血土血土

The soil is hungry. And it ain't for water.

Clyde has one farm, one sawed-off shotgun, one rusty scythe — and a field that only grows on blood.

By day you dig, sow and harvest. By night the forest opens its red eyes and everything in it comes for your crops. Kill them on the beds: every drop that hits the soil feeds what grows there. At dawn the field drinks — and what drank the most grows the most.

Farm with a shotgun

• Blood is fertilizer. Red, black ichor or green bile — each kind of blood mutates your crops differently.
• Plants that fight back. Sunflowers spit seeds, flytraps swallow beasts whole, ripe pumpkins are bombs.
• Graft hybrids — mortar pumpkins, snapdragon flytraps, thorn-wheat hedges.
• Shoot their legs off. Live dismemberment: limbs fly, beasts limp, crawl and bleed into your beds.

Kill a boss on your beds

Bring a boss down over a crop and its heart falls into the dirt, still beating. By morning that crop is GIANT: double the size, every power doubled. A giant flytrap doesn't just eat. It plays with its food.

Shoot their legs off

Every blast takes something with it. A harvestman that has lost six legs keeps dragging itself at you on the last two.

Graft a fortress

From autumn on, graft two crops into one. Wheat crossed with a flytrap grows a thorn hedge that bleeds whatever crawls through it; sunflowers crossed with pumpkins become mortars. Build a fort out of your farm and hold it.

A year of nightmares

Every season is its own game, with its own beasts, its own rules, its own weapon and its own boss:

• Summer — gnawers, bloaters, armoured shellbacks, eight-legged harvestmen. Boss: the Rat King, a hundred rats knotted into one.
• Autumn — crows rob you by day; burning scarecrows and acid spitters by night. Fog. The pitchfork skewers three in a row. Boss: the Headless Harvester.
• Winter — nothing grows without blood, and frost kills whatever isn't kept warm: split logs, feed the braziers. The frozen dead rise from the drifts; a wendigo hunts under the snow. Molotovs. Boss: the Winter Stag.
• Spring — rain makes everything grow and washes the blood away. Floods, locust swarms, mole-maws that drag crops underground. The chainsaw. Boss: the Hive Queen.

Juicy, loud, ridiculous

• BUTCHER — stop time and carve a path through the horde, then let it all fall apart at once.
• War relics heave out of blood-soaked ground: artillery shells, mines, moonshine.
• Clyde talks back. Loudly. "Rest in peas."
• Blood moons, storms, fog nights, blizzards, floods.

Survive the year. Then do it again.