Renascent

A third-person action RPG set at the threshold between life and afterlife.
Die. Return. Ascend.

I had just finished the Dark Souls trilogy for the first time, all three back-to-back in a couple of weeks, and somewhere between the end credits of DS3 and staring at the ceiling at 2am, I thought: what if I made this type of thing, but set it in my world.

I've always been more of a multiplayer guy. Competitive shooters with friends etc. Solo games were always something I was interested in but could never sit down and actually get through. Dark Souls was different. DS1 had me hooked almost immediately, and by the time I finished DS3 I was a changed man. So naturally, I decided to make a game.

Obviously I wasn't going to build a full Dark Souls campaign. I'm one person, and a “busy” man, so let's be realistic. I started thinking about formats. What kind of game could give a lot of playtime without requiring an unreasonable amount of content creation? A roguelike dungeon came to mind: the Palace of the Dead, a deep dungeon buried inside Final Fantasy XIV. As a format, it's simple, but appealing. Replayable, self-contained, with enough structure to feel like a real game without needing a sixty-hour campaign's worth of assets.

So, a lil bit of roguelike, a lil bit of souls combat feel, slap it into the setting of my own fantasy world-building project and see what happens.

The World (Haven't settled on a name yet)

You are dead. That's where the story starts. This story, at least.

The player finds themselves at the threshold of the afterlife — soul flickering, the doors to eternal rest within reach. But there are forces stuck in this space between worlds. Ancient spirits, long-imprisoned, who can't move on without help. They ask you to return. To go back amongst the living, climb the impossible tower they've constructed, and prove yourself worthy of the title of the True Renascent. Because only your kin can lift the ancients’ curse of eternal unrest.

The world you play through is their creation, a kind of alternative reality built by these ancients as a testing ground for their successors. It feels familiar in some ways, strange and enchanted in others. The deeper you go, the more the story in the background reveals itself. Not necessarily through cutscenes or exposition dumps, but through passing conversations, item descriptions, and runes carved into walls you might walk past without looking twice. If that sounds familiar, it's intentional. The atmospheric environmental storytelling of the Souls games is something I deeply admire, and I'll be doing my best to follow in those footsteps. And yes, I am expecting way too much from my first game dev project. I don’t care. I just wanna try it out :D

Details

Genre Third-person action RPG — souls-like-ish combat, roguelite kinda progression

Engine Unreal Engine 5

Platform PC — Steam (planned (as in, if that time ever comes))

Status Early development

Is it overly ambitious? Probably. Am I having fun? Yeah, genuinely.
It's the journey, not the destination - and so on and so forth...
Follow along in the devlog if you're curious where this goes.