Early Access survival game Scum only just launched at 9 AM this morning, but it's already become Devolver Digitial's biggest launch to date. While Devolver wouldn't share any numbers with me (not a surprise), a peek at the Steam Stats page shows Scum is already in the top 10 games by concurrent playercount. As of this moment, there are just under 50,000 people playing.

I've been playing too, exploring the crafting, zombies, cannibalism, and extremely gross bodily functions of Scum, which include not just pooping but super-pooping. Tyler also previewed some of the higher functions of Scum's complex menus, meters, and tooth counters back in April.

Scum is an Early Access open world survival game, so you probably know the general drill: spawn on an island with essentially nothing, run around gathering resources to craft stuff, loot houses for gear, watch out for zombies and other players, and keep yourself fed, hydrated, and healthy.

The simulation running beneath it is an extensive one, however. As Tyler noted in his preview back in April, Scum has a heck of a lot of meters that allow you to track the status of your character to an extreme degree, everything from your heartbeat to your vitamin and mineral intake, what's in your stomach and what's passing through your digestive track, and even how many teeth you have.

With all that simulation comes a lot of gross stuff: if a game is tracking the amount and type of food passing through your intestines, you can probably guess it doesn't simply disappear when it leaves your body. It's not all disgusting: there's some pretty cool stuff I've also come across playing it this week. I'll try to alternate between the gross stuff and the cool stuff I've seen below.

Yessir, you can really chop a body up, yep

Let's start with gross! Above is a video of me killing a zombie with an axe, then doing other things to it with an axe. A lot of other things. You can, uh... you can really chop up a human body in Scum, for sure, so if you've been looking for that in a game then maybe this is the game for you. Torso and limbs can be turned into steaks, fat, and bones, and there's also hands and feet and guts and a head. I won't tell you what to do with all that meat when you're done carving it up, but you can use your imagination.

(Note: the part where the second zombie tries to avenge his chopped-up pal: that's not the game freezing, that's my recording program freezing.)

Maybe all this dismembering is coming too quickly for me on the heels of the gruesome Graveyard Keeper, but I think I might be ready for a nice, wholesome game where you don't dissect and eat people.

Some crafting recipes allow for substitutes

Sometimes in crafting games, recipes can kind of suck when you have an item that feels like it would logically satisfy a recipe but won't, simply because the recipe cannot be strayed from. In Scum, I was pleased to discover that sometimes you can substitute certain components and still craft the item you want.

If a component is swappable, it'll have little arrows below it in the crafting menu that let you page through alternative items. Does the recipe call for rope, but you don't have it? Wire or cable will work, and so will sewing thread. The amount you need may be different depending on the component you use, but at least there's an alternative, just like when you bake a cake in real life and substitute apple sauce for sugar and get a not-very-good cake.

You can hurl

The first time I barfed in Scum was from standing in the woods eating mushroom after mushroom until I spewed it all back up. That felt fair. The second time, which you can see above, was after I'd eaten two human steaks and washed it down with a large bottle of lime soda. It wasn't the uncooked human flesh that caused me to barf, it was from overfilling my stomach with the drink. Gotta keep an eye on those meters.

(Note: it was unintentional, but that gif actually loops really well.)

Dressing in layers is pretty damn cool

The early hours of a fresh spawn in a survival game are a challenge for a lot of reasons, but especially because even if you're lucky enough to find a lot of loot, chances are you can't carry it all with you. So it's nice that if you come across a sweater with a pocket, and you're already wearing a shirt with a pocket, you can just put that sweater on over that shirt and have two pockets. Find a jacket? Throw that baby on over them both. You are now a pocket monster.

This can have adverse effects: apparently, if you get wet, all that clothing will weigh more and slow you down.

You poop

Maybe pooping isn't gross. We all do it. It's normal and natural. And here it's a bit more realistic looking than, say, in Ark, where a dungball the size of a grapefruit just appears near your butt and falls to the floor—though in both games you poop right through your pants. I'm not sure we really needed jiggle physics on the turd, but we've got 'em. Thanks.

Unlike in Ark, however, I couldn't pick up my poop afterward. I'll leave it to you to decide if that's a good or bad thing.

In singleplayer mode, there's a free camera

I like when games have photo modes, or any sort of feature where you can move the camera around apart from your character and take pictures. I found this out accidentally, but if you press F10, you'll be able to fly the camera away from your character to take some shots. I noticed that when activating it while in first-person mode my character doesn't have a head, but in third-person his head is there. (It doesn't appear to work in multiplayer, probably because people would use it to look around corners and such.)

You may have sudden, explosive diarrhea

Here's a tip. If you consume human flesh, unrefrigerated milk, cream, half a bag of sugar, some olives, an entire bottle of wine, and some antibiotics you found, take a peek at your status meters. They may have some important, urgent information for you.

I was attempting to take a cooking pot outside to see if I could fill it with water, and my guy just hunched over and began spraying poo everywhere. Yeah, it's gross. Just be thankful gifs don't make noise.

You might occasionally spot a robot visiting you

I'm not entirely sure if this is a human spectator watching or just a little mood-setter to remind you you're really participating in a brutal game show, but a robot occasionally pops in to monitor you. Considering that in the hours I've spent playing multiplayer Scum I've never seen another player (the map is 144 square kilometers and it hadn't entered Early Access yet so populations were low), it's nice to remember you're not alone. I'm not sure if you can shoot it, or what happens if you do: I've only seen it twice, and I was unarmed both times.

Zombies got some moves

Hey, I ran out of gross stuff (your character also urinates, but that's not terribly gross and I forgot to record it anyway) so let's finish with more cool stuff.

I'm not sure what you look for in a zombie experience, but I kinda prefer the sort where I can handle a single zed without too much trouble while a swarm is almost certain death. I've had kind of a mixed experience so far: sometimes zombies go down without much of a fight, other times they beat me within an inch of my life. So I tend to try to avoid them unless I'm, you know. Hungry.

It's nice that you can eventually outrun them if you've got enough stamina, though this zombie in particular was incredibly spry, leaping over rocks and bushes like he was having a great old time chasing me. I was wearing the clothes I'd taken off another zombie, so maybe he thought I was his pal.

There are things much deadlier than zombies

I'd forgotten this was in the trailer, so it was a complete surprise. On a rainy evening I spotted a building behind some tall fencing, and after squeezing through a gap I found myself face-to-grill with something much more dangerous than a zombie. I was so stunned I just stood there staring, and a moment later I was dead. It definitely didn't help that my framerate took a massive dump at the key moment, but I'm pretty sure I'd have been dead either way.

Now, at least, I have a goal in Scum: destroy one of those mechs, or maybe drive it myself. Hopefully it's got a toilet in there. Scum enters Early Access on Steam today. So far, I'm having a cool but gross time with it.

SCUM is an open-world multiplayer survival game that distinguishes itself from the crowd through extreme attention to detail. As Tyler explained in his April preview, it tracks—among other things—individual vitamin and mineral levels, body temperature, muscle mass, stomach volume, and even the number of teeth remaining in your face. It's unusual, to say the least. And it's coming to Steam Early Access on August 29. 

Aspects of numerous previous survival and battle royale games appear to come together in SCUM. There's obviously a PUBG-style competitive element to it, and it's presented as a voyeuristic near-future game show, similar to SOS or the late Radical Heights. But the Steam listing says "knowledge and skills are the ultimate weapons for long-term survival," which includes combat proficiency but also security system hacking and other "knowledge-based skills." Do well and you'll receive life-extending gifts from your corporate sponsors; do poorly and you'll die, but you might come back with all those skills intact—as a zombie, apparently, and yes, they're in the game too (though they're called 'puppets'). 

The big question about SCUM is whether the ability to monitor your vitamin K intake proves to be a small piece of a large, engaging puzzle, or just a weird novelty that wears off after five minutes. Open-world survival is a tough biz to break into at any time, and making the survival element more akin to actual survival is a risky move: Most of us, if dropped in the wilderness with nothing but a spot of helpful advice about scrupulously monitoring our calorie intake and workout regimen, would just keel over and die. But if nothing else, it should be a nice break from banging a rock against a tree to make an assault rifle. 

SCUM was the first game featured in Devolver Digital's incredible E3 2018 show, embedded below. I would strongly encourage you to watch the whole thing, but the relevant bit (with maybe a spot or two of possibly NSFW language) begins at 4:56. 

If you saw Devolver Digital's E3 conference last year, you'll have had an idea what to expect: host Nina Struthers doing a pitch-perfect impersonation of frightening corporate passion, gore, skits, and maybe some hints about actual games. This year's was a short one, though it did find time to reveal "lootboxcoin" and end with an homage to Robocop. In between, there were actual trailers for actual games including a remake of FromSoftware's Metal Wolf Chaos, a game in which the President of the United States puts on a mech suit to defeat a coup. You read that right. 

They also showed a trailer for My Friend Pedro, a game about skateboarding while performing gun ballet which you might have seen some excellent gifs of. (During the conference this led into Nina Struthers setting a man on fire for arguing over the pronunciation of the word 'gif' because this is still Devolver we're talking about.) Croteam's prison-riot survival game SCUM has a new Early Access trailer for the occasion too. And that's it until next year, when Struthers will presumably return as a full-blown cyborg to murder some more people. Can't wait.

I hope you aren't tired of survival games with hunger and thirst meters, because SCUM has those—plus a reading for every vitamin and mineral your character's body needs. That's just the start. You can see SCUM's full character data screen above, which includes caloric intake and usage, muscle mass, and even a stomach volume meter.

Outside of its flagship metabolism simulations, a lot seems to be up in the air with SCUM, and it's changing as the developers react to feedback from a smallish group of invited alpha testers. The gist is that you're a prisoner on an island reality TV show, and you can compete in events to earn fame points to spend on gear, healing, and other things you might need to stay alive.

What will players do in the singleplayer mode? Will there be NPCs who give you quests? How customizable will the 64-player servers be for those who choose to rent their own? Will there be 'safe zones' on the island? All of these were presented as questions yet to be answered when I chatted with community manager Josip Barišić at PAX East a couple days ago. But vitamin deficiency simulation is settled.

Survival isn't a binary problem of 'eat or die' in SCUM. Though I assume you will die if you don't eat, what you eat is important, too, and will affect your character's physical characteristics. If you create a heavy, buff character but are unable to maintain a diet high in protein and carbohydrates, you'll lose muscle mass and weight. Barišić tells me that the tooth counter exists because if someone knocks all your teeth out, you won't be able to chew solid food and will have to find a way to liquefy it. That is apparently a real feature in SCUM.

According to Barišić, players won't have to pop open this screen and track their carb intake—just like in real life, you can get by without paying a great deal of attention to nutrition. Players who want to min-max their vitamin B levels, however, have the option to. A carefully planned diet and exercise regimen (see the video above for more on the latter) can give you an advantage, improving stats like speed, max carrying weight, stamina, and so on.

There is a goal to SCUM: get off the island. And there's an in-game explanation for all this nutrition data, which is that it's transmitted to you by an implant in the back of your neck. Barišić tells me that before you escape the island, you'll have to find a way to remove the device without dying—probably with the help of other players who've leveled up their medicine and programming skills. Once you do, you'll no longer have the benefit of knowing your precise sodium level.

A lot about SCUM remains unclear to me, and may simply be undecided. For instance, I noticed that when Barišić changed his character's body type during character creation, his intelligence number changed, which doesn't make much sense. But it won't be like that in the final game, he tells me. 

Everything being subject to change, I don't know exactly what SCUM will look like when it releases in Early Access sometime in the next few months. Just playing with its comically detailed simulations may be enough to make it fun for awhile, though. Aside from metabolism, SCUM also simulates the wetness of fabrics, and includes a frighteningly complex skill system. I look forward to laying out my gear to dry and manually zeroing my scopes while munching on high-protein, high-fiber foods, even if just for the novelty of it all.