CoreCrawler

Resource Parcel 88-B is gorgeous. Let's fix that.

You are Associate #4471 of Yieldco Interplanetary, and your job is simple: harvest the planet. All of it. Drive your crawler into herds of fluffy Puffloafs and watch them disappear into the grinder. Shell crystal trees until they ring and shatter. Drain a whole sea past the locals' protest signs. Liquidate a civilization's libraries for the Gift Shop.

Every biome you strip makes your crawler bigger: a truck, a mining rig, a fortress, a corporate campus on treads, and finally the frame of a spaceship. And every biome you leave behind is bombed flat, automatically, while PAL narrates it like a quarterly earnings call.

• Six biomes, one continuous world. The Tenderlands, the Chiming Woods, the Mycelial Marsh, the Glass Sea, the Lantern Cities and the Core, with no loading screens between them. Each one is a new kind of place and a new kind of destruction.
• Grow through six size classes. The camera pulls back, the world gets smaller, and yesterday's boss is today's snack.
• Break, then eat. Shell what's too big to chew, then vacuum up the pieces. Chain harvests for SYNERGY multipliers.
• Six bosses, each with a second act, who mostly just want you to stop. A grandmother who hums. A choir that sings until one voice is left. A fungal mind that tries to talk to you. A parliament that surrenders halfway through the fight.
• The music is made of the planet. Every biome's soundtrack is played by its living things, and it goes quiet as you harvest it, while cheerful corporate muzak fills the silence.
• A Board that is never satisfied. Meet quotas, beat quarterly targets, fulfil Side Contracts from Marketing, Legal and HR, and sit through the Board Room call at every promotion. Top marks read "Exceeds Expectations (suspicious)."
• Performance Improvement Plans. Lose your crawler and a replacement Associate is on the way. The Company doesn't mind either way.
• An ending you'll feel slightly bad about. Hold to confirm departure.
• The Universal Translator. Hidden in every biome: what the locals were actually saying, with PAL's Morale Filter helpfully underneath. Read them all and the Heart has more to say at the end.
• The Procurement Catalog. The Board picks your promotion; you pick the rest. Spend Shareholder Value on grinder teeth, magnets, turbo boosts, tax optimization and a very tasteful pink paint job.
• Performance Reviews, graded. Every quarter gets a C, B, A or S. The Board keeps your best.
• Growth Mode (New Game+): same planet, higher quotas, and optional Board Mandates (Lean Operations, Crunch Time...) for a bigger Growth Score. Q4 looks a little soft.
• 30 Performance Reviews (achievements, tracked in-game), a photo mode for your brochure, rebindable controls, Assist Mode and full controller support.

CoreCrawler is a satire about the worst of human nature, played completely straight by a very enthusiastic AI. The violence is cartoonish, colourful and absurd; nothing is gory.

Content

Cartoon violence against cute fictional creatures and a fictional civilization, played for dark satire. No blood or gore; creatures pop into glitter and goo.

System requirements (Windows)

Minimum: Windows 10 64-bit, 4-core 3.0 GHz CPU, 8 GB RAM, Vulkan 1.2 GPU (GTX 1060 / RX 580 class, 4 GB), 1 GB disk.
Recommended: Windows 11 64-bit, 6-core 3.5 GHz CPU, 16 GB RAM, RTX 2060 / RX 6600 class.
Full controller support (Xbox layout) and keyboard + mouse.