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Now Available: Left-Hand Path, a Dark Souls-inspired Roomscale RPG

About a month ago, the HTC Vive VR headset arrived on my doorstep.

I was very busy at the time finishing off a film and developing a 2D RPG, but I thought I’d play with it for an evening anyway.

Approximately 2 hours later, I emerged, and said “holy crap, this is the future.”

I put all projects aside from the film (released a week later as Dangerous Treasures), and decided to focus on VR exclusively for the indefinite future.

(I also drilled not one but two holes in my office wall so that I could run the Vive through into a larger room for more room-scale space.)

And a month later, I have an alpha test version of a Dark Souls-inspired RPG for the Vive, with the current working titles of either “Magic Of The Dark” or “The Left-Handed Path” depending on which one I think sounds cooler at the time.

(Opinions?)

It’s not ready to come out yet, but it will be soon-ish. When It’s Done.

It’s a dark RPG inspired by a crossover between Dark Souls (mood, level design, combat, leveling system) and Amnesia (storytelling style, general pants-wetting terror), with a heavy dose of my own couple of decades writing fantasy for the screen and pen-and-paper games.

Probably the biggest stand-out feature is the magic system, which you control by drawing magical symbols in the air, and the ritual magic system, which involves a full-on “light candles, draw protective circles, invoke the spirits, cast toward appropriate cardinal points” system. I really want to make you feel like a wizard (Harry), and I think it’s succeeding.

Having spent the last half hour debugging the ritual magic system in my upcoming VR game, I can conclusively say the unnamed protagonist of “Kubla Khan” got off easy only having to weave a circle around him thrice. I’ve had to weave this bloody circle about 35 times now and it’s still buggy. - Me on Facebook yesterday.

So far, I’ve succeeded in causing multiple people to leap across the room, muttered “coooooool” under my breath many many times during development, and accidentally gotten a zombie in the face once. Fun story.

So yes. No images or video yet (Monday, maybe), but it’s coming, it’s coming soon, and it’ll make you feel like a dark, scary, possibly-undead wizard.