ELEVATEWAR: Owlboy Dev's Elevator Brawler Savant

Owlboy is not out yet and doesn't have a release date. That is the bad news. And by that, I mean that it's the bad news - the news by which all upsetting and otherwise unfortunate events are judged. Developer D-Pad Studio's been bending over backward and probably turning its head upside-down to get the gorgeous side-scroller out the door, but it's only (composed of) human(s). Everyone needs a vacation and nope actually D-Pad is just insane so it's spent its "holiday" making a different game. This one's called Savant, and it's a lushly gothic bite of, er, elevator action. If dictionaries were organized by distance between meanings of words, those two would be at opposite ends (and also dictionaries would be useless), but the game actually looks kinda great! Watch the trailer below and see for yourself.

So basically, you ride an elevator ever upward, taking down gigantic swarms of enemies along the way in arcadey bursts of death and numbers. The whole thing is a collaboration with Norwegian musician Aleksander Vinter, aka, er, Savant. HOW WILL WE EVER TELL THEM APART.

Seriously though, Savant looks wonderfully quick and heavy hitting - kind of like a more mobile (in the movement sense) version of brilliant mobile (in the on-a-phone sense) gem Ziggurat. This is your stylishly hatted Van-Hellsing-alike's last stand, so you've got to fight for your life and also do lots of super cool dodge flips.

Color me interested. Also, purple. Savant will be out on July 30th. And Owlboy? Who knows, but at least D-Pad is giving the game its undivided attention again. But hey, to ease the wait, I found these hideously adorable GIFs of somebody petting a baby owl. Look at its little-widdle gigantic eyes. Oh jeez, I'm going to squealpuke everywhere.