Survival game ‘Icarus’ introduces a more lenient approach to permadeath

Developer RocketWerkz is adjusting its stance on permanent death in its survival sim Icarus, introducing a way for players to protect their characters.

Icarus is a notoriously tough and unforgiving survival game set on an alien world where a terraforming effort has gone disastrously wrong. While risking exploration on the surface for resources and exotic matter, if players don’t make it back to an extraction rocket before the end of a mission, they’ll lose their character for good. This wipes any skill progress they’ve made on those characters.

However, in a new Steam Community blog post (as spotted by PC Gamer), RocketWerkz has announced plans for “Insured Drops”, which will mean that “any character left on surface after the timer has expired will be saved and returned to the HAB.”

Unfortunately for any players struggling with Icarus’ difficulty level, this won’t be a game-wide feature – RocketWerkz says it will only apply to “a handful of early-game drops.”

There is scope for insured missions to evolve in future though, as the developer adds that “this adjustment is the first of many, giving us a chance for us to test out some theories and concepts we’ve been working on behind the scenes. Expect more significant changes on this front in future updates.”

The harsh difficulty of the game has been a recurrent problem for the Icarus community. Back in December 2021, RocketWerkz resurrected 64,000 lost or dead Icarus characters, saying at the time that “we may not have been clear enough to new players”  how the permadeath system worked, adding that “when you lose a character unfairly it hurts.”

In other news, Tabletop Simulator developer Berserk Games has donated £7,300 ($10,000) to the National Center for Transgender Equality, following controversy over claims of transphobic and homophobic moderation. It will also keep its global chat systems down for good, and will be “running a series of articles on our blog to showcase the great work on TTS created by members of the LGBTQ+ community”.