How Spiritfall brings platform fighters into the world of roguelikes
These days, the roguelike has famously managed to blend itself with other genres such as shooters, sidescrollers, and isometric dungeon crawlers. Rather than fall into one of those three categories, Gentle Giant’s Spiritfall instead draws influence from platform fighters, of all things. Like in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate or MultiVersus, Spiritfall has players fighting enemies on a 2D plane and jumping between different floors on a stage.
As someone who hasn’t spent much (or any) time with the platform fighter genre, I found Spiritfall’s mechanics easy to wrap my head around. It turns out combining that style of gameplay with roguelikes conventions works surprisingly well, and it’s one of those blends I didn’t realize I’d like until I got it in my hands. But it also helps that Spiritfall has elements of Supergiant’s Hades in its gameplay, as players receive blessings from animal gods that manifest as elemental powers. The verticality of Spirtfall's stages and the built in chaotic nature of platform fighters means that fights can be a little scrappier than in Hades, but it's very satisfying to clear a stage with abilities such as freeze bombs and dashing to create a flaming bird.
I played two of Spiritfall’s three beta versions that closed out 2022. Ahead of its recent Steam Next Fest demo and Early Access release in March, I spoke with Gentle Giant about its debut title, including how it settled on the game’s blend of different mechanics, its structure as a roguelike, and its various sources of inspiration.
Q: When it came to figuring out what Spiritfall was going to be, which came first: the sidescroller roguelike or the platform brawler? Which was easier to start with?
We started with a more vague idea of what Spiritfall
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