Brief game overview (Patreon)

A "fast-paced surgery sim"? What does that even mean?

Cutting Edge is a story-driven game about performing surgeries and saving patients. If you're a fan of Trauma Center, you've already got the gist of it; feel free to skip a bit ahead.

If you're not familiar, Trauma Center was a series of Nintendo DS and Wii games developed by Atlus (makers of Persona!), first released in 2005. These games also revolved around performing life-saving surgeries and following the stories surrounding them.

Feel free to scrub through a Longplay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5WlhqxOmsE

Trauma Center was fairly popular and well-received in North America. There were five of them in total, with the last entry (Trauma Team) releasing on the Wii fifteen years ago, in 2010.

The game loop

So what's the gameplay like in this surgery sim?

The game is divided into "Episodes" (or levels). Generally speaking, each Episode has one Operation accompanied by a pre-op and post-op Story section.

In the Visual Novel-lite Story sections, you'll experience chunks of the game's linear story, mostly through character dialogue. Talking with your co-workers, learning about the world, asking questions, those sorts of things.

During Operations, you'll play as Dr. Peri Maddock, and are tasked with saving a patient, no matter who they are. You'll have to master all the tools at your disposal to cut, stitch, burn, and screw your way to a successful procedure.

Afterwards, you'll be evaluated on your performance. But don't sweat it too much - at the end of the day, a saved patient is a saved patient.

(But if you want to try and improve your rank... I'm not stopping you. And hey, your friends will be able to see how much better you are, once proper leaderboards are implemented~)

After that, there is typically a bit more story, after which the Episode is done!

Episodes aren't too long (15-30 minutes or so), so there are plenty of nice, natural stopping points. (...there's nothing stopping you from binging them, of course.)

So why make another surgery sim?

I'll probably go into more detail in a separate post. But for a quick answer...

For starters, the last entry in Trauma Center was fifteen years ago. There's not really been any indication of another, official Trauma Center coming out since.

There have been plenty of general surgery sims since then, of course. But I consider the vast majority of those to be low-effort, kind of icky and hard-to-look-at mobile game slop.

I keep mentioning Trauma Center because it really struck the right balance between surgery simming and arcadiness. There were surgery sim games well before it, don't get me wrong - like Life & Death. But those all tended to go for realism.

I wanted to make something that captured the vibe of the Trauma Center games while also iterating on and improving what made it great. (Expect me to talk more about that in a future post!) Not to mention there's nothing like this currently on PC.

If they aren't going to do it, then I will!

Anyway, I hope I helped with understanding what Cutting Edge will be like! Until next post!