Unfinished Pixel, an independent game studio based in Barcelona, has announced their upcoming title, Blightstone, a dark tactical roguelite RPG set to launch on Steam Early Access in 2025. The game introduces innovative grid-free, turn-based combat, emphasizing character placement and environmental interaction.
Players will navigate a world corrupted by a magical rift, battling demons and dark forces while managing resources to survive the spreading blight. Each failed attempt contributes to future success, as collected Earthglass shards strengthen the guiding Crystal, enhancing the capabilities of subsequent adventurers.
Unfinished Pixel, founded in 2014, is known for titles like Spy Chameleon, Super Volley Blast, Super Tennis Blast, and Super Soccer Blast. With Blightstone, they aim to blend the roguelite genre with detailed characters and environments, offering a challenging and immersive experience.
Gameplay Highlights:
- Dynamic Combat with Interactive Environments: Battles unfold in alive, procedurally-generated scenarios where tactical use of terrain and weather can decide your fate. Hide in tall grass, trigger environmental explosions, sink foes in quicksand, or leverage weather effects like fog and rain to influence outcomes.
- Skill Variety and Synergies: Choose from an extensive pool of skills, including melee, ranged, area-of-effect, traps, and summoning. Both heroes and enemies can deploy status effects like bleeding, poison, stun, and even doom, making encounters unpredictable and challenging.
- Companion and Ally Mechanics: Summon allies or deploy skills to control others, adding new layers to party composition and synergy in battle.
Hardcore Strategy Meets Roguelike Adventure:
- Resource Management: Every run demands careful oversight of health, blight levels, equipment, and character synergy. The crystal’s survival is paramount—its destruction marks the end of your quest.
- Meta-Progression: Uncover lore about the Earthglass and infernal rift as you progress through procedurally-generated maps. Gain new powers and insights with each attempt, ensuring every run is meaningful.
Crystal-Fueled Storytelling:
The narrative revolves around the Earthglass Crystal, a fragile yet crucial relic that must be delivered to the infernal rift. Along the way, you’ll meet diverse characters, piece together the mystery of the Blightstone, and take the fight to the Demon Overlord.
Blightstone is set for release in 2025 and will be available on PC via Steam. Below are the trailer and overview.
About This Game
Blightstone is a challenging, dark fantasy turn-based roguelike that brings unique twists to combat through freedom of character placement, interactive environments and hardcore resource management. Dying, learning and meta-progression will be key to defeating enemies. Your mission is to protect and deliver the Earthglass Crystal to the infernal rift. Only then you can destroy the Demon Overlord and shatter the Blightstone itself.
Protect the crystal, if it dies the quest is over.
- Use interactable environmental hazards and objects, as well as weather elements to carefully read situations and strategize their every action. The smart use of the environment or weather effects can turn the tides of battle at the last minute!
- Choose from a wide range of combat active and passive skills: melee, ranged, area of effect, delayed powerful skills, interruptions, traps, on event triggered skills, skills to summon characters, to control other characters too. These abilities are available to both players and enemies.
- Combat statuses like bleeding, poisoned, immobile, stunned, doomed and dozens more.
- Environment zones: ponds of water, tall grass to hide (can burn too!), quicksands to sink, holes to throw enemies in, and more!
- Random weather modifiers: fog hides the UI of the enemies, rain applies wet to all entities, wind decreases ranged accuracy, etc.
- Companions and summonable allies that work on their own, but can be controlled with certain skills.
- Environment entities that explode, cause damage on impact or affect the gameplay in emergent ways.
Strategic depth is also furthered through the systems-focused approach to adventuring in Blightstone. Careful management of not just health, but also blight levels, the various resources, equipment loadout, the roster of characters and their synergies would be critical to survive each run.
Each run is procedurally-generated thus each map is different from one another. Through the various runs and scenarios encountered, players will get to meet a broad cast of characters, unravel the story behind the rift and earthglass, and gain more strength and powers each time.
