Step right up to Circus Electrique, Zen Studios’ steampunk-circus RPG coming September 6

blog.playstation.com:

Sometime in late 2019, a small team of creative minds within Zen Studios pitched an idea to the rest of us: “Let’s make an RPG set in a steampunk version of London where all your playable heroes are circus performers.” Pretty much everyone who read the pitch—myself included—reacted in a manner that I hope you share upon hearing such a premise: “What a crazy idea… I love it!” Just a few weeks away from the September 6 release of  Circus Electrique, allow me to reflect on how it all came to be—and other ways the game differentiates itself from other RPGs, as well…

The idea for a project first referred to as “Circus Scandal” came about when team members fresh off other Zen Studios RPGs like the first-person dungeon-crawler Operencia: The Stolen Sun, tactical roguelite Dread Nautical, and 4X genre mishmash CastleStorm II all expressed our desire to bring another RPG to life. At Zen, it’s important that we make the kinds of games we ourselves want to play…and it just so happened that in recent years, a certain relatively new subgenre of RPGs had particularly enthralled many of us, best exemplified by Darkest Dungeon. And amidst that darkness, a lightbulb went off: “We enjoy this kind of a game. Let’s make our own.”

But what exactly was the best way to make a game like Darkest Dungeon “our own”? We realized early on, the first step was to present a unique aesthetic. High fantasy is cool and all, but what if we took things someplace else? What if we didn’t even have any knights or mages or orcs or elves or dragons? (Not even a single dungeon, poorly lit or otherwise!) What if we…went steampunk? 

That was designer Andras “Babar” Klujber’s idea, to which pretty much all of us said, “Steampunk is great! We love steampunk! Why