Funnel Runners makes the weather the level designer
3 min read
Most survival games have a map that stays where you left it. In Funnel Runners the tornado eats the buildings, and the loot inside them goes with it.
The map is consumable
You are on your first deployment with APEX Storm Monitoring Services. A high-priority F5 tornado is approaching, and you and up to seven friends have to collect data, scavenge what you need, and survive. The weather is the enemy, and it is the only one that matters.
Storms spawn randomly and grow stronger over time, tearing the map apart as they go. Buildings collapse piece by piece. The important part is what happens next: items can no longer be found in destroyed areas. The map is not a backdrop that takes damage, it is a resource being consumed while you are standing in it.
That turns every decision into a timing problem. The house with the thing you need is still standing right now. It might not be in ninety seconds, and the route there is through the part of the map the storm is currently crossing. Nobody had to write that tension into a mission script.
Being swept up by the wind is its own failure state, so the storm is simultaneously the clock, the level geometry and the thing that kills you.
Why destruction has to cost something
The rise of the systemic game is the frame. Destruction in most games is a visual layer — walls break, nothing changes. It becomes systemic the moment breaking a wall removes something the player wanted, and tying loot to intact buildings is about the cheapest way to make that true.
How Overcooked’s kitchens force you to communicate explains the co-op half. Eight players in a collapsing town will naturally split up, and splitting up under a shared timer is exactly the condition that makes people talk. Someone has to call the storm, and everyone else has to believe them.
The risk in random spawning is that randomness alone is not drama. If storms appear anywhere with equal probability, players will learn to hover at the edge and wait. The interesting version escalates toward the places you still need to go.
What you actually get
Funnel Runners is by Supernova Studios LLC, self-published, out now in Early Access on Windows, under Action, Indie, Simulation and Early Access. Up to eight players, with data collection and scavenging as the objectives underneath the weather.
Early Access is the honest label for a game like this, because destructible maps and eight-player netcode are two of the more expensive things to get right and they interact badly. The pitch is strong enough that it is worth watching either way.
If the appeal is an environment that is actively working against you rather than just sitting there, Open Waters is the other one on this list — a small boat, a compass, and an ocean with no landmarks and something underneath it.
