If you’re a gamer who sees live service roguelike slop nobody asked for, or knows somebody who does, then you’re experiencing a problem that has gutted PC gaming specifically.
Simple pleasures like enjoying a story-rich linear game have become nostalgia in the same way that the Pokemon craze of the 90s did.
Now you may have looked to Japanese visual novels or JRPGs for something meatier. But lately those games won’t let you kill the villain without a cutscene lecturing you about revenge. They punish player agency with ethics lessons. Story is treated as more important than mechanics, which in a video game is backwards.
Now, there will be a better alternative, Inshallah.
Head & Blood. The vision behind our game, which is set in the Brotherhood of the Wolf universe, is that it forces you to be extremely aggressive with the combat. And because of this, we are focused on ensuring the prototype meets our fanatically high standards before building content for the game. One of the things we’re looking at, for example, is refining our input buffering, which is something that’s extremely important in order for you to chain attacks, cancel into movements in case you’ve regretted an attack you wanted to start, and react instantly to threats.
If you’re seeing live service roguelikes nobody asked for, that’s because Let’s Plays went mainstream and a streamer could just play a $60 narrative game for 8 million views. And so now game studios are trying to create games that are un-Let’s-playable, but that’s causing them to create games that gamers don’t want to play. Ha!
Head & Blood is a 2D combat Soulsborne platformer with that hyper-aggressive old-school arcade DNA of ensuring that every minute of gameplay has maximal gameplay density. You’re not just walking around hallways absorbing atmosphere.
We’re in the prototype phase. In the meantime, immerse yourself in Brotherhood of the Wolf. Grab the graphic novels. The video game will be a continuation of that story, not a retelling.
Get ’em here: https://talesofkhayr.com/blood-tax/
-Wes