DayZ creator's new game Icarus debuts incredible 20-minute live-action short film

DayZ creator Dean Hall's studio RocketWerkz has released a captivating 20-minute live-action short film to set the scene for its new survival game Icarus, launching Friday, December 3.

For the uninitiated, Icarus is RocketWerkz' new session-based single-player survival game in which players drop onto a terraform-damaged planet for a time-limited search for rare exotic matter. Fatal Sky is a documentary style short starring live-action actors being interviewed about a failed mission to Icarus that resulted in several casualties. With finger-pointing and conspiracy theories abound, the ones most impacted by the tragedy are the deceased's loved ones, whose actors give truly powerful performances. For a lower profile game, it's a really compelling little film with great acting and a production value that rivals most modern TV shows.

Hall, who's serving as gamerunner on Icarus, says the Fatal Sky documentary isn't so much a trailer as "a piece of companion media that puts players into the right frame of mind for a survival game" - that is, one grounded in reality, tension, and decision-making that comes with real consequences.

"The drive to survive, a Survival game, requires a delicate approach so we avoided fantasy sci-fi," says 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."

You can pre-order Icarus on Steam now and save 10% on the listing price.

For what to play right here, right now, check out our list of the best survival games out there.