If you are old enough to remember a time when creepypastas dominated the meme culture of the internet, then you might be aware of the content from the world of the SCP Foundation. It was created from a community-lead moderated wiki that contains the oft redacted internal memos and reports from a fictional organization that specializes in containing and researching anomalous entities. Be they Doctor Who-style weeping angels that snap your neck when you’re not looking, trans-dimensional beings who drive you insane upon learning about them, or mundane objects that barely breaks the laws of physics, the works of the SCP universe primarily explore the juxtaposition between bureaucracy and eldritch horror. And beyond the many articles on the wiki, there have been several video games and short films over the years that delve deeper into the community created universe–likely due in part to the IP falling under creative commons licensing. One such game is a multiplayer horror title called SCP: Secret Laboratory that released in 2017, and according to developers Northwood Studios, they’re working on some exciting new content and an extensive overhaul for it.
Secret Laboratory is a dynamic, asymmetric, round-based experience that places several factions with different goals in an underground facility and lets the cards fall where they may. D-Class prisoners and Scientists want to escape the lab, Security wants to help them do that, and the SCP monsters want to kill all of them before they can. The NTF want to kill all the SCPs and D-Class, and the Chaos Insurgents want to kill everybody except the D-Class. There’s proximity chat, guns, paranormal items, and also a nuke that can instantly end a round, of course. It would be frivolous to attempt to cover all the possibilities and win/lose scenarios in a round of Secret Laboratory–the key thing to understand is that it’s an appropriately experimental and chaotic game that centers on social interactions between players.
Since its launch, the small indie game has had a committed fanbase and has maintained relatively consistent player counts hovering in the low thousands. SCP: SL is completely free-to-play without even a hint of microtransactions, and its development costs are stated as coming 100% from Patreon donations, which as of right now add up to roughly $5,000k a month. With this, the decentralized Northwood Studios have ceasely evolved their game, building it up from bare-bones assets with new mechanics, visual revamps, balance changes, and seasonal updates. And just today, the studio released a comprehensive dev log that covered their progress on build 15.0, which they’ve dubbed Megapatch III.
There’s no confirmed release date for the update, but there’s several promising things to look out for when it comes out likely later this year. Foremost, the developers are adding the first new playable SCP monster since almost eight years ago. They explain that it took them so long to finally get this on the roadmap primarily because of design issues and technical limitations. But now that there’s been so much maintenance and progress on the project, they were finally able to settle on something new. SCP-953, as it is designated, looks to bring a layer of deception to the game. The monster is basically a skinwalker, and focuses on surviving in a disguised human state for long enough to change into its deadlier form to wreak havoc. It looks to be loosely based on the East Asian myth of the Nine Tailed Fox, though for more background information on the developers’ interpretation of the creature it might be helpful to visit the SCP webpage for it here. As for the other big piece of content in Megapatch III, the rather sparse surface-level area in the game is getting a complete overhaul. Similarly to the addition of a new SCP, production on this began several years ago in 2018, but the developers claim that they were “Admittedly way of our depth,” and as such had to move on to addressing other aspects of the game. Though after the 14.0 build came out last year, they felt like they got their mojo back, and work started up again. The dev log shows that the surface zone will be a fully-fleshed out area complete with story-driven environmental design, which may finally ground the game in its setting a bit more. Secret Lab’s facility, referred to as Site-02, is confirmed by the developers to take place at a remote location in Greenland, and will have signage, props, and design that will support that. As mentioned earlier, Northwood Studios hasn’t confirmed a date for all this yet, but they report that they are “still on track” for their projected timeline, and will keep everyone posted as they continue work.