Thunder Lotus Games, the indie game studio behind hand-illustrated Viking saga Jotun, have come out with a new trailer titled “Embrace” for their upcoming Lovecraft-inspired game Sundered. Check out the new “Embrace” trailer for Sundered below:
Thunder Lotus describes Sundered ’s gameplay as “a replayable Metroidvania where you resist or embrace ancient eldritch powers,” in a new blog post from William Dubé, the creative director at Thunder Lotus Games. The trailer introduces the Eschaton City, the third region, as well as providing a preview of the game’s Corruption mechanics.
Gameplay mechanics are centered around a procedurally generated dungeon in which you must fight swarms of dynamically-spawned enemies in order to collect shards. Upon death, you return to a central Hub where those shards may be spent in a Skill Tree. After that, you can progress further in the dungeon, but every time you die, the physical rooms are re-shuffled.
“Though the overall structure of the world is set in stone, subsections take a random sampling of preset rooms and assembles them to create a different flow every time. Think of it like Diablo 2 , where the progression of the levels is always the same, but the individual tiles are always different. This allows us to make design choices which are core to a Metroidvania experience like backtracking and unlocking new abilities that unlock new regions,” said Dubé .
The monsters in Sundered are meant to add to the Lovecraftian atmosphere of instability and madness, so monster spawns are dynamic based on factors such as time, stress level and current region. “This adds a multiplicative layer of uncertainty, since the second layer of randomness of the monsters gets added over the already random dungeon,” said Dubé .
The Hub where you upgrade your abilities allows you to spend shards on Upgrades, Perks and Metroidvania-esque Abilities. Upgrades are boosts to stats like Health or Critical Chance, while Perks are “gameplay-changing modifiers” that can be found in the world but are equipped in the Skill Tree. Perks don’t come without a price, though. As for the Abilities, once an Ability is found out in the world’s Shrines, it appears in the Skill Tree and unlocks a new branch filled with new Upgrades.
Finally, Sundered ’s catch phrase “Resist or Embrace” ties the game’s mechanics into its Lovecraftian themes. Abilities can be corrupted by using an Elder Shard, received as a drop after a boss fight. This can be brought to a Skill Shrine to corrupt a particular Ability, which becomes a much more powerful version of itself but costs you a slice of your humanity. “Embracing” will have an impact on both the story and the ending to Sundered .
The music used in the “Embrace” trailer is available here. Are you looking forward to Sundered’s mechanical complexity and new, Metroidvania-style gameplay challenges? Feel free to talk about Sundered in our comments section below.
