AUCKLAND, New Zealand - December 1, 2021 - RocketWerkz has released an epic twenty-minute long documentary-style short film “Icarus: Fatal Sky,” blending live action and game footage to welcome players to the universe of its sci-fi survival game Icarus.
Icarus launches on Steam this Friday 3 December at 2pm PST or 10pm UTC.
Developed by DayZ creator Dean Hall’s studio RocketWerkz, Icarus takes a session-based approach to survival games. Players take limited-time drops onto a terraform-damaged planet in search of rare exotic matter, which fuels advanced tech, as they progress through the game’s gritty sci-fi universe.
Shot in a tense documentary style with live actors, “Icarus: Fatal Sky” tells the story of a prospecting team that didn’t make it back. When an ill-fated First Cohort expedition saw most of a team killed by an 'unexpected' Force 12 storm, a scandal erupted with consequences and conspiracy claims back home on Earth. The team’s search for exotic matter pushed them to their limits as they surveyed Icarus’ terraformed surface, but who was ultimately to blame? “Fatal Sky” unpicks the stories, science and counter-claims surrounding this tragedy, revealing new truths about an event that shook the world.
“The drive to survive, a Survival game, requires a delicate approach so we avoided fantasy sci-fi,” says Icarus’ gamerunner Dean Hall. “We wanted to create a mature, grounded reality for Icarus’ universe. The kinship that comes from taking on the unknown, the tension, the decisions, are as much core elements of playing a survival game as in the real world, and that’s also what went down in Fatal Sky.”
“The Fatal Sky documentary isn’t a trailer, rather it’s a piece of companion media that puts players into the right frame of mind for a survival game. Much like in real life survival situations, the decisions you make in a survival game have consequences. The events you face, and your decisions based on them, form the journey our players make far beyond simple storylines outside the genre..”
In April RocketWerkz released a similar live action eight-minute documentary called “Icarus: No Rescue” which can be viewed at: Icarus: No Rescue .
About Icarus
Icarus is a session-based survival game for up to eight co-op players where players drop onto the broken terraformed planet of Icarus. Initially equipped with nothing, players drop to the planet for missions lasting from hours to weeks, before returning to orbit to progress their character and tech for the next drop.
Built in Unreal Engine 4, Icarus features handcrafted maps, three biomes, online multiplayer, two tech trees, character attribute system, weather events and destructible buildings in a near-future setting. At launch it will be available in English, German, French, Russian, Brazilian Portuguese, Latin American Spanish, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Japanese and Korean.
About RocketWerkz
After the global success of influential survival game DayZ, Dean Hall returned to his native New Zealand to found RocketWerkz in 2015. In September 2019 RocketWerkz opened a studio on the waterfront in Auckland, New Zealand's largest city, to focus on next-gen AAA survival game Icarus. Over 65 people have contributed to Icarus.
Media Resources
Watch Icarus: Fatal Sky on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIz-6-w_fxY
Watch the Icarus Launch Trailer on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOeuqct2HAM
For more information or review code requests email press@rocketwerkz.com or
Michael Meyers (MMPR): michael@mmpr.com