Earlier this year Jasper Byrne released indie horror/survival game Lone Survivor to much critical praise. Not resting on his laurels, he's hard at work at a new game already. It doesn't have a name just yet–the announcement post on his blog identifies it as just "new game." Still, there's some screenshots of interest that you may peruse on his website…but also some initial descriptions of what the project is!
So what he's thinking is:
Basically it’s a combination of all the ideas I’ve been shooting around since the later parts of making LONE SURVIVOR, from dungeon crawler to sci-fi head-messing to whimsical platformer… or another way of looking at it may be Zelda x Demon’s Souls? The story is a little weird, though.
Judging from how good Lone Survivor was, this isn't just an empty promise of two great games being mashed to create something better–we can have reasonable faith he'll pull it off. He goes on to describe the game a little further:
It has two-handed combat, equipable weapons and rolling (I love rolling), but I’m now writing an engine to make this sort of Zelda-Phantom Hourglass type projection to try and make the environment more exciting, but unlike that game it will use sprites to convey the characters. I still have a good way to go before I can get this sort of look in-game, a lot of tools to write and art to draw.
All sounds good. You take this, you combine it with the retro art style, and it looks like we have another hit on our hands. No release date/window known of yet, but we'll keep you updated.
