Scars Above, Revealed at Koch Media Show, Looks Like Tomb Raider in Space

Koch Media held a media conference today, ahead of E3’s kick-off this weekend, to reveal more details about its new game publishing company, Prime Matter, and describe which games they’re working on. The only game that came with any gameplay footage to show was Scars Above, a trippy sci-fi horror game that the developers describe as “Alice in Wonderland” meets “Alien.”

We got an extended look at the gameplay and the story of the game from the footage shown. The main character, Kate, is a member of a space recon team who’s stranded on a very nasty alien planet. She must battle her way through some very aggressive fauna and find her team. I can see the influence of both the aforementioned Alice and Alien, but the third-person perspective and Kate’s ponytail make it look like sci-fi Tomb Raider.

The Koch Media event, one of the E3-adjacent events that are running ahead of the event’s official start this weekend, was, for the most part, nothing to write home about. While the host kept repeating that the company’s new publishing arm, Prime Matter, had 12 games in development, most of them were too early in development to show. The only thing we got from Payday 3 was a single piece of concept art, for example. Scars Above stood out just for having an extensive gameplay trailer.

Funnily enough, I recognize developer Mad Head Games as being the studio behind some of my favorite casual puzzler games. Good to see they’re getting a chance to break into the AAA space. We got a solid seven minutes of gameplay from the trailer, which is more than just about anything else we could say from the show. There were a couple of interesting trailers — the most notable besides Scars Above being Dolmen, another sci-fi horror game (I’m seeing a pattern here).