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Photo: Discovery/Archi Banal
Photo: Discovery/Archi Banal

Pop CultureMarch 21, 2022

All you need to know about new channels Eden and Rush

Photo: Discovery/Archi Banal
Photo: Discovery/Archi Banal

Two new free-to-air TV channels launch today. What can we expect? 

Viewers of free-to-air television now have more content to choose from, with today’s launch of Discovery’s new channels eden and Rush. These two channels replace Choice, and while they keep Choice’s vibe of lifestyle and light entertainment, eden and Rush will be refreshed by a broader and newer schedule of programming.

“We’re delighted to launch two new free-to-air channels in New Zealand, delivering on our promise to bring more great entertainment to Kiwi audiences,” Discovery’s Glen Kyne said in a press release. “Eden and Rush combine the best of Discovery’s global library with carefully selected shows to build a stellar line-up of content. Whether viewers watch live or stream on ThreeNow, we know they’re going to love it.”

Will we love it?  What can we expect from these two new channels? Let’s find out.

eden 

Eden’s (the lower case e is part of the new brand) tagline is “a better everyday”, with a focus on reality, light entertainment, drama and films. Eden will continue to screen some of Choice’s popular shows, but also give viewers a variety of new-to-New Zealand content.

The channel launches with shows like The Chase USA, Ellen’s Next Great Designer, wildlife series Meet The Penguins, and the reboot of classic 90s home renovation show Changing Rooms. There’s a regular Saturday night movie slot, and later this year, eden will screen other big-name shows, including the Keeley Hawes drama Finding Alice and reality series Strictly Come Dancing.

Other launch highlights include:

The Newsreader

Anna Torv and Sam Reid star in Australian drama The Newsreader (Photo: Supplied)

Thursday night is drama night on eden, and the channel kicks off with the premiere of this award-winning Australian series set in a TV newsroom during the mid 1980s. Ambitious reporter Dale Jennings finds himself paired with notoriously “difficult” newsreader Helen Norville, and as the pair cover a variety of world events, their professional and personal lives become entangled. The Guardian called it “well-told and engrossing”, the Sydney Morning Herald gave it five stars. (Weekly from Thursday 24 March).

The Bidding Room

A cross between The Repair Shop and Dragon’s Den, this series sees the public bring in a variety of intriguing antiques to be valued by a panel of experts, before the items are sold at auction to professional dealers. (Weeknights from Monday at 6pm).

Newshub Live at 8pm

Rebecca Wright hosts Newshub Live at 8pm (Photo: Are Media)

New channel, new news. Rebecca Wright presents eden’s nightly news bulletin, screening live at 8pm every weeknight with a “tightly-curated” round up of the day’s news and exclusive interviews.

Clipped

Why has nobody thought of a reality show about trimming bushes before? Clipped follows talented topiary artists as they turn trees into works of art, with one artist “clipped” from the competition each week. Could be incredible, could just be a show about wonky hedges. (Weekly from Friday 25 March)

Dancing on Ice

Holly Willoughby and Phillip Schofield host Dancing on Ice (Photo: Discovery)

Ever thought Dancing with the Stars was missing something, like ice skates and thermal pantyhose? Then check out Dancing on Ice, the British reality series that pairs celebrities with professional skaters as they compete to raise money for charity. (Weekly from Friday 25 March).

Rush

Your TV may grunt when you change channels to Rush, thanks to all the testosterone in its shows. Rush wants you to “experience more” and promises extreme thrills and high-octane adventure, and if you love being stuck in the outdoors with nothing but your tightly honed survival skills for company, Rush is all your dreams come true.

As well as shows presumably chosen simply for their intriguing names (Amish Mafia, Alaskan Bush People and Goblin Works Garage), here’s a few of Rush’s best launch watches.

Man vs Wild

Bear Grylls, stuck again (Photo: Discovery)

Bear Grylls is a man on a mission, and maybe that mission is to drink his own pee on every single continent. Season six of the classic survival series sees Grylls continue to test his endurance in some of the toughest and most remote environments in the world. (Weekly from Monday 21st March).

The Wheel 

This isn’t the British game show hosted by Michael McIntyre, but a survival series where six ordinary people are challenged to survive alone in a variety of extreme ecozones. They’re stuck in the wilderness for 60 days, and have to move from one zone to the next with little notice. Michael McIntyre could never. (Weekly from Monday 21st March).

Treehouse Masters 

Embrace your inner child with the series that designs and builds custom treehouses around America. From a spa treehouse in Texas to an Ohio brewery in the trees, building expert Pete Nelson travels the world in search of amazing tree homes. (Weekly on Mondays, rerun on Wednesdays).

Manhunt with Joel Lambert

Found him (Photo: Supplied)

Joel Lambert is trapped in a foreign land, trying to reach a pre-arranged rendezvous point before the local military finds him. Will his experience as a special operations officer help him survive the tough terrain? Of course it will, but one of these days both Joel and Bear Grylls will be captured by Michael McIntyre and imprisoned on The Wheel, and then we’ll really find out what they’re made of.

Check out eden (Freeview channel 8) and Rush (Freeview channel 14) from March 21. Selected shows will be available to stream on ThreeNow.

 

Keep going!
The gameplay of Dread Hunger, the new game from Christchurch studio Digital Confectioners that is following in the golden footsteps of Among Us. (Photo: Digital Confections, Image Design: Archi Banal)
The gameplay of Dread Hunger, the new game from Christchurch studio Digital Confectioners that is following in the golden footsteps of Among Us. (Photo: Digital Confections, Image Design: Archi Banal)

Pop CultureMarch 19, 2022

How a little Christchurch studio beat Among Us at its own game

The gameplay of Dread Hunger, the new game from Christchurch studio Digital Confectioners that is following in the golden footsteps of Among Us. (Photo: Digital Confections, Image Design: Archi Banal)
The gameplay of Dread Hunger, the new game from Christchurch studio Digital Confectioners that is following in the golden footsteps of Among Us. (Photo: Digital Confections, Image Design: Archi Banal)

Move over, crewmates – there’s a new captain in the town. Digital Confectioners’ Neil Reynolds tells Sam Brooks how they turned indie game Dread Hunger into a world-beater.

You’ve probably heard of Among Us, the cutesy game that encourages you to mistrust friends and strangers alike. Inspired in part by the party game Mafia and John Carpenter’s film The Thing, the whodunnit-style online game was released in 2018 but blew up during the pandemic. For many, playing Among Us was a way to stay in touch with friends during lockdown, and to get their mind off the grim situation unfurling outside.

The popularity of Among Us kickstarted a trend for “social deduction” games, and it’s a trend that Dread Hunger is capitalising on, hard. The game, developed by Christchurch studio Digital Confectioners, fits neatly into the social deduction genre but with a twist: it’s set during a naval expedition into the Arctic in the 18th century, with players taking on roles as eight explorers trying to survive in the wintry north. But twist! Two of the eight are traitors who can call on dark demonic powers to ruin the expedition.

The game has been hugely successful, coming in at number two on the Steam global charts behind the juggernaut that is Elden Ring – a game that has been hotly anticipated for three years, with blockbuster names like George RR Martin and Hidetaka Miyazaki it. That competition makes Dread Hunger’s achievements even more impressive. As of writing, Dread Hunger has reached a new active player high almost every day since its initial release in April, and has a current peak of over 76,000 active players.

And it’s come out of a little studio south of the Cook Strait.

Digital Confectioners  was founded by James Tan and Sam Evans way back in 2007 as a two person operation largely dedicated to modding – taking an existing game and modifying it with new maps and modes of play. Neil Reynolds, Dread Hunger’s game designer, joined the studio in 2011 as its first employee. Digital Confectioners’ first two games under its own banner were Depth – a shark vs diver battler – and Last Tide – a 100 man battle royale with deep sea divers, the studio seemingly keen to carve out its own nautical niche. From those small beginnings, Digital Confectioners grew and grew. The studio now has 15 employees in total; the team that worked on Dread Hunger is 10 of those.

Reynolds says the game was largely inspired by season one of  supernatural horror series The Terror, which followed the aftermath of a terrible 19th century shipwreck in Arctic waters. That show’s mood of creeping fear pervades Dread Hunger – it feels like you’re stuck on one of the earlier Silent Hill ships, albeit with a few more pirate hats, shambling skeletons, and sea shanties. Mistrust and dread, appropriately, lurk in the corners of every frame of the game. The only person you can trust is yourself, whether you’re an explorer or traitor.

“We were already very interested in the social deduction genre,” says Reynolds of the game’s origins. “We played things like Mafia and Werewolf and we saw it as something that could be mainstream, but wasn’t at the time.” Dread Hunger was released this year, but the team started working on it in 2019, a year before Among Us took Twitch by storm. Reynolds estimates that when they started development on Dread Hunger, most gamers had never even heard of “social deduction” as a genre.

“Our plan was to bring it to them.”

Just your average everyday 18th century nautical mutiny. (Photo: Digital Confectioners)

The term might have been unfamiliar, but social deduction  has long been popular outside of video games – you likely already know the rules of the party games Mafia and Werewolf, for example. Social deduction ignites a part of the brain that most of us try our best to hide – it  encourages you to deceive, to trick, and to assume the worst of other people.

But social deduction had never really taken off in video games – until Among Us.

It’s not surprising that Among Us was a hit. The game has an appealingly cutesy design, and the rules are simple enough that they can be understood as easily by young kids who are new to gaming as adults who have spent more time in the gamer chair than they care to admit. Combined with the proven thrill of high-stakes, high-emotion matches, Among Us had a winning formula, especially once half the world went into lockdown in 2020. Now Dread Hunger is riding the undertow of the tsunami that was Among Us – even making headway in China, a market that Among Us didn’t manage to break.

The success of Dread Hunger has come as a welcome surprise to the team who worked on it, says Reynolds. “Almost every single day since launch we’ve hit a new all-time high in terms of players, in terms of sales. It’s been amazing to watch the growth.”

The explorers and/or traitors of Dread Hunger, in action. (Photo: Digital Confectioners)

Reynolds attributes part of the game’s success to the setting, one which had already proven popular in the gaming world. It seems that gamers really like to be ship captains (see: Sea of Thieves, Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag, Sid Meier’s Pirates). It’s also a setting that places Dread Hunger apart from other games in the social deduction genre. “Other games in the space are quite cartoony, and they’re not first person. There’s less roleplay for players to do, because they’re not in the character themselves. With us they can really roleplay as an 18th century sailor, or a captain, or a cook.”

The team knew they were really onto something big when the community content began rolling in. “It was when people started making fan art for our game,” says Reynolds. “Then people started making guides and videos on how to play our game. I was so stoked.”

Romy Gellen, Digital Confectioners’ marketing and communication manager, sees the bulk of that community content, the lifeblood of any live service game. “Just last week, I read the first Dread Hunger fanfiction, which was… quite an experience!”, says Gellen. “We’ve even had some cosplays of the characters so far, and people are even cosplaying as they stream.” 

So where to from here? The team recently released a “roadmap”, a timeline of things they plan to add to the game like more cosmetic items and prestige classes to play with. But Reynolds anticipates things might change even more. “The constant growth has already meant that we’ve had to make some pretty big changes as we go. It’s been pretty crazy.”

It’s a dream situation for a games studio. Huge launch, new peaks for active players and sales every day, break into an elusive market. What else could they want?

One thing: “I’d love to see more Kiwis play the game. I’d love to be more of a household name here.”

You can buy Dread Hunger on Steam.

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