Crafted with love: Jotun devs' Sundered on Kickstarter
Metroidvaniä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn!
Sundered [official site], the Lovecraft-tinged Metroidvaniä! Iä! from the folks behind Jotun, will launch in July. That's the news from developers Thunder Lotus who have, in the meantime, launched a Kickstarter to fund making Sundered all shiny and polished in these final few months. If you fancy delving into procedurally-generated dungeons to rumble with many-mawed horrors and don't want to wait until July, swing by the Sundered Kickstarter to sling some pennies its way.
Sundered does share a few similarities with Jotun, like having hand-drawn art, big places, big monsters, and a fondness for a bit of a scrap. Sundered isn't 'Jotun with tendrils inside your head clawing at the walls of reality a longing deep inside to receive oblivion from dark gods humanity once unknew', mind. It's a Metroidvania in that 'get new abilities, go new places' way, it boasts of big rumbles with dynamic hordes of enemies, and it mixes hand-crafted levels with generated ones.
Here, it all looks a bit like this:
The Kickstarter is looking for 25,000 canuckbucks (£15-ish) and -- whoosh! -- it blew past that in less than a day. Backer rewards include finished copies of the full game, alpha access, beta access, naming stuff, and so on.
Sundered's closing in on done, it sounds like, but to be proper fancy they need a little extra time and money. Thunder Lotus are Kickstarter as a weird sort of paid alpha/beta doodad, gabbing a lot about how keen they are to gather feedback by offering access as backer rewards, though they are clear that "we also need the money for development time to implement that feedback."
If you simply want a finished game, hey, with the Kickstarter going swimmingly you can simply wait.