Dead Mage’s gorgeous 2D hack ?n’ slash has left me awestruck
Story-driven hack ‘n’ slash Children of Morta‘s Kickstarter campaign went live today and it looks absolutely stunning. I cover a lot of retro-inspired pixel-art titles in my work here at Destructoid, but what the studio has revealed today stands alongside some of the best that I have seen.
Children of Morta hopes to secure $65,000 in funding during the course of the Kickstarter campaign, and according to the title’s crowdfunding page, the pre-production phase is already complete. With prototyping and design validation out of the way, the team is already hard at work on the core game, focusing on “expanding [the] game’s story, mechanics, systems” as well as adding new enemies and environments.
As previously revealed, the heroes of Children of Morta are all members of a family of guardians, the Bergsons. For generations the family has passed down the tradition of guardianship over the mountain when one day a tragic event corrupts the Roots of Life deep within Mount Morta, causing once-peaceful creatures to transform into “furious, mindless monsters.”
The Bergsons are the land’s only hope. It is now up them to seek out the “Seeds of Life and use them to cleanse the corruption.”
In Children of Morta, you’ll have the opportunity to play as several different family members: there’s John, the father, a warrior wielding his family’s ancestral shield; eldest son Mark, a martial artist who prefers to fight with his bare hands; sister Linda, a violinist who is equally skilled with a bow; youngest son Kevin, an agile youth adept in the use of the daggers; youngest sister Lucy, a mage instructed in the arcane arts by her grandmother; and their cousin Joey, a veritable mountain of a man, brandishing an enormous war hammer.
Other family members are detailed as well, but I assume that they are not playable characters and will most likely function as the game’s shopkeepers and item crafters.
Children of Morta will feature procedurally generated levels for added replayability. Some narrative elements in the game will also be procedural, but a single overarching story will remain a constant through every playthrough.
The team elaborates on this unique blending of roguelike game design with narrative by saying that the “procedural narrative events blend within the main game story” and as a result, “different players playing Children of Morta will have different experiences while following the same main story.”
Dead Mage’s ambitious pixel art tour de force has left me nothing but impressed. Not only on a visual level, but as a game design concept as well. By combining masterfully executed 2D pixel art with an experimental melding of roguelike procedural elements in both level generation and portions of the game’s narrative, Children of Morta looks like it could it could turn out to be something incredibly special.
Children of Morta [Kickstarter]
