Phantom Hellcat turns Devil May Cry into a theatrical production

digitaltrends.com:

“We wanted to make a game like what we played in our youth,” said Ironbird Creations studio head Alex Godlewska, about its debut project Phantom Hellcat.

Described in Ironbird’s promotional materials as “Devil May Cry meets Nier: Automata, with a twist,” Phantom Hellcat is a stylish action game being built in Krakow, Poland. It was shown off-site at this year’s Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle, where I had the chance to interview Godlewska. She describes Hellcat as “pure” by design, as it deliberately avoids the inclusion of heavy RPG elements like leveling up or Soulslike mechanics. Instead, the focus is on combat and traversal, which attempts to make the player feel like they’re always in full control.

Phantom Hellcat is set at an indeterminate point in the ’80s or ’90s, inside a magical theater that was created as a trap for demons. The theater has a single guardian, its creator, who has a strained relationship with her teenage daughter Jolene. When Jolene accidentally breaks one of the theater’s seals, her mother gets abducted by an entity known as the Trickster. Without any real idea of what’s going on or how to stop it, Jolene is forced to learn her mother’s job from the ground up and pursue the Trickster into the pocket dimensions inside the theater.

Jolene’s weapons in Phantom Hellcat are all created by a series of magical, upgradable masks that she can find and wear, with each mask providing one weapon and one unique traversal mechanic. In my demo, the only mask shown gave Jolene a single one-handed sword and a short-range forward teleport, useful for both dodging attacks and dashing to the other side of obstacles.

The onscreen action shifts between 2D and 3D based on what’s happening at the moment.