Factsheet

Developer:
Swimming Scorpions
Based in Poland

Release date:
TBD

Platforms:
Windows

Website:
swimmingscorpions.com/petrol-blood

Available From:
Free - Steam

Description

Petrol Blood is a stealth action driving game that will let you taste the authentic Eastern Bloc gasoline.

History

Introduction

Swimming Scorpions is a small-scale independent studio from Wroclaw, Poland.

Our second game, Petrol Blood, is an open world action game in which you’ll drive your car beyond the Iron Curtain to destroy countless communist monuments and wreck militsiya cop cars.

While creating Petrol Blood we wanted to not only showcase the less known part of Europe, but also return to the roots of old school driving games such as Driver and Carmageddon.

Inspirations

Maciek Machowicz, game designer:

Just like anyone my age, I spent my childhood playing GTA and Carmageddon games (age restrictions who?). This time however, I found the biggest inspiration in movies rather than video games. The ingenious opening sequences of Drive and Baby Driver immediately come to mind. The previous demonstrated how stealth and driving can go hand in hand, while the latter was a breathtaking road ballet feasible only for the extraordinarily skilled drivers.

Sprinkle in some gadget-filled 007 cars and scenes from the anime Redline, where racing is turned to 11, and you’ll get inspiration boosts enough to fuel at least a dozen projects. Fortunately we were able to fit them all in one title, thanks to the action open world genre being very suitable for mashing a variety of ideas.

A personal touch

High budget video games have gifted us with impressive recreations of cities such as New York, London or Los Angeles. Instead of going head to head with these behemoths, we decided to feature some smaller and less known locations: Wroclaw and Prague. Our close personal ties to these cities helped us deeply understand and recreate their vibe.

Wroclaw is the home to our studio, and the Nadodrze district which is heavily featured in Petrol Blood, is full of fascinating contrasts. It’s worth mentioning that this exact location was used in Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies.

Czechia’s capital, the nearby Prague, holds a special place in our designer’s heart, with his yearly visits to the city. The stunning Art Nouveau architecture, strolls along the Vltava river and remains of the medieval buildings make it one of the most attractive European tourist destinations. It has also been featured in a number of movies and games, such as Metal Gear Solid 4 and Deus Ex to name a few. We decided to present the city through a different lens, though - focusing on the beauty and the influence of Alphonse Mucha.

In the terms of sound design, our dear friends at Tshask Sound Studio have relentlessly recorded old engines to provide the most authentic experience. Our soundtrack features local young and talented bands, which we cannot recommend enough. One of the highlights, Niemoc, is the first artist that you’ll be able to listen to on the in-game radio. Definitely check them out!

Petrol Blood is set in a difficult and painful time for our region, which has been occupied by communist Moscow regime until 1989. Even though our depiction of these trying times is highly hyperbolic, verging even on absurd, we cannot pretend to bury it in the past. Many of the social issues such as the ubiquity of political propaganda, breaching of privacy and police brutality, persist to this day. These issues, which should remain a relic of the times long gone, are a reality for many people even now in 2022.

Features

• Mission-focused gameplay loop in a open world setting gets the player right in the action without limiting his style of play.
• Two different approaches to vehicular combat: either smash your opponents in vehicle melee or blast them to bits with an array of deadly car mounted guns.
• Diversified gameplay, in which high speed chases and car skirmishes are intertwined with stealth.
• Arcade controls will let the player perform the most daring car stunts using a combination of powerful boost and drift techniques.
• Over-the-top boss fights provide strong entertainment value and distinctive milestones in the narrative.
• A hyper-stylistic setting of the Cold War era in the fashion of action movies like Atomic Blonde and James Bond franchise.
• Adding retrofuturistic elements to game’s timeline allowed us to unleash a wider range of enemies and create artistic remix of the Soviet Block reality.
• A compelling story presented on animated comic strips and in-game dialogues.

Petrol Blood Credits

Swimming_Scorpions
Founder

Contact

Support
m.machowicz@swimmingscorpions.com

Homepage
swimmingscorpions.com/petrol-blood

Indie DB
indiedb.com/games/petrol-blood

Twitter
twitter.com/bloodpetrol