Developer Bit Kid announced yesterday that it's almost ready to release its Metroidvania Action-RPG, Chasm, after almost six years of work and around $200,000 raised on Kickstarter. Coming out on July 31st on PC (Linux, Mac, and Windows), PlayStation 4, and Vita, PC early access backers will be able to get their hungry hands on Chasm as early as July 16th.
Chasm plops you in the shoes of a young knight off on his first mission for the Guildean Kingdom. You must investigate a mine that has recently stopped producing the good stuff for the Kingdom. What good stuff? Who knows, but there's a deserted mining town, kidnapped villagers, and monsters crawling out of the ground, so you better start swinging that sword.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=9BL162RQXKg
Promising all the features you'd expect from a Metroidvania game, Chasm will throw piles of loot and abilities at you, lock you in rooms with screen-filling bosses, and let you explore a large, sprawling map. A noteworthy difference between Chasm and the games it takes inspiration from, such as Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, The Legend of Zelda, and Metroid, is the procedurally generated map, which is generated with a seed number when you start your campaign. In other words, if you'd like to play the same map as a friend, you can simply use the same seed number. As stated on Chasm's website:
"Though the overall story is the same for all players, your hero's journey will be unique: each of the rooms has been hand-designed, and behind the scenes Chasm stitches these rooms together into a one-of-a-kind world map that will be your own."Procedural generation isn't exactly new for games that borrow from Metroidvania's enticing pool of mechanics if one includes games like Rogue Legacy and Dead Cells. Yet in those games, you run through the map from start to finish in each run, instead of exploring and progressing through a large static world such as in Chasm or Metroid. Balancing this has been difficult, Bit Kid admits in their Steam Announcement, in order to make pacing feel just right.
Chasm will cost $19.99/€17.99 and will be available on July 31st on Steam, Humble Bundle, and the PlayStation Store.
