Galacticare getting new free mode via update

Developer Brightrock Games and publisher CULT Games has announced an update for Galacticare, adding a new free mode.

The update will hit PC (Steam, Epic Games Store, and GOG) as well as Xbox Series S|X, while it’ll be coming to PS5 at a later date, or “soon”, as the developer explains.

Challenge Mode is our response to our player’s masochistic requests for more difficulty, suffering, and general misery,” said Josh Bishop, Creative Director and co-founder at Brightrock Games. “It’s been built to be unforgiving and push players to utilise their full toolset, it’s intended for those who want their Galacticare experience to have a little more bite to it.”

Check out the new trailer, and the official word below:

Go toe to toe with the grim reaper themself as your hospital bows under the weight of death like never before. In the all new Challenge Mode, every mechanic has been skyrocketed to disastrous levels of intensity.

Here’s the key features for the free update:

• It’s mutating!: Welcome deadly new strains as the conditions you’ve learned to cure now mutate to be incredibly infectious and highly fatal! Make sure to put your nerds into the Research Lab to find the cure and keep fatalities to a financially-tolerable minimum while you work on the cure.
• Ready or not, here they come: Patients are swarming into the sanitised halls of your hospital, and their numbers are only increasing! Disruptive and inconsiderate, requiring rooms you haven’t yet built, choking your hospital corridors with queues… Good luck, Director.
• Anyone got a spare body bag?: With patients arriving on their last legs (or tentacles), their health will deteriorate much faster. You’ll need your full suite of treatment tools to save them, especially now that treatment difficulty has increased, requiring happy, high-level doctors to keep patients consistently alive (and able to pay you!)
• A hard knock life: By 2049, patients are flat broke. Income from treatments is reduced, the traveling merchant is far less generous with freebies and Level 3 doctors can no longer be recruited directly. You’ll have to train them yourself.
• Actions have Consequences: Lose too many patients and have your hospital snatched by the “Space Cops”. Oops!

Galacticare is out now for PC and consoles. Read our interview with the team, here.