Castle Crashers creator's next game is full of battles and bear blood

It takes less than 30 seconds for The Behemoth’s new game to feel right at home with the likes of BattleBlock Theater or Castle Crashers.

Game 4, a codenamed project being developed for Xbox One and Steam, is what co-founder Dan Paladin calls a fast-paced, turn-based, co-op adventure game with management and role-playing game elements. Characters scurry across a board move-by-move to deliver strategic hits. Roughly put, it's a mouthful that translates to something surprising from the creator of platformer BattleBlock Theater or beat 'em up Castle Crashers.

Game 4 has a distinct personality to share with players. It involves a lot of bear blood, gibberish and a few piles of poop.

The game opens on Earth after a humongous, space-drifting bear has crashed into the planet. A narrator introduces players to Horatio, a man seeking vengeance for his family. Everything is ... well, kind of a mess.

"The bear blood is screwing up space and time as we know it," Paladin said. "We're assuming the [perspective] of Horatio, because he's just a farmer in the middle of nowhere. He doesn't actually know what the bear blood does, but we know that it's messing up everything.

"What it's really doing is taking any history of the earth and history of any other planet with any other race and just flip-flopping them all over the universe. Earth as we know it has all kinds of crap everywhere."

All kinds of crap show up in the game both figuratively and literally. You can recruit a friendly half-cyclops into your party or battle grumpy cupcakes in a cute candy land. The game's world is huge and, thanks to the occasional torrent of bear blood, changes often.

"... Breadcrumbs — well, birds eat those."

Early testing with a static world wasn't as interesting, Paladin explained, and by changing the world's layout, players remain engaged when they venture out. You can never be completely situated, but you're not exactly without help, either. Leaving a trail of tiny poop can guide you home.

"We went with [poop] because breadcrumbs — well, birds eat those," Paladin said.

While exploring the overworld map, enemies appear on-screen; bumping into one takes you into battle. Our demo of the game included three units to direct in battle: Horatio, a young woman named Pipistrella and the half-cyclops Yosef.

Each character is fully customizable — defense is decided by what kind of hat you're wearing — and any one can be set as the game's hero. Whoever you select as the main hero receives extra health and strength. Every time characters do "anything of value," like attacking or healing, they gain XP.

Game 4 is different from The Behemoth's past work, but it's not such a far jump, according to Paladin. The developer's model has always been to take a genre it likes — or doesn't like — simplify it and add its own spin.

"That's exactly what we did with this genre, which is somewhat notorious for being complicated," he said. "I sort of wanted to allow people who aren't into reflex-based games to enjoy our stuff.

"I personally have a hard time with certain turn-based games, because they're so complicated that I can't keep track of everything. If it were just a little simpler, I'd get it. But I wanted to see how far we could go in simplifying the mechanics while keeping as deep a strategy game together."

Game 4 is already a year into development, Paladin said. It currently has no release date.

"It's a polarizing genre," Paladin said. "I don't expect people to be like, 'Oh, that's gonna be great.' You've got to really try [Game 4] out and see our angle on it."