Black Skies
An EMP takes out modern infrastructure. Cross cold mountain terrain, manage your survival, and make hard decisions to stay alive.
Independent game studio
The world already taught you how to play.
Metacortex Studios designs games around one idea: a world should respond the way a real one does, so what you already know is how you play.
Games
Survival at three scales: a frozen mountain, a puzzle board, and deep space.
Survival Slide
Slide whole rows and columns, match supplies, clear the map, and scavenge your way to the city.
Interstellar Survival
Working title. The final name may change.
A hard-science space game about waking up as a human mind inside an autonomous spacecraft, and finding out what it can do.
More when there is more to show.
Design principles
Instincts over tutorials.
The goal behind every Metacortex design: if you know what something does in life, you should already know what it does in the game. Each game works toward that one system at a time.
Things should behave like what they are.
Materials should come from somewhere and go somewhere. If it looks like it burns, it should burn.
Effort should leave a mark.
Working on something should change it, as far as the tool allows, with results that look like results rather than a number on a bar.
Objects can carry meaning.
Some things matter for what they remind you of, not what they do. The design treats that as real too.
Where a game has to simplify, it should simplify in the direction you'd guess.
The studio
An independent studio, making games since 2024.
Metacortex Studios LLC makes games about subjects worth getting right. Each project starts from something worth caring about and is built toward one standard: the world should behave the way you expect.
Contract work
Game development and design, for hire.
Metacortex Studios takes on game development and design contract work.
Contact the studio