You may know Lost In Cult for its astonishingly beautiful and deeply researched Design Works series, which dives deep into the development of indie hits likeAnimal Well,Outer Wilds,Citizen Sleeper, andImmortality. You might also know it for its gorgeous Lock-On journals full of excellent writing about games and curated art from top industry talent. Or maybe you’re familiar with its other work, spanning everything from an anthology of essays by critic Jacob Geller, tobooks chronicling gaming history, to a trivia gameaboutgaming.
Whatever you know it for, you’ve probably noticed that the company puts a huge emphasis on preserving the history and culture of games, and a great deal of care goes into the products it sells, making them both informative and aesthetically beautiful. Now, it’s turning its careful eye to physical releases of video games with its Editions label, which will package and distribute bespoke physical editions of beloved indies.
Lost In Cult Is Releasing Limited Physical Editions Of Cult Favourite Indies
Its debut releases will be Immortality,The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow, andThank Goodness You’re Here!, with more to come. Each release will be limited – Immortality will get 1,500 copies, while the other two will have 3,000 copies each. Each will be “housed in a custom, collectible mailer box with seasonally-rotated illustrations”, include an essay and developer interview booklet, and come with unique art. All this for £59.99.
You can also opt to buy the Switch bundle, which includes the first three Editions releases for the Nintendo Switch, or just the physical releases on their own.
More crucially, Lost In Cult works directly with DoesItPlay?, a group that ensures that physical games work entirely internet-free. This means that Lost In Cult’s Editions will be playable from start to finish without needing a download at any point, and all primary content is on the cartridge or disc.
Not A Lot Of Companies Are Preserving Games Anymore
This is huge if you care about game preservation –which you should, by the way.We live in a time whenvideo games don’t always get physical editions, and those physical editions will probably require you to download the game off the internet anyway – that’s certainly the case withDoom: The Dark Ages. Game-key cards for the Switch 2won’t actually contain the game. Games made for older platforms that were never physically released can easily vanish into the ether, with no way to play them.
That means that having a physical release that can be played entirely out of the box, with no need for additional downloads from servers that might eventually disappear, is a big deal. In fact, it’s pretty rare nowadays to see instant playability out of the box, even with a disc – at the very least, games on discs will be subject to day zero patches.
And it’s also important that these games are preserved, since it’s smaller-budget indie projects that are most at risk of disappearing if they’re not actively preserved. Lost In Culttold Kotakuthat it will be focusing on games that are “usually very artful, whether that’s through its design, through its visuals, through its story. Again, that is in some way pushing the medium of video games as a serious form of art forward.”
This doesn’t just serve collectors, though these are the people most likely to shell out for a boutique edition of an indie game – players at large benefit from having a game on their shelf that willalwayswork, as long as you have the console to play it on. Physical releases aren’t being taken as seriously as they used to, but with the quiet elimination of physical releases as a practice in the industry, I think we’re going to be thanking Lost In Cult in a couple of years.
