Sucks To Be In The Sticks demo ready to sink your teeth into on Steam

• Announcements by Sam Amiotte-Beaulieu
• Published:

Full version of vampiric small-town adventure coming later this year to Windows PC

It’s tough being a young adult trying to make ends meet while keeping on top of classes and making time for friends and family. Now imagine doing it as a newly turned vampire, like you will in CoAction’s upcoming Sucks To Be In The Sticks, forced to balance your new condition with more mundane problems in a crumbling post-Soviet town whose best-kept secrets begin to unravel through blood. 

You are Ilo, a non-binary 19-year-old student who suddenly finds themselves turned into a vampire against their will on a night that started out like any other. Still in the same town they’ve lived in all their life, Ilo is surprised to discover that the place they thought they knew top to bottom is really “buzzing with secret vampire activities” that threaten to turn the protagonist’s world upside down. Complicating matters is that while most modern vampires sustain themselves by feeding off the energy humans provide through their wishes, dreams, and intentions, Ilo is cursed with “a cruel hunger” that can only be satisfied by blood. 

Absorbing energy from humans leads to supernatural visions of their dreams personified, but when drinking people’s blood you “experience their darkest moments” firsthand and face their traumas as if they were your own. Relieving sorrows for those who suffer can save them from their darkness, but beware that each torment takes a toll on Ilo through painful visions that haunt them. As Ilo, you must search for answers to why the world is so broken, all while dealing with the internal voice of the sire who turned you still living inside your mind and desperately trying to “hold on to what remains of your humanity.” 

Sucks To Be In The Sticks is described as a “cursed life simulator” in which you experience small-town life as a young adult “caught between the supernatural and the everyday.” Ilo visits various hand-drawn, side-scrolling locations and “uncovers local secrets, juggles new and old connections, and takes whatever odd jobs they can get to survive.” This town has a diverse population filled with those “often overlooked” in society, including “queer people, ethnic minorities, migrants” and more, as the game’s Finnish developers seek to present “social and political issues through both metaphor and realism.” It's a bleak world, yet it’s filled with the hope of those who still call this place home, and sprinkled with humor for anyone who is able to both “laugh at the absurd [and] sit with their grief.”

Gameplay seems largely traditional at first glance, navigated entirely via keyboard with hotspots popping up to interact with as you draw near. Instead of solving puzzles, however, here you will be tasked with completing a variety of mini-games, ranging from scrubbing down walls to reliving a nightmare of a little girl who saves herself from a terrifying situation with the help of her teddy bear. Along the way you can engage in perfectly normal activities like having “late-night conversations with your mom while helping her at the flower shop,” while others stem entirely from your challenging new reality, such as attempting to “navigate a childhood friendship strained by your new secret.”

The full version of Sucks To Be In The Sticks is due out sometime later this year, but in the meantime a Windows PC demo is already available on Steam that offers an early taste of what to expect.