Open-world adventure Pine goes into beta on the Kartridge storefront

You may remember Kickstarter success Pine from a couple of years ago—it's the sandbox game by indie studio Twirlbound where animals have "lives, goals and quests of their own". You play a member of a struggling tribe working to find a place in the food chain as part of a simulated ecology of competing creatures.

As of today it's available in a limited beta via Kartridge, which is webgame portal/moblie publisher Kongregate's storefront. For $20 you get into the beta and also get the full game when it comes out, at which point it will cost $25 and also be available on Steam.

Kartridge is a digital storefront that Kongregate launched in late 2018, focused on indie games and with a suite of features like chat, achievements, and user levels. It does without manual approval processes and application fees, using an internal editorial team to curate and highlight games.

The final version of Pine will launch on October 10.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.