Elysian Shadows - Interview @ Retro Gaming Mag

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Retro Gaming Mag has a new interview with the team behind Elysian Shadows, and asked them a few questions about the game.

RGM- Why do a role playing game when everyone else in this area is doing much easier shooters or working with game engines of some sort?

ES- We honestly think the role-playing genre is the most powerful form of artistic expression there is. It's a marriage of art, music, code, and especially writing. An RPG gives you the creative freedom to mold an entire world, storyline, cultures, and characters after your own vision. It gives us endless freedom to create an experience that is meaningful and is intellectually stimulating-and most importantly, it has the greatest potential for establishing an emotional connection between a game and an audience, which we think is truly the ultimate goal for any form of artistic expression. Along that same vein, we have also found ourselves able to freely incorporate aspects of other games and even non-RPG genres into our own RPG, which I think has been a profoundly rewarding experience. You will immediately notice that we like to emphasize the "3D"-ness of the world of Elysian Shadows, and our players can even jump, climb, and interact with the world in a platforming nature. This has literally allowed us to introduce platforming mechanics and level designs from games like Mario and Megaman to spicen up the RPG genre.

Another aspect of this is our survival horror-influenced dungeons and ruins. Something we really wanted to establish artistically with ES is a strong dichotomy between the lush, beautiful, and vibrant overworld and the dark, gloomy, forboding ruins. We quickly found that with our dynamic lighting engine, we were able to create a sense of fright and tension in some of the environments that we don't believe has ever been possible with a traditional 2D RPG... For example, in one of our ruins, the player is alone, in the complete darkness, with just a little torch to find his way around, with a multitude of creepy monsters coming after you with full surround sound sound effects-it's pretty terrifying.... I think Connor, especially, who is a die-hard survival horror fan has really been able to find his creative place with ES and grow attached to a 2D RPG by being able to endow it with some of his survival-horror influences. The project truly is a melting pot of various inspirations. ​