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“In this dying age, only pockets of humanity remain. There was no apocalyptic event to speak of; only the cruel march of time and the inexplicable infertility of the world,” reads the blurb. “Accursed creatures stalk the barren lands between settlements, which are themselves terrible places; squalid, medieval and mostly ruled by tyrants.”
An accurate description of Wellingborough, Northamptonshire*, but also the copy for Entropy, the next game from Lovely Hellplace, the dev behind the incredibly weird and much-beloved Dread Delusion. Where Dread Delusion was a first-person, open-world RPG, Entropy is a throwback to the RPGs of yore: a turn-based, party-based thing where you and your crew venture across the land to stop a demonic threat.
It was announced yesterday and looks rather excellent, I must say. The Dread-Delusion-style PS1-esque graphics are all present and accounted for, but where that previous game was psychedelic and bright, Entropy looks a lot more Souls-y: grim, feudal, and filled with stats to obsess over. Though fear not, there’s still all manner of freaks and weirdos to fall in love with, like ‘guy who is also a snail,’ and ‘man who has no skin but is not letting it get to him.’
You play as a theatre troupe caught up in an otherworldly war when demons start knocking the city gates down, and off you go on your big adventure to make choices that will “determine the fate of your world.” Lovely Hellplace says the game is “inspired by classic JRPGs,” and you can certainly see the inspiration in the snippets we’ve got so far.
I have to imagine Lovely Hellplace might be a little put-out by everyone constantly comparing its games to Morrowind, and to be sure, Dread Delusion has more in common with Bethesda’s opus than what we’ve seen of Entropy so far.
But I have a one-track mind, and a lot of what there is to see of this new game really does remind me of some of Morrowind’s best parts—not just the giant mushrooms, but inscrutable and hostile world, the strangely folkloric tone of its writing and central conflict, and the fact that it’s a brave enough game to have you play as a kind of militarised Upright Citizens Brigade. When I compare a game to Morrowind, it’s the highest compliment I can muster. I’m very excited to get my hands on Entropy when it hits next year.
*I lived there. I’m allowed to say it.
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