The Summerford Winter Demo is now available on Steam for testing! We’ve added and overhauled some of the major systems based on feedback from players in the Steam Autumn festival.
Please keep in mind this is a test demo - it's not the finished, final product, but it is far closer to our final vision, and has been refined based on a ton of feedback from users on Steam and Discord.
If you encounter bugs or just want to provide feedback, it would be amazing if you could let us know on our Bug Tracker or on our Discord. We’ll only be updating the demo to fix major problems, but any feedback and ideas still have plenty of time for us to implement into the main game.
Here’s a few of the changes in the Winter Demo:
Combat System
Summerford now has a proper combat element! Alongside her original knife for use in emergencies, Sam now has a gun that she can equip, and she can find health and ammo throughout the world. There will be more enemies, weapons and items in the finished game.
For now, we’ve tried to balance the combat as best we can, though you may find it too easy or too difficult. Just like in other classic survival horrors, the game should be about avoiding combat where possible, conserving and exploring for items and ammo to stay alive. We hope to introduce difficulty levels in the final release.
Controls
We’ve done some tweaks to the overall controls, including making Sam slightly faster overall. We’ve set tank controls as the default for keyboard and mouse users and swapped some of the defaults around to make keyboard control much more fluid, though we’d still recommend playing Summerford with a controller. Nearly all the controls in the game are now remappable, too.
UI Overhaul
We’ve overhauled the UI to make it easier to use and more visibly appealing, which includes having all of the game notes, audio logs and items in a single easy to use menu. We’ve also made interactions generally easier to use and see, and made major visual and control changes to the notes system.
Maps
To help players navigate the world, there are now maps for each outside area which you can find as you explore. They track your location and places that you’ve already visited, making navigation around the game world and working out where to go next much easier.
Save / Load System
You can now manually save the game at telephones and telephone boxes in three separate places during the demo. The game also autosaves at the start of a new area.
Camera and Scene Changes
We’ve added around 15 new camera shots and tweaked every single shot in the original demo.
This means Sam no longer becomes too small or gets lost amongst the scenery, and it should be much more obvious where you can and can’t explore.
We’ve also been focusing on a common bug which leads Sam to get stuck on objects in the game world, which should now be vastly improved.
Horror Vibe and Tone
We’ve added a completely new section of the game that was previously not in the demo to give you a better idea of the “vibe” of the full game.
We’ve also made some other tweaks to the atmosphere of the game. Much like the games it’s based on, like Fatal Frame, Rule of Rose or Obscure, it’s designed more as an atmospheric adventure game with a horror theme than a pure ‘jump scare’ horror game.
There’s still some work to do on the overall tone of Sam’s character, who we know can come across as a little unphased by the whole situation, but we still want to maintain an adventure game level of personality rather than having our main character being confused and scared about literally everything she sees.
Performance Increases
Overall the game is running faster on the lower end systems. We think an i5/1060/8GB system will run the demo well, and we hope to be able to make many more improvements for the final release next year.