Marauders is a Tarkov-style survival FPS game that wants to impart one key lesson - life is cruel. Indeed, it would have to be, in a Dieselpunk alternate history in which 'the Great War' never ended and everyone is fighting over scraps of the asteroid belt in the early '90s. Darwinism reigns supreme and Marauders is not going to give you a shiny insurance payout if you lose all your stuff.
"Losing all your stuff is tough," Cameron Small tells me. He's lead designer at Small Impact Games, a four-person studio that's working on Marauders with Team 17. "It's a tough thing to get over. But I don't think any feeling beats it in terms of progression." It's also a very risky strategy for an indie game in the battle royale-adjacent space, as he's quick to acknowledge, but: "as long as we can educate the player that they can go in with nothing and come out with everything, maybe it's worth [the risk]".
Small Impact was founded on a love of survival games, hardcore shooters like Escape from Tarkov, and about half a dozen other influences that all combine to make Marauders. The studio clearly revels in the harshness of Darwin's 'survival of the fittest' theory and the winner-take-all opportunities it implies; Cameron tells me he enjoys going into a game of Tarkov naked and seeing what he can walk away with. "Your first raid could be your best raid, or your worst," he muses.
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Marauders looks like a blend of Escape from Tarkov and The Expanse