Content Warnings

There is some violence associated with the combat system, but nothing extreme, gory, or super explicit.
There are occasional swearwords, and some alcohol drinking visible on the scene, all in moderation and according to the context.

Project Introduction

PLOT

Our game tells the story of a hitman, Elester - a Syndicate agent.
Born as a Magin - a magical outcast excluded from society, he became a prominent soldier of an underworld organization. He was raised to be a killer. Unfortunately, no one raises you to be a Magin. And with maginism... things can get ugly. It is a story of a man escaping his past, looking for his place in a hostile world. The plot is where the hero is thrown into a whirl of events that pushes the man to become anew. He’s forced to leave his everyday life and is taken on a journey that makes him question his former self. Facing critical choices, the hero paves his own path.

SETTING

A dark fantasy world, where magic is directly tied to the desires and fears of its inhabitants. A world that stands on the verge of an industrial revolution, where races and cultures mix and cease to determine one’s path in life. A place where classical fantasy motifs are met with the relativity of modern morality.

GAMEPLAY

Adventure elements intertwine with the deck-building system, creating engaging gameplay and narrative experience where the choices matter. It’s a hand-drawn, immersive tale.

Our loop goes like this:

1. Exploration - traversing the 2.5D world, and interacting with it. Free-roaming, exploring, investigating. Including a bit of dungeon crawling.
2. Comic book sequences - progressing through plots, deciding on storyline-altering choices. Making foes and friends, learning about the context, lore, and enemies. Gathering cards, quests, and charging the essence bars.
3. Deck-building - creating the deck for combats, and managing gathered cards. Choosing between upgrades and special cards gained as combat rewards, and making various deck builds by creating two-sided essence cards combos gained directly from the storyline.
4. Combat - using the created deck and gathered essence resources within turn-based encounters.

Our binding mechanic is:

The essence - two bars that represent the amount of two types of essence in Elester. Using the essence cards will either gain you some essence, or drain it out of you, so it is important to have some of it for the combats. For the story, however, the more essence you have in you, the less time you'll have to decide as Elester will more impulsively reply by himself driven by the dominant side of the essence.

ESTHETICS

Visuals are dripping with a dark and heavy vibe countered by the comic book style. Core techniques we use are posterization, seeking interesting shapes, limited tonal transitions, limited color palette, and exaggerated chiaroscuro.

Music sounds like a mysterious fairy-tale, with an enriched orchestral texture. The core techniques we use are rich melodics, mostly minor keys, ambient harmonics, and sampled orchestral instruments often led by piano, with the addition of pads and synth voices.

About Developer

We are a small, independent, remote operating gamedev studio. We appreciate polished, good-looking products with heart in them. We’ve been putting all of our hearts into developing this passion project for the past couple of years and right now we’re looking forward to seeing it published.

We gathered in 2017 as a non-profit community-oriented indie gamedev project initiated by a Polish YouTuber. Since we were all young and very early in our gamedev journey, for the first few years we’ve focused on self-education and iterating tons of ideas, tools, stories, etc. In 2019 we decided to dedicate ourselves fully to the project and quit our jobs to do so. A demo was created, and one year later crowdfunding was successful. In 2021 we signed a publishing agreement with Daedalic Entertainment and started the production phase of the game.