How are you feeling today? Relatively untroubled by visions of squirming, organic gunk clogging your vessel’s exhaust ports as you fall steadily toward an enormous ball of fire? We’ll see about that.
I’m here to tell you about Ultrasound, in which you are stranded aboard a spacecraft that has been colonised by growths of the Gigery persuasion. If you don’t purge critical systems pronto, you’re going to end up the wrong side of a photosphere. Here’s a trailer.
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“Use an ultrasound machine to diagnose and do surgery on a grotesque infection spreading aboard a space freighter,” explains the Steam page. “Craft meds, upgrade your machine, find new surgical tools, and restore ship systems before you collide with a star. Soon, something will be born.”
This sounds like the unsexy edition of Erostasis. You’ll need to craft medicines to thwart spreading growths, and free up navigation and life support before it’s too late. There are several endings to unlock, and I’m guessing the majority are not pleasant.
Ultrasound might seem like a gross-out game with a gimmick, but it has a serious core. It’s “being developed by two new fathers – Walter Woods (Lead Developer) and Jason Scalfano (Lead Artist) – and is inspired by their respective tragic and joyful paths to parenthood,” as the press release explains.
“So many of us know the hope and horror of the ultrasound machine,” the developers write. “The mystery. The ambiguity. The flickering image of life and death. We hope our game captures these difficult feelings and resonates with players.”
I respect the sincerity here. That said, given that there appear to be notes of memoir at work, I would quite like to know if the mothers of Woods and Scalfano’s children had any say on the game’s portrayal of pregnancy as body horror. They are not mentioned anywhere in the press materials. Ultrasound is out “soon”.