Silksong, Final Fantasy, Sonic and much more.
It’s almost September and it’s set to be one of the biggest months of the year, with Team Cherry’s anticipated release Hollow Knight: Silksong finally releasing.
Apart from this, games like Star Wars Outlaws and Daemon X Machina are on the way, and later in the month, series such as Sonic, Pac-Man and Final Fantasy return.
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Drab x Drive.
August is nearly over, and we’ve had two first-party releases this month: Kirby and the Long Title Nintendo Employees Are Obliged to Say in its Entirety and Drag x Drive.
The Kirby revamp just came out (and it’s very good) while Drag and Drive (yes, this one’s definitely an ‘and’) hit the courts back on 14th August. Are you still playing it? I’m willing to bet dozens of you are.
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If you’ve played more than a few role-playing games, you’ll know how your hero’s journey typically plays out. In the prologue, a terrible thing will happen – an event that demands you move quickly to prevent an apocalypse or defeat an all-encompassing evil. In the following hours, you’ll spend 90% of your time completely ignoring that impending threat, instead helping randomers you met in the pub and collecting loot from dungeons. That’s okay, though, because the big bad will always wait for you. The world perpetually teeters on the brink of extinction until you’re ready to fix it.
Not so in The Blood of Dawnwalker, the first RPG from Rebel Wolves, a new studio founded by former CD Projekt Red staff. Its campaign puts you on a clock: you have 30 days and 30 nights to save your family from evil vampires.
That hold-on-while-I-do-a-thousand-side-quests meme “was definitely one of the reasons” for this interesting approach, creative director Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz says with a smile. “I wouldn’t say it was the sole reason, but I would say this was definitely a starting point for a conversation.”
To properly understand that time pressure system, it’s best to start with how The Blood of Dawnwalker’s campaign is structured. Dubbed a “narrative sandbox,” it doesn’t follow a linear sequence of events. There’s no quest one, quest two, quest three and so on.
“After the prologue, you can go directly to the castle. You could try to rescue your family immediately,” explains Tomaszkiewicz. “There’s a variety of quests you can participate in. You can ignore them, or you can do them. There are a lot of activities that are directly targeted against [main villain] Brencis that will weaken him, for example, and make the attack easier. But at any point you can decide, ‘Okay, I’ve got enough, I’m going to the castle, I’m going to do it.’”
If The Blood of Dawnwalker was a book, then, you’d read the first chapter and then would be free to skip directly to the end. As for the optional chapters between those two points, you can read them in any order… but you’ll need to find the pages first. “You are not railroaded into these plotlines,” Tomaszkiewicz reveals. “You have to find them [in the world] on your own. We do leave breadcrumbs of course, but we want to make sure that it doesn’t feel like ‘These are the three plotlines, do them and then go there,’ right? We wanted to enhance the feeling of exploration and finding these stories in the world.”
That brings us back to the time system. You have 30 days and 30 nights to explore Vale Sangora, a 14th-century kingdom nestled in the Carpathian Mountains, and undertake as many (or as few) of those plotlines as you want. That time element evolved out of Dawnwalker’s protagonist, Coen. A man suffering from both silver poisoning and a vampiric curse, he lives as a mortal during the day and becomes a blood-sucker at night. “The time passage was kind of central to the character,” Tomaszkiewicz notes, especially since your vampiric abilities allow for a very different, more supernatural playstyle after dark.
Perhaps the most important thing to know is that there is no real-time ticking clock in The Blood of Dawnwalker. The minutes do not start counting down from the moment you start a new game. This is not Majora’s Mask or Outer Wilds. “We were thinking that if time would flow naturally, it might be quite unpleasant. The playstyle would change on the go [from human to vampire and back to human] constantly without your input,” explains Tomaszkiewicz. “So that’s where the time as a resource idea came in.”
It’s best to think of time in The Blood of Dawnwalker as a currency rather than a stopwatch. A bar, split into eight sections and displayed in the upper-right of the screen, represents your daily allowance of that currency. Performing significant actions marked with an hourglass icon, such as completing objectives or engaging in certain conversations, will “spend” a section of the bar. Similar to Deathloop, then, simply exploring or completing lower-level tasks will not progress time. Theoretically, you could stay in the noon period of the seventh day for dozens of in-game hours, provided you don’t do anything marked with that hourglass symbol.
While Rebel Wolves is very excited about the way time has shaped The Blood of Dawnwalker’s choices and quest design (of which you can learn more about in our recent preview), Tomaszkiewicz is aware that many people will be skeptical of the system. “I know there are a lot of players that are afraid of missing out, so we definitely tried to not cut off too much content,” he explains. “We are aiming, at least in a normal, average playthrough, for you to be able to do 80% of the content.”
Rebel Wolves has twisted temporal rules to deliver on that goal, particularly when it comes to how time-sensitive events are handled. For example, one storyline involves a burning house, but the flames will blaze indefinitely until you actually discover the building. Only then will you need to act before you spend too many sections of the time bar. There’s no chance of you turning up one day to find a house you never knew even existed is now a pile of rubble and ash.
Of course, regardless of how quests and time are handled, there’s always that looming pressure: 30 days and 30 nights to save your family. But there’s unwritten nuance in that deadline. “Don’t think about it as a game over thing,” Tomaszkiewicz hints. “It’s more like a choice and consequence thing.”
That’s the vital takeaway: you may have a time limit to save your family, but there is no time limit to complete the game. You can continue to play indefinitely after that point. And who is to say that saving your family will even be the most important part of your story? The Blood of Dawnwalker’s Steam page states: “Embark on the quest to save your family, or swear revenge on your sire and destroy everyone standing in your way.” Perhaps that tale of revenge will provide an alternate journey for the main campaign? I ask Tomaszkiewicz to elaborate, but he refuses. That Steam description is already more than enough, he says.
It’s easy to see time, even when it only moves during specific actions, like sand slipping through your fingers. As something you lose. But it’s important to remember that progressing time brings you closer to one of The Blood of Dawnwalker’s most exciting features: Coen becomes a vampire at night. When the moon rises, you unlock the ability to walk up walls and along ceilings, and to teleport to rooftops and out-of-reach balconies. Such skills unlock a variety of opportunities, not to mention a stealthier play style. And so, if you want, you can skip the days and play only during the night. It’s a “totally viable way to play,” Tomaszkiewicz confirms, albeit with a warning that ignoring the day also means missing quests only available during the waking hours.
A vampire’s supernatural strength and skills come at a price, though, and it’s one we all know: gulping down vast quantities of blood. You’ll need to satisfy Coen’s hunger regularly, and the only truly gratifying meal is found in the neck of a human. You can opt to ignore that hunger, or feast on much less-satiating animals, but there are consequences to such a lifestyle.
“If you starve Coen, if you don’t feed him enough, and if you go into important conversations, he can lose control and just kill off important NPCs,” Tomaszkiewicz reveals.
Rebel Wolves isn’t unique in creating a game in which you can kill significant characters, but it’s doing so in its own way. You can’t just stride up to someone and cut them down with your sword, for instance – it’s always to do with your vampiric urges. But you do have a choice. “You can decide to give into your vampiric nature whenever it comes knocking,” Tomaszkiewicz explains, describing it as “the whispers of your dark nature.” But that’s only possible if Coen is merely hungry. If you starve him, then every conversation is a roll of the dice. The hunger could seize control, and you’ll have no option but to watch him chow down.
This system is possible thanks to that aforementioned “narrative sandbox” campaign structure. “In a game that has more of a strict core narrative, you couldn’t kill off a character that is pivotal to the story, right? Because the story would fall apart,” notes Tomaszkiewicz. Since all quests in The Blood of Dawnwalker (aside from the first and last) are essentially optional, it means anyone can be killed without derailing the story. Instead, those deaths become the story. You can punish characters you hate, or be caught off-guard by surprise slaughter.
This bloodlust is part of a wider set of overlapping systems designed to make the kingdom of Vale Sangora feel alive. NPCs have routines, and they’ll raise the alarm if they see you stealing or feeding on their neighbours. Rival factions will brawl each other in the streets. And the evil Brencis watches you from afar.
“As you gain more notoriety in the valley, as you do these acts against Brencis, he won’t stay passive,” Tomaszkiewicz reveals. “He will enact these edicts that will hamper your progression. So he might send out more soldiers into the streets, or patrolling the roads, or enforce a curfew. So now it’s more difficult to feed at night.”
Notoriety initially sounds like GTA’s wanted level, or the escalating response of Metal Gear Solid’s guards. But it’s actually more complex than a simple difficulty spike. “Sometimes it can actually be a boon,” Tomaszkiewicz explains. “It’s not just Brencis and his soldiers [who react to your notoriety,] it’s also the people in the valley. They will recognize you and be afraid of you. So in some quest situations it actually might be helpful. There are some factions that fight against Brencis, they don’t like him. So building up notoriety is actually a good way to gain a good standing with them.”
The narrative sandbox approach means Rebel Wolves has had to pay close attention to how the story ends. The ability to skip over every major quest, or kill off significant characters, means every player will hit the finale with different levels of knowledge. Some may not even know what a Dawnwalker is, while others will have found solutions to all the major problems. And so when I ask how many endings the story has, Tomaszkiewicz doesn’t have an easy answer.
“This is a very complicated web of connections,” he says. “I can tell you the designer working on the endings is… let’s say the meme of [It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’s Charlie Day] with the red tape. That’s him basically. It is a lot of fun, but it’s a lot to keep track of.”
That’s not the only thing the story team needs to consider, either. The Steam page claims that this project is “the beginning of a brand-new saga built with love for the role-playing genre,” and so The Blood of Dawnwalker is just chapter one. The Rebel Wolves team may be building a game, but they are also building an entire universe that they plan to explore in subsequent games.
“We have ideas for the overarching story of Coen,” reveals Tomaszkiewicz. He says sequels are, of course, not guaranteed, but the team has ideas of where to go should this first game be a success.
“There is much more in the IP than just vampires, let’s say,” he teases. “There is this whole hidden world that we are not exploring on purpose in this first game. We want to leave a lot of fuel for the sequels and so on. But we do leave breadcrumbs and hint at these things. So yeah, we have a general idea of where we want to take Coen.”
Such sequels and grander saga ambitions are beyond Rebel Wolves’ grasp for now, just as The Blood of Dawnwalker is beyond our own – at this year’s Gamescom, we were only able to watch a demonstration rather than go hands-on ourselves. And as exciting and promising as that demo was, it’ll take first-hand experience of the narrative sandbox to truly tell if the studio’s bold approach to RPG design has paid off. But just as Coen thirsts for the blood of mortals, I hunger to taste more of this fascinating, risk-taking Slavic fantasy.
Matt Purslow is IGN’s Executive Editor of Features.
Loop de loop.
To celebrate the newly-released movie adaptation of The Exit 8, the Switch version has received a minor, yet welcome upgrade for the Switch 2.
If you’re unaware of the premise, The Exit 8 takes place in a looping corridor within a Japanese metro station. Your job is to escape, but to do so, you’ll need to keep an eye on your surroundings, as each loop through the corridor may reveal some odd ‘anomalies’.
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Or have you Forgotten?
The weekend has crept up on us once again, so it’s time to kick back with a game or two.
Before we get to our plans, however, let’s look back on all the Nintendo news that happened this week. Honestly, it was a rather quiet one. Nintendo launched a series of stop-motion Mario shorts and the kid-focused Hello, Mario! app in Japan (which we went hands-on with), rumours of a September Nintendo Direct started bubbling away, and The Pokémon Company revealed another new Mega Evolution for Pokémon Legends: Z-A.
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“Just two months to go”.
Square Enix locked in an October release date for Dragon Quest I & II HD-2D Remake earlier this year, and if you’ve been wanting an update about how it’s progressing, it’s now gone gold!
To mark this milestone, the official Dragon Quest social media account shared a photo of remake producer Masaaki Hayasaka alongside industry legend and “father of Dragon Quest”, Yuji Horii. The team has also taken the time to remind everyone how there’s now “just two months to go” until this anticipated release arrives.
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UK gamers, I’ve failed you. In the hours between me spotting that this 32-inch Samsung Odyssey monitor was reduced by £300, Amazon has put the price up by £100.
In the world of Kaiju No. 8, titanic, otherworldly beasts are a constant threat in Japan: to the extent that not only is there a military organisation – the Japan Anti-Kaiju Defense Force (JAKDF) – set up to deal with them, but there are also regimented clean-up crews whose jobs are to come in and cut up then cart away the often skyscraper-sized foes once they’ve been felled.
Lead character Kafka Hibino dreams of being a JAKDF officer, but at the start of the series is working in clean-up, and hoping that when there’s work to be done he doesn’t get assigned the intestines… for obvious reasons. It’s not long, however, before he’s – season one spoiler alert here – both a member of the JAKDF and dealing with the fact that he’s somehow been gifted/cursed with the powers of a kaiju himself, designated by the powers that be as Kaiju No. 8.
Stylish action, goofy humour and bad-ass characters all come together to make what follows a whole heap of fun, and frankly, excellent fodder for a video game. Why so? Well, in terms of action, the series focuses around squad-based combat against bizarre and menacing enemies both large and small, with battles decided by exposing each creature’s core (i.e. weak point) and finishing it off. Pair that with highly individual characters, who have a range of expertise in different weapons and fighting styles, and you’ve got a video game waiting to happen.
Enter Akatsuki Games, and Kaiju No. 8 The Game. This free-to-play turn-based RPG on mobile (with PC to follow) very much fits the mold for modern Japanese live service mobile games, with gacha rolls for characters and weapons, and numerous different currencies and crafting materials that allow you to level up characters, moves, weapons and more. This is a game with daily check in rewards, time-limited events and grinding for materials so you can enhance your characters and take on the next challenge.
Whether that’s your kind of thing is up to you, but there’s no doubt that the team has put a lot of effort into this title. Akatsuki Games has been working on Kaiju No. 8 The Game for more than two years – since well before the anime started airing – with a team size of around 200 people.
The result is a game with excellent presentation, thanks to well-realised 3D character models, a good sense of scale, and super slick combat animations. The core gameplay loop is compelling too, putting you in control of a four person squad in turn-based battles that move quickly and have plenty of room for strategic depth.
Kaiju No. 8 The Game also has an impressive amount of content out of the gate. Not only does it have an original story to play through (set during the second season of the anime, which is airing now), complete with an impressive amount of voice acting (in Japanese), but it has other modes that highlight iconic moments from the manga/anime’s story, tell side stories for the main characters, and so on. It even has a side-scrolling combat mini-game.
Let’s dig into some of the specifics.
In Kaiju No. 8 The Game, Dimensional Gates are opening up in the sky and a stream of kaiju threats are swarming out. Is this a job for the JAKDF? Yes, but with a little help from CLOZER (that’s the rather awkward “Closing Order With Zero Restrictions”, in case you’re curious), a special organisation tasked with sealing said gates. The plot twist, however, is that the captain of CLOZER is Sagan Shinomiya – one of a handful of brand new characters – and fan fave Kikoru Shinomiya’s sister.
The set-up allows for a never-ending stream of gameplay as you fight through the kaiju from a particular gate, culminating in a boss battle and closing the gate, then moving on to another. It’s a fun premise, however, as the gates themselves connect to a different dimension, meaning that iconic kaiju that have already been neutralised in Kaiju No. 8’s world can still appear, allowing the game to dive into battles only referenced in the manga/anime. My hands-on, for instance, culminated in a fight with an alternate version of the legendary Kaiju No. 2.
Another important point is that while the manga/anime is set entirely in Japan, these gates are opening up globally, so the game can roam all over the place. You can imagine how a live service title might take advantage of travelling to different parts of the world.
In addition to Sagan, and a couple of other entirely new characters, Kaiju No. 8 The Game is packing all the series mainstays you’d expect, from the captain of the Third Division Mina Ashiro (and her tiger Bakko) and her vice captain Soshiro Hoshina, through to the captain of the First Division (and otaku slacker) Gen Narumi and Kafka’s partner Reno Ichikawa. Each, as you would expect, has a signature weapon and fighting style, from Hoshina’s twin swords through to Sagan’s shield, which she uses like a blunt weapon.
Kafka is perhaps the most interesting, as he is essentially two characters in one. All the other fighters unleash a flashy attack when their Ultimate is triggered in battle, but Kafka’s Ultimate sees him transform into Kaiju No. 8 for the rest of the encounter, giving him a completely different set of moves.
The battle system lets you choose a squad of four before each mission, and the order in which you place them creates two pairs of “battle buddies”, dictating who executes follow-up attacks when you expose a kaiju’s core. (More on that in a sec.)
Combat is turn-based, with the upcoming move order shown at the bottom of the screen. As you’d expect, characters have a wide array of options from single and multi-target strikes through to buffs and debuffs, but there are a couple of key systems that open up strategy. The first is that your party has a shared SP pool (mana, essentially). A normal attack restores a pip, while using a combat skill depletes one. This approach means you need to be tactical in how you manage your resources in order to use your characters’ most powerful techniques.
On top of this is the system for exposing an enemy’s core – a pivotal part of combat in the manga/anime that’s been brought across to the game. Enemies have discreet shields (called plates) that reduce the amount of damage they’ll take, so the main priority in any combat encounter is working out the most efficient way to break them. Some plates can be broken with any attack, others require specific types of attacks. You might need to use an elemental attack, or even more specifically, an attack utilising one of the five elements in the game (fire, ice, wind, lightning and water). Obviously different characters have different types of attacks, so ensuring your squad has the affinities necessary for the combat encounter you’re going into is key.
Breaking enemy plates is vital because once you destroy them all, the kaiju in question’s core is exposed, triggering an automatic follow-up attack from the attacking character’s partner and forcing the foe to skip a turn, bumping it back down the turn order sequence at the bottom of screen. It’s pretty satisfying knocking a kaiju back just as it’s about to attack, or better yet, preventing it from unleashing its Ultimate.
Speaking of Ultimates, each character has a gauge that fills as they fight (with follow-up attacks boosting it significantly), and these are – as you’d expect – some of the flashiest and strongest attacks in the game. Ultimates are great for finishing off kaiju with their core exposed, and can be triggered at any time, overriding the upcoming attack order. One thing to bear in mind is that missions are made up of several combat encounters, one after the other (with fast-paced ninja running in between, as the squad sprint to the next battle), and your SP pool and Ultimate charges carry over from battle to battle so, if the final encounter is significantly harder, you can prep for it.
Combat overall is fast and slick, letting each character show off their individual styles while also working as a team. You’re generally fighting smaller kaiju that attack in groups, but the game does also pit you against the kinds of towering monsters the manga/anime is known for, with the camera set low to really help sell the scale of the encounters.
There’s a good strategic foundation to Kaiju No. 8 The Game’s combat, but as with most RPGs, your characters need to be constantly leveling to keep up with the opposition you’ll face next. There are a somewhat overwhelming number of systems in place to allow your characters to grow more powerful, and they’re pretty much all centered around material drops.
Just to quickly give you an idea, you use Defense Force Manuals (of which there are several rarities), along with credits, to “enhance” (i.e. level up) your characters. These all drop from playing the game and are essentially spendable XP. Initially your characters max out at level 20, but the level caps can be expanded, boosting the character in question and also increasing the challenge level of story missions and opening up higher difficulty training options. (Training, incidentally, is how you get the materials to enhance individual skills, but is subject to a stamina system.)
Characters can also “Ascend”. This requires you to have a double of the character and other resources, and gives you a bonus perk. On top of all this you can enhance your characters’ weapons and individual skills. There’s a lot to keep track of, and it feels like you’ll need to have a decent pool of competitive characters in order to swap your squad around if you need specific plate-breaking abilities, which means engaging with a tonne of different collectables.
New weapons and characters are acquired through the game’s gacha rolls, and utilise a star system for rarity. For the most part you’ll be getting three star weapons, and it remains to be seen how many rolls free-to-play players will be able to generate, as well as how fairly priced the gacha system will be for paying players. One thing is certain, though – the pool of characters and weapons is pretty large, and the rarest drops infrequent, so if you’re hunting for something specific, it may be a long process.
Despite the many trappings of free-to-play mobile game design, Kaiju No. 8 The Game’s moment to moment gameplay has a lot going for it, with clever core battle mechanics, slick animations and impressive visuals. And with its strong emphasis on story, and clear reverence for the source material, this adaptation will definitely be worth a look for fans of the series. Kaiju No. 8 The Game is out on August 31.
Cam Shea visited Akatsuki Games in Tokyo as a guest. He’s a former IGN staffer, now freelance writer and beer geek.
We covered a great deal on a gaming chair the other day, but you might not have considered that your desk could be optimised for extra comfort for long periods.
Keep on rollin’.
Last February, you might recall how our retro-focused sibling site Time Extension highlighted a new high-speed game called Rollin’ Rascal.
At the time, this Kickstarter project – drawing inspiration from 3D Sonic platformers and even Mario – had just reached its Nintendo Switch goal, and now, well over a year later, the development team Curiomatic has revealed the title will be coming to the Switch 2.
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