Pretty Metroidvania Faeland jumps onto Kickstarter

Faeland's pretty pixel art first caught my eye in January when it was just a teaser trailer, but now it's come to Kickstarter with a prototype build in search of $29,000. It calls itself a "Metroidvania action adventure RPG", which is to say you travel back and forth between its various towns and villages, delve into castles and forests, solve puzzles, jump between platforms, slay enemies, fight bosses, unlock new areas and complete side quests to get better weapons and armour.

You control Sam, a secluded hunter who's driven from his home by a band of orcs and trolls. Forced to start a new life, he goes about the world making new friends to the background of a looming darkness that threatens the survival of the entire realm, which he'll inevitably have to deal with himself. It's classic zero-to-hero stuff.

The sword-and-shield combat (there are also spears, daggers, axes and bows) can't help but put me in mind of Zelda and, as one commenter on my January story wrote, Sam bears more than a passing resemblance to Link. The combat looks to be fairly deliberate: you can't swing lightning fast, so it's all about timing dodges and blocks.

The developers have penciled in a December 2019 release, so clearly there's still a lot of work to do, but I like what I see so far. I know some people are sick of pixel art, but I like the fact that Faeland's visuals are relatively soft and easy on the eye. It's one to watch, I reckon, and it has lots of backer tiers if you want to throw some money at it—$1 will get you the prototype build.

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.