Celcius Strays demo unleashed for a limited time

• Announcements by Sam Amiotte-Beaulieu
• Published:

Visual novel-styled adventure set in the Brok the InvestiGator universe coming to Windows and Mac

It isn’t easy being in charge, especially when all the odds are stacked against you. In Celcius Strays, a darker visual novel-styled spinoff from Brok the InvestiGator from developers COWCAT and Patch Works Interactive, you’ll have to make tough choices to keep your clan alive while the rest of the world sees you as the bad guys.

Nine years have passed since “the coup to save your people failed,” leaving the Squealers “banished to a far corner of the Slums” with you as Chief. Your people, a rat colony living in the abandoned sewers and scavenging whatever they can to get by, have trusted you to help them survive “robotic death squads, a deadly climate, and power-hungry Slumlords all eager to snuff out” the last rodent remnants. After a supply heist goes horribly wrong, you have to “manage your team, protect your colony, [and] be a leader” to your kind in order to protect them from “a futuristic wasteland fraught with danger.” As you begin to uncover what really happened, with a deadly heat wave on the horizon that threatens the entire colony, you’ll have to decide who you can trust, because “in a world set against you, not all danger comes from outside.” 

While Celcius Strays shares much in common with its predecessor, using a similar point-and-click interface for collecting items and interacting with the environment. Here, however, the game shifts focus away from brawling and puzzle-solving for a more challenge-lite visual novel experience where “the choices you make and the relationships you build shape the future of the story.” As one of the major antagonists from Brok the InvestiGator, Chief brings a darker angle to this world of humanoid cartoon animals where the only law that matters is the one that keeps your clan safe. 

Presented via gorgeous hand-drawn backgrounds with lightly animated poses for expressive, fully voiced characters, every scenario presents tough choices that will “impact the core story and shape the future of the Squealers.” Sending crew members out on assignment to "gather resources [and] scout out locations” based on their qualifications for the task, for example, will lead to new interactions and better or worse outcomes for the way events play out. There are plenty of accessibility choices available as well, as the game features a commendable number of user-friendly options, including fully voiced menus and larger font sizes, as well as quality-of-life features like a hotspot highlighter, both manual and automatic saves, and collectibles to search for along the way. 

There is no release date yet for Celcius Strays, but the full prologue is available on Steam for Windows and Mac – only for a limited time, though, so you’ll need to act fast before it disappears.

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