting back to our roots a bit,” said Casey Lucas-Quaid, Community Manager.
If you have a good friend that can play ball and suffer through what is basically the experience of doing tech support, RTFM is available on PC and Mac via itch.io. The download page also includes the link to download the “f*cking manual.”