Sidescroller RPG Moonfall Announced

Slovak videogame studio Fishcow Games has announced its new title, Moonfall, a sidescroller RPG set in a “dark industrial gothic world” whose culture and philosophy never had its own age of Enlightenment. The title is slated to be released next year on PC, Mac, Linux and consoles (no details on this, though presumably the developers are talking about PlayStation 4 and Xbox One) and uses a 2D handpainted art style.

First of all, here’s the blurb from the official website:

Moonfall is a hand-painted side-scrolling 2D action RPG game set in a dark industrial gothic world where the age of Enlightenment never came.

Will you change the outcome of a war between a mighty empire and wild savages? In order to succeed, you must take advantage of your skills powered by the Moon itself and unleash your full potential against hordes of cunning enemies. Challenging boss-fights will force you to utilize everything at your disposal.

It’s dangerous to go alone. Team up with your friends in co-op campaign and make use of your unique abilities to achieve victory together. Or maybe you prefer to walk the road as a lone wolf? Challenge real players in arenas and other modes, climb the ladder of death to prove your worth!

And a snippet from the dev diary:

At the earliest, we were poking around two settings for the game (see Figure 1). One was a sci-fi post-apocalyptic world, the other one classic fantasy. After a while, we made a choice to try fantasy. We like the setting, because we are big fans of fantasy games so we can lean on already widely understood design choices. Hence, we spent the first four months working with a version of the game set in a dark fantasy world.

…

In December 2015, we had realized just how much saturated the market is with dark fantasy games like Diablo. Even though we were sure that our game had some distinct features, such as point of view from the side and a unique visual style, we saw that as a potential problem. So, we started the process of adjusting the story and setting. The first thing we tried was infusing the game with gothic elements, which improved the looks, but still didn’t really cut it.

The developers haven’t really explained what “action-RPG” means for them yet, but hopefully it’s something that we’ll discover soon in one of their developer diaries.