Long-Disappeared, Festival-Winning Game Revived After A Decade

Ten years after its release, award-winning and influential indie game Cart Life is coming back. AdHoc studio and original developer Richard Hofmeier are working together to create a definitive version of Cart Life, set to release in 2023.

Cart Life won the Seumas McNally Grand Prize at Game Developer's Conference's Independent Games Festival in 2013. The game is a retail simulator following the lives of three characters trying to make a livelihood as street vendors. Critics at the time celebrated the Cart Life for the way it translated working-class people's lives and the struggle to make ends meet--a grim and unyielding experience where every decision counts. GameSpot's Cart Life review also praised the game but commented on the technical issues.

Due to those bugs, Hofmeier removed the game from Steam in 2014, according to an interview with Wired. He had also largely stopped being active in the game development scene, choosing to work various jobs in different fields. "I'm trying to have as many jobs as I can in this one lifetime," he said to Wired. "It feels like maybe the best way to learn."

In 2021, co-founder of Adhoc Studio Pierre Shorette reached out to Hofmeier and the two ended up connecting. They agreed to bring back Cart Life, with AdHoc serving as the publisher and providing resources for Hofmeier to finish the game.

"Cart Life was this game I'd always wanted to come back to, to resolve and to complete and--in a sense--to redeem this game to myself," Hofmeier said.

Cart Life doesn't have a set release date yet, but it's expected to come out some time in 2023.