Genre filmmaking is in her blood.

But for director Caitlin Cronenberg, Humane came about not only as an opportunity to follow in the footsteps of her father, the legendary horror filmmaker David Cronenberg, but also as a chance to pursue a premise she couldn’t get out of her head to its terrifying endpoint.

“There’s something sort of delectable about exploring people in crisis, because it’s the time we, as human beings, are the most ourselves,” she tells Inverse. “It’s harder to hide behind some visage of who you want to be when you are in crisis. It’s true of your friends, too. As soon as you’re in crisis, you see who your true friends are. And you meet your true self.”

In Cronenberg’s ruthless dystopian satire, now in theaters, a widespread ecological collapse has led world leaders to take drastic action. Their directive: reduce the world’s population by 20%, in order to conserve resources, allow the Earth to heal, and avoid humanity’s extinction.

Manor Lords is a brand new city-builder title released on Steam in Early Access this past Friday, and it managed to wrack up a staggering 1 million copies sold in just 24 hours.

It’s a massive success for a strategy title, eclipsing every record set by other strategy games, like Civilization, for players on Steam. But much more than that it highlights the biggest trend developing in 2024: players want more mid-priced games.

As the industry continues to question the sustainability of blockbuster games, it begs the question if more of these kinds of mid-range titles could flourish.