Mimic Alert

Mimic Alert is a first-person co-op horror game in the spirit of the PS1 era. You are the new hire of an agency that clears mimics out of a quarantined research zone — things that can take the shape of anything: a chair, a crate, a cat, a person.

DAY AND NIGHT

Every shift starts in daylight. Walk the site and learn it: what stands where, how many chairs sit at the table, which crates are stacked by the wall. Talk to the staff. Buy what you need at the supply stand.

Then the gate closes and the power goes out. You have a torch, a revolver and six rounds in the cylinder. Somewhere in the dark the mimics have taken the shape of ordinary things — some new, some in place of what was there. Find what changed and shoot it. Shoot the wrong thing and you pay for it.

PLAY TOGETHER

Bring a friend through Steam and play the whole campaign as a pair, with its own progress and smarter mimics. Or take on the Challenge: a random site, a bigger building, more mimics and 200 credits to spend. Cover each other's back — the mimics can catch either of you. And wear a TV, a bucket or a cat on your head while you do it.

PVP: THE MIMIC QUEEN

One player is the Queen, up to four are humans, one night in a big building. She becomes any object, cat or person, lunges from her disguise, sets traps, infects the staff and turns humans into her mimics. The humans have to finish their tasks, open a gate and get out — or kill her. Public lobbies, proximity voice chat.

TRUST NO ONE

Scientists, technicians and nurses sit out the night with you. Ask them about themselves by day and remember the answers. By night some of them will be wearing someone else's face: one detail of their story wrong, their clothes a shade off. Shoot a person and the shift is over. Shoot a mimic wearing a person and it tears its way out.

THE DARK IS PART OF THE GAME

Turn the torch off and wait. Things that are not what they seem cannot stay still in the dark. Further into the zone the mimics stop waiting: they creep after you while your back is turned and leap the moment you look.

TOOLS OF THE TRADE

Set a bear trap and look away. Put on the spectral glasses and follow the tracks to where it hides. Throw a flash grenade and watch everything that isn't real run. Scan a suspicious chair. Jolt a liar with the stun gun and hear what they blurt out.

PET EVERY CAT

Stroke every cat in the building. Most of them are cats.

FEATURES

• Online co-op campaign for two, or play alone

• PvP: the Mimic Queen against up to four humans

• Nine locations: warehouses, cold stores, offices, living quarters, laboratories, the main building, the ALARM finale and the Halloween Miller farm

• Two shifts per location, and every shift is a new building — memory has to be earned again each night

• Open yards and closed buildings, day and night, fog, steam and street lamps

• Mimics with dozens of ways to give themselves away, and some that give away nothing

• People who may not be people

• A supply stand: body armour, rounds, scanner, flash grenades, bear traps, spectral glasses, stun gun

• Three difficulty levels and a grade from S to F for every night

• A story told over the radio by Pluto, who has seen too many new hires come and go

• Hats. Lots of hats.

• Low resolution, vertex wobble, dithering and hard shadows — the way horror used to look