Update #4 - Unreal Engine 5 & LOTS MORE

Wow, this year has flown by! And understandably you guys have been clamouring for an update (and some even thinking one won’t ever come). Well, it’s my absolute pleasure to finally put all that to rest with Update #4. This is a biggie.

Main Features

A completely new map utilizing Unreal Engine 5 technology

This is what took us so long – but we think it’s well worth it and we hope you’ll agree

Huge overhaul of Nessie’s behaviour creating a much scarier and omnipresent threat

Tons of new sounds creating a much more tense atmosphere and scarier Nessie

Swimming, so that falling into the water isn’t an immediate death sentence

New Tutorial level

Evidence collection is no longer about finding obscure spots but is now about completing minigames,

including:

Audio Minigame where you have to match up two wavelengths by controlling Amplitude and Frequency

DNA Minigame where you have to lean left and right to keep your balance

Replacement of the fishing net with an actual fishing rod you have to cast, hook fish with and reel in

Tweaks and bugfixes

Removed the animation driven movement in the walking and replaced it with a more traditional movement driven animation method

Added a colourblind mode and option to press e instead of press and hold to interact

Increased the turning circle of the boat and made it dependant on speed for realism

A bunch of fixes to prevent crashes

Fixed Pong flickering for clients

Made Pong throw up a game over screen instead of just kicking you out

Made the Pong achievement work for clients

Added a new animation for holding torch and now faces the correct way

Made it so that the newspaper will appear showing progress when everybody dies

Made the interaction much better at detecting when you stop looking at one object and look at another

Slightly increased in-game mic volume

Can now pan the map and the movement and zoom are stored for when you next open the map

Tools will now rotate automatically to fill the inventory

‘Reset to Default’ will now actually reset to default

New torch pose and much better torch light

Future Plans

Pending all the bug reports we’re inevitably going to get despite rigorous testing (please do report them before just refunding or leaving a review!) we finally feel satisfied with the basic game of Loch Ness and feel like this is where we should’ve been when we launched early access a year ago.

But we’re not done with Loch Ness – there’s so much more left for us to explore, so look forward to these coming soon:

Unlockable upgrades to all your tools and a new, faster speedboat

Two new areas to explore inspired by Urquhart Castle (you can already see the outside on the new map!) and Boleskine House – two haunted locations from the real-world Loch Ness

Two new Nessie types with completely new routines, behaviours and powers