What do you do if your Kickstarter project looking for $45,000 CAD fails? Try again but ask for almost twice as much. Ashen Rift is now looking for $85,000 CAD via the crowdfunding service to make its man-with-beard-and-dog first-person shooter a reality, but despite a shorter pitch video and a higher target, there’s still reasons to be intrigued by the game that piqued John’s interest earlier this year.



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Austere exploration combined with a half-silent relationship put Ashen Rift’s grim, post-apocalyptic world in clear Journey or Shadow of the Colossus territory – two games cited by the original Kickstarter pitch – but it’s the combination of those elements with inspiration from Quake that interests me most. This is a game that’s aiming to introduce tenderness to a world ruined by a rift created by scientists gone too far, populated by gribbly flesh-eating monsters, and navigated by way of circle-strafing with grenade launchers.

The pitch video above shows a good deal more of the game’s combat than last time, showing how you might cause bits of the world to explode and how enemies handle shotgun blasts. It’s still worth watching the last pitch video however, which goes into greater detail about the developer’s inspirations – which apparently include his own beard.

Thus far the game has been developed as a spare time project, but the money from this Kickstarter would be used to make it a full-time job and to contract another programmer and artist to help with the game’s creation. $20CAD (£11.27) will get you get the game upon release with a projected delivery date of October 2015, while $45CAD (£25.36) will get you early access to the game at some point in the future.