About twelve years ago, we took a deep breath when we reported that Lone Survivor developer Jasper Byrne’s new action RPG “Zelda x Demon’s Souls” was no more. “It was too big for one person to make,” Byrne wrote at the time. “This is the root of the problem. It wasn’t that I fell in love with the idea, just that I physically can’t do it.” That was then and fortunately this is now. Byrne has returned to the project for the time being and has begun screen sharing on social media.
If you’ve never played Lone Survivor, it’s an excellent side-scrolling survival horror that combines ideas from Silent Hill into something all its own. “The strongest praise I can give is that this is a game clearly made by a man who understands why people are still hoping for a return to the glory of Silent Hill 2,” wrote Adam Smith (rest in BG3) in 2012 . “It’s a game made by someone who appreciates that the best way to get under someone’s skin is to make them think about that skin, not just the way it peels off when a knife is applied, but the way it peels off. the way it feels to the touch, the way it covers our skulls and helps us express ourselves, and the way it wrinkles and ages.” I’ll just add that the soundtrack pony.
I’m not sure when exactly Byrne decided to revive his action RPG project – he was installing WIP screens for yearsperhaps more for the pleasure of sharing than as an indicator of progress – but in one of this week’s surprising Xitter updateshe says he rewrote the whole thing to run in Unity at some point. He also took an extended development break when Covid hit. “[It] feels so fresh after an almost five-year hiatus,” it reads another TwiXter post. “I never fell in love with it, but when Covid started I got too worried about it and decided to press pause. I only recently felt brave enough to try it, so I can see what it feels like to get back into it work. Let’s see what happens.”
Here is a photo of the project from 2013, when it was still running on the Blitzmax engine.
And here’s one of the screens Byrne shared this week. I really like the fog and how the choice of perspective works with the terrain textures.
In a further updatesays Byrne that he has “written down the eight milestones it takes to get this thing out the door. Nothing but the bare minimum, because twelve years is already enough.” Fingers crossed that things go relatively smoothly from here. If you want to give him a hand and you have yet to play Lone Survivor, you can find it a remastered version on Steam.