All Articles: Chasm

After more than five years in development, Bit Kid has announced that Chasm, their medieval-styled MetroidVania, will be released for the PC, PS4, and Vita on July 31.

In addition to the release date news, Chasm received a new trailer yesterday (embedded above), and Game Director James Petruzzi stopped by the PlayStation Blog to discuss the game’s lengthy development process:

One distinctive feature of Chasm is that the world map is procedurally generated when you start up a new campaign. That feature has led to a lot of questions and confusion, so I’d like to address exactly how it works and why we designed it that way. The latter part is easy to answer. Our entire team is composed of Metroidvania fans. Whether it’s Castlevania: Symphony of the Night or Axiom Verge, we’ve played through our favorite games so often that we’ve long since memorized the maps. We love how those games play but wish we could wipe our memories so we could get that experience of exploration all over again. It’s our hope that people who love Chasm the way we love our favorite games can play it over and over and still have it feel fresh. But at the same time, people who only play the game once should have no idea that there’s anything procedural about it.

But that’s not to say that everything’s completely random; there is a fundamental structure to the game that never changes. If you’re familiar with Castlevania: Symphony of the Night you may recall that first you get the Jewel of Open, then the Leap Stone, then the Soul of Bat – in that order. As you get these upgrades, new areas of the map become accessible. Chasm, like most titles in this vein, follows this structure. When you start up a campaign, the game always has these key upgrades and plot points in the same place.

What’s different is how you get from one key point to the other. Chasm has a bunch of pre-designed rooms that are slotted in modularly in different combinations. So you won’t have any rooms that feel like they were designed by a computer. Instead, you’ll encounter rooms in a different order and even encounter new rooms you never saw the first time, and your path will be different each time you start up a new campaign.

Chasm will be priced at $19.99 when it launches later this month.

After more than five years in development, developer Bit Kid is finally ready to release Chasm on the PC, PS4, and Vita this Summer. If you’re unfamiliar with Chasm, it’s a MetroidVania that asks players to take control of a young knight on his first adventure. Together, you’ll explore a procedurally-generated world stitched together from a batch of pre-built rooms:

Welcome to Chasm, an action-adventure game in which you play a new recruit undertaking your first mission for the Guildean Kingdom. Thrilled to prove your worth as a knight, you track strange rumors that a mine vital to the Kingdom has been shut down. But what you discover in the mining town is worse than you imagined: The townspeople have begun to disappear, kidnapped by supernatural creatures emerging from the depths.

Honor-bound to solve the mystery and restore peace to the Kingdom, you embark upon an epic adventure, with deadly battles against cunning monsters, exploration of ancient catacombs and castles, and powerful new equipment hidden at every turn. Though the overall story is the same for all players, your hero’s journey will be unique: each of the rooms has been hand-designed, and behind the scenes Chasm stitches these rooms together into a one-of-a-kind world map that will be your own.

Bit-Kid’s James Petruzzi talked a bit more about Chasm’s development process on the PlayStation Blog, and a new trailer for the distinctly retro-styled game has been embedded above.