With a final lick, the weasel expires. Its head is mine. I slink back to my nest and shove this new head onto my strangely thick duck neck. Then, I take off in a flutter and scutter of beetle wings and legs. I pass an Oscar the grouch-style bloke in a basket selling animal body parts for crystals. Ahead lies a giant salamander wearing a fedora. He asks me to go and steal some eggs from an ant queen who’s wearing an actual crown. I refuse. We fight. He keeps whistling for backup. My weasel head bites away, an openly terrified expression written across its whiskers.
That, in so many words, is Strange Seed, which came out in full yesterday and also has a demo I’ve gioven a go for this article. It’s a cartoonish evolution murderfest from devs Chronicle Games, who cite E.V.O.: Search for Eden and Spore’s creature stage as their inspirations.
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I’m quite young, and so haven’t gotten around to playing either of those games. I’ve still found Strange Seed charmingly weird and weirdly charming. Well, at least when I’m managing not to think about what its central loop entails too much. You begin as a purple blob which drops off a tree, and quite jovially sets about replacing its blob body parts with those of creatures inhabiting the forest.
You murder these creatures and other blobs by licking, biting, or charging them, and they turn into a hunk of meat on a bone. You gobble this up for health, biomass which’ll allow you to equip more animal parts, and animal parts themselves. Some can be talked to. For example, early on you meet a lonely duck. He’ll only let you be his friend if you’ve got a duck’s long neck. You murder another duck, take the neck from its hunk of death meat, and voilà, he’s your mate. For five seconds, after which point you murder him for more duck parts.
To equip new parts, you claim nests, which I’m probably going to risk pissing people off by likening to Elden Ring’s sites of grace. They’re spots of brief respite that act as respawn points throughout the world and also allow you to switch up your animal part loadout. What you equip is limited by what you’ve found, but also how many bits of biomass murders and exploration have earned, with some animal parts being more effective, but taking up more of your biomass limit while they’re active.
You also find powerups while exploring which allow you to upgrade the mass of a body part. These all offer different stat boots, and the health one’s linked to your neck. So, if you’re minded similarly to me, odds are your head’ll end up mounted on a tree trunk. Though, that might just be because I’m a bit crap at timing my licks and charges to quickly take out fairly tough beetles. I’ve found one boss so far – the salamander who speaks like a cockney gangster that I mentioned earlier. It’s going to take a fair bit more murder-grinding before I can beat him.
I may well end up doing it though. Despite the constant freakish body horror, Strange Seed’s got a chuckle-worthy charisma that hasn’t quite worn off on me yet and is janky in the right ways rather than annoying performance ones thus far. You can check out the demo on Steam if it sounds up your alley.
