Mega Cat Studios�WrestleQuest has turned heads thanks to its gorgeous pixel art world t??hat blends RPG fantasy exploration with wrestling action. Though it? was originally slated for an August 8 release, the game has since been delayed to August 22 on all platforms.

//twitter.c?om/skyboundgames/status/1688712585175261184

It is a brief delay triggered by a slight bug developers found. As a Tweet by Skybound Games explains, it was “discovered that it was possible for players to lose their save game progress when playing WrestleQuest on multiple different devices.�/p>

[caption id="attachment_360115" align="alignnone" width="640"] Image via Mega Cat Studios.[/caption]

WrestleQuest gets pushed back a few weeks

The delay may be disappointing, though the stated reason for it is understandable. WrestleQuest has hours of content, taking players on a journey to become the greatest pro wrestler. The tweet also suggests that WrestleQuest will have cross-save capabilities.

Early impressions of the game have be?en mostly positive, with critics praising the art style and its engagement with the wrestling world. A few real-worl?d wrestling superstars also make an appearance, including Andre the Giant, Jake “The Snake�Roberts, and?? Jeff Jarrett.

The delay may have been necessary, but it does push WrestleQuest into quite a busy time in gaming. It launches in the same week as Immortals of Aveumn and Armored Core 6. Sea of Stars, another pixel art game, releases the following wee??k on August 29.

The post WrestleQuest delayed to August 22 appeared first on Destructoid.

Make your matches extra super

Fall Guys has always had a great lineup of themed costumes, from Sonic to Ratchet & Clank to Portal. Their newest collaboration with yet another fan-favorite franchise is dropping January 5, and this time fans will get an opportunity to don skins from one of the most beloved animated series of recent memory: Invincible. Skins for Mark, Omni-Man, and Atom Eve will be available for purchase in the Fall Guys store in collaboration with Skybound Games, so don't be surprised if you see some new super-friends soaring through your matches soon. Of course, Fall Guys is a family friendly game, so we won't be seeing quite as much blood and gore as we're used to from t??he??se characters.

//twitter.com/FallG??uysGame/status/1610290021478580227

Amazon Prime's acclaimed animated series Invincible is based on a comic series of the same name, written by Walking Dead comic author Robert Kirkman. Season one was a massive success when it dropped in 2021, even spawning a series of popular memes, and while we know another season is supposed to drop sometime this year, it's anyone's guess as to when we can expect it. Some fans are hoping that this Fall Guys collab means we'll be getting an update soon, and I'm certainly?? in that boat myself.

Fall Guys has also seen a resurgence since it went free-to-play last year, and rightfully so. I returned to the game recently after not having touched it since 2020, and it's probably even more fun than I remember due to all the new stages and content that they've added. My backlog has been keeping me plenty busy as of late, but Fall Guys is one of those games I know I'll be coming back to when my schedule clears up a bit. Certainly as a fan of the Invincible series, it'll be worth logging on to see if I can't secure some of these?? ne?w skins.

[Featured Image via Amazon]

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A small project about blinking through life became a seven-year journey

It was during IndieCade 2014 that the team behind indie hit Before Your Eyes knew they had something. They were showing a student project, titled Close Your at the time. And?? even in its earliest state, it was emotionally resonating with people?? who played it.

"People were crying, you know, after sitting down with it for 15 minutes," rememb?ers Graham Parkes,?? creative director and lead writer at GoodbyeWorld Games. 

The group had brought a student project to show off, next to up-and-coming experiences like Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes. They didn't know at the time that it ??would kick off a seven-year journey, eventually leading to a published re?lease under Skybound and a BAFTA.

Don't blink

Will Hellwarth, Oliver Lewin, and Graham Parkes all knew each other growing up. The old high school buddies met at a young age before splintering off to different places for higher education. Parkes we?nt to NYU to study playwriting; Lewin studied music at the New School; and Hellwarth went to USC, to study game desi??gn.

It started with Hellwarth fi?guring out how we??bcams could utilize eye-tracking. Leveraging a demo from Mixamo, an animation company in San Francisco, Hellwarth used it to read and react to the movement of someone's?? eyes via the built-in webcam.

Around the same time in the indie scene, Brendon Chung and Blendo Games had been making waves with Thirty Flights of Loving. Its use of cuts, a film-making concept transposed into video games, would soon collide with the webcam tech, as Hellwarth conceived the basic concept for Close Your. Parkes says they started to pick up on this tension of holding onto memories ??as you b?link through them. 

"And so we ver?y quickly got to this idea of life flashing before your eyes," Parkes?? says. "Let's do a whole life. Let's jump through an entire person's life in a single game."

Hellwarth and several others from USC, alongside Parkes and Lewin, who composed music for the project, put together Close Your. The crew took it to IndieCade, where it won the Dev's Choice Award. Then, at IGF 2015, Close Your would win the Student Award, at the same show where Outer Wilds, 80 Days, and This War of Mine took home trophies.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNQBKBXOul4

The team saw the awards and the emotional reactions to the project. Parkes describes that early version of? what would become Before Your Eyes as rudimentary, similar to a sketch. But there was something th?ere, and the team had ideas on how to make it better. So it turned, like many indies of the time did, to Kickstarter.

Eyes wide open

For a new start-up, Kickstarte??r offered a lot of enticing opportunities. It can encourage a little groundswell, and get funding to the developers; in this case, to help GoodbyeWorld Games, as they dubbed themselves, secure the support needed to add more features. A long and more branching narrative, an emotional score, and homegrown blink recognition software that would work on any computer with a webcam were all part of the goals.

At first, GoodbyeWorld said it accounted for a margin of error. But it would be years before Close Your would ever morph into Before Your Eyes. Parkes acknowledges that, as years went on, the ??proj??ect was in a rocky place.

"A lot of people had other commitments," Parkes said. "We had realized that we had asked for too little money, we'd over-scoped, we had over-promised. But we?? really didn't want to be, you know, one of those failed Kickstarters."

Much of the original team was made up of students involved with the project from USC, alongside a few from outside the school. And as time went on, the team size ?red?uced.

"As years go by on a scrappy project, peoples�lives move in different directions and the team lineup evolves because of that," L??ewin told me. "Some of the original crew went on to work at AAA companies, some went outside of the games industry. Some people stuck with it from inception to completion, and some people (very important ones) came on in the last ye?ar."

But the?? crew kept working away at it, even as it was a nights-and-weekends project. And soon, new funding arrived. In 2018, Verizon Media's Ryot would let them "take a bigger swing" at the project. More members could go full-time, an??d more people could be brought on.

Floating on the river

This also let GoodbyeWorld Games step back and figure out exactly what kind of story they wanted to tell. Inspiration came from many places—the Book of the Dead, psychopomps, C.S. Lewis' The Great Divorce, and even Parkes' own time dealing with chronic il??lness.

What emerged was what you see in Before Your Eyes today. Players see through the eyes of someone who died, and is having their life rolled back to judge whether it was a life lived well. Like the weighing of a soul against a feather, the player blinks their way through many twists and choices, with the ultimate question of whether it was all done well hangs overhead??.

To say more would ruin what is, ultimately, a concise and wonderful story. It deals with heavy topics and material, finding the bittersweet and even sometimes the little joys in every moment. Because, in Before Your Eyes, you can't stay in one moment forever.

"You can hang on for as long as you can, but you're gonna have t??o blink," said Parkes. "And so that failure is sort of embedded in there. You're going to lose, like how you're going to die. And then the question sort ??of becomes, are you raging against that? And what makes your time valuable? Is it about, you know, how much you try to fight and maximize your time? Or is it more about sort of learning to appreciate the moments that you do have?"

Before Your Eyes asks what a moment means to someone, and how long they might push to stay in it. And especiall?y, whether all those?? moments add up to some greater perceived value of a life.

Parkes says it all clicked around the id?ea of what our world la?bels as greatness. But in a pursuit of greatness, the value of goodness is often missed.

Soon, the project was brought in front of Skybound Games, not too long after COVID-19 lockdowns started. Skybound signed on, and Before Your Eyes was set to launch on April 8, 2021.

Stay here

Expectations were, as the Good??byeWorld crew put it to me, modest. The team had been going through rounds of testing, trying to account for tons of use cases. Everything from low-light and glasses to wearing a balaclava was on the docket.

GoodbyeWorld Games also added an accessibility feature, which allowed for users to click to blink, rather than use the webcam. Lewin notes that webcams are, themselves, a factor in playing this game or not; the pandemic made webcam adoption much more widespread, but the team still wanted to make sure ??that people could play their game, even if they didn't own or couldn't reasonably use a webcam to do so.

Parkes jokes that there's already? many other ways to "cheese" the blinks anyways. One he mentions, literally drawing eyes on a sheet of paper and holding them up to the webcam, is remarkable in its ingenuity.

GoodbyeWorld was shocked and humbled by the reception they saw. After winning the award back at IndieCade, they had lofty aspirations; but after years of development, they were just looking forward to having a game on Steam. Once a tech demo in a parking lot, Before Your Eyes would win a BAFTA in 2022 in the Games B??eyond Entertainment ca?tegory.

And yet the development team referenced seeing others play it, when I asked them about the reception to the game. Lewin jokes that it's like getting to go on the first date again. After years of growing, developing, and building up towards it, Before Your Eyes was finally playable for the public.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=E45wJNEmVgw

The next vignette

What's next for GoodbyeWorld Games? Well, a few things. The team teases that it's working on two projects under the GoodbyeWorl??d banner right n??ow.

They won't elaborate too much, but one of them does feel like a "continuation" of Before Your Eyes, exploring more of what the studio calls "camera as controller." Essentially, cameras as a way to con??trol video games.

They're also exploring ways of bringing Before Your Eyes to new players. One notable way is the news that, in collaboration with Netflix, the team is bringing Before Your Eyes to phones. Many device??s have cameras built in, and that makes it a natural fit for a port.

Whatever is next, the GoodbyeWorld crew certa?inly seems like they're ready for it. After years of development, working and reworking a student concept into an award-winn??ing game, the team has learned a lot. And while it resulted in one excellent game, it also gave them a drive.

Lewin told me about how the team wants to make things no one else does. "We only really want to be doing this if we are in our own little world, with our te??am, making something that we know no one else is really going to do and there'??s no competition out there."

So I think it's safe to say that whatever is next for the Before Your Eyes team, it'll ?be something quite different. Don't blink and miss it.

The post How Before Your Eye??s went from student project to BAFTA award-winner appeared first on Destructoid.

Wrestling and turn-based battles make for a surprisingly good combination

The world of wrestling is filled with starry ideals and crushing defeats. The in-ring athletics and backstage politics form a theater that's all its own, wrapped up in layers upon layers of performance and genuine moments. With WrestleQuest, Mega Cat S??tudios wraps all of that up and puts it? into an RPG.

I got some hands-on time with WrestleQuest at PAX East 2022, where I got to see how this combination plays out. The story follows several wrestlers, with two in particular taking the lead. They live in the toybox world where everyone is into wrestling in some fa??shion. The idealistic Randy "Muchacho Man" Santos believes in the ring, working to achieve his goals with his own two hands. Meanwhile, Brink Logan is a jobber; he takes the fall for other wrestlers, buying into the world in hopes that his? dedication will pay off.

Through these two lenses, I got to see the world Mega Cat is creating for WrestleQuest. And so far, I'm very intrigued.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXQMkQ71F_M

RPG rumble

To be clear up-front, I'm not an avid wrestling fan. I've watched a few of the big shows, and it's really hard to exist in this industry without knowing at least a bit about wrestling. I've even played a pretty decent number of wrestling games, though those have struggled to give me what I want? out of a virtual wr?estling experience.

WrestleQuest feels like the answer. It's about the world of wrestling, in RPG form. Turn-based battles act out the matches, as your party of wrestlers can choose between basic strikes or a variety of moves, ranging from? simple grapples to hig?h-flying stunts or more.

The battle system itself feels very similar to Mario RPGs, like Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, or even more recently Yakuza: Like a Dragon. Pi?ck an action from a menu and act it out, and hit the quick-time button prompt for a follow-up. Sometimes enemies will get sent to the ropes, allowing a chance for a follow-up. You can also get blasted back, and hit?? the button prompt for a recovery.

Wrestling mechanics still seep into the battle system in the form of pins. While knocking a character out is an option, so is a pin. Once an enemy has taken enough damage, they drop to the ground, allowing the pl?ayer to attempt to pin them. It's the classic chase bar, where the pinner has to try and stop a moving arrow on the fleeing bar representing the pinned. Nail it three times, and they're out; mess it up, and they pop back up with some extra health.

What gets really cool is how actual wrestling story plays in??to these matches. In one tag-team rumble, my manager wanted me to lose, and wanted it to look heroic for the other guys. So I had to complete a certain set of objectives, like pinning someone and failing to secure it??, to "win."

A wider world

It's ideas like this that really jumped out at me. WrestleQuest seems set to grapple with the realities of wrestling, and not just the exciting acrobatics and feats of strength. One of the develope??rs described a later quest to me where a wrestler is found all busted-up.

After finding his tag-team partner for help, t?he player finds out the partner wants the injured wrestler to use glue—the toybox equivalent of steroids. And in this moment, you'll be able to decide whether to endorse this or say it's better to succeed without it. Not only does this count towards your status as a "face" (hero) or "heel" (villain), it also provides some interesting insight into ?what Mega Cat is grappling with for story.

WrestleQuest can actually deal with discussions of staged matches and "kayfabe." It can have a character who is wide-eyed and? believes in real victories, while another is a jaded brawler who's constantly used as a stepping stone for others. It can dig into complex topics because it doesn't necessarily have to be the front-facing game for a wrestling ?program.

Bringing the action to action figures

It helps, with darker material, that the world itself is all action figures. And lighthearted contrast isn't the only way WrestleQuest uses the setting. It also really chases the?? idea of playing with wrestling figures, the same way one might have when they were younger.

A kid might not have had a full lineup of every WWE wrestler. So maybe instead of two wrestlers rumbling, maybe it's Macho Man ?versus a Gundam in a business suit. Or a giant lizard. It's a world made up of toys, not just toy wrestlers.

Speaking of, plenty of big names are signed onto the project. Jake the Snake Roberts, "Macho Man" Randy Savage, and Andre the Giant are all set to appear. Jeff Jarrett has been consulting on the g??ame, even.

For those who want something a bit different out of their virtual wrestling, WrestleQuest genuinely seems like the answer. Even those who haven't been interested in the idea before, might get interested now. It reminded me of how Golf Story got so many folks into the sport, even though they'd never go near a PGA Tour.

You can wishlist WrestleQuest on Steam here. No release date's been set just yet.

The post PAX: WrestleQue??st finds a be??autiful harmony between RPG and pro wrestling appeared first on Destructoid.

Not quite as dark as Super Fire Pro's story mode

During today's Xbox Indie Showcase, publisher Skybound Games and indie outfit Mega Cat revealed WrestleQuest a fun-looking new title that will blend the 16-bit RPG adventures of yesteryea??r with some of pro wrestling's most legendary in-ring perfor??mers.

Developed by Pittsburgh-based indie outfit Mega Cat Studios, WrestleQuest will put players in the spandex singlet of a budding young wrestler, as they embark upon their dream of becoming the biggest superstar that the business has ever known. As they pick ??their way through the terrifying backstage politics of a pro-wrestling locker room, our hero will find help and inspiration from a roster of licensed legends, including "Macho Man" Randy Savage, Jake "The Snake" Roberts, Jeff Jarrett, Andre the Giant, The Road Warriors, and Diamond Dallas Page (who I assume will be on-hand to crack your back).

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=YR879YGTbt8

WrestleQuest will combine the narrative adventure of old-school RPGs with turn-based in-ring action, as the player makes a name for themselves in the glory days of Sports Entertainment. In keeping with its old-school themes, WrestleQuest is rendered in cool pixel visuals, reminiscent of the glorious 16-bit era. James Deighan, the founder of Mega Cat, says that the team grew up lovin' wrestling, and hopes that WrestleQuest will capture the wild and colorful halcyon days of both wre??stling and video gam?ing.

It's a really fun concept, and having an array of licensed stars featured in-game will really help to put the title on the map. If you aren't feeling the current trend of wrestling sims, then perhaps WrestleQuest will encourage you to climb back into the ring �in an altogether different manner �when it steps through the curtain later this summer on PlayStation, P?C, Xbox, and Nintendo Switch platforms.

The post WrestleQuest is a retro-style RPG featuring some?? real ring le?gends appeared first on Destructoid.

Blink and you'll miss it

It's the first day of December, and all through the blog, the writers of Destructoid are clearing their backlog. So in my efforts to catch up with some missed notables in the run-up to award season, I decided to boot up indie narrative Before Your Eyes last night. And frankly, it's r?eally taken ahold? of me.

If you haven't heard of Before Your Eyes, it's a narrative adventure from GoodbyeWorld Games with a pretty interesting premise. Stepping into the head of someone else, you watch through thei?r eyes as you ??whisk through their life. You are Benjamin, Benny, and you are reliving Benny's life.

Going back through Benny's memories, you relive all of it through his eyes. From birth to death, you see it all in a first-person view. Even, at times, making choices. And sometimes those choices are whether or not yo??u blink.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=CP_aKLHxIgI

The crux of the experience is that you play Before Your Eyes with a webcam p?lugged in. Using eye-detection software, the game will recognize when you've blinked. Sometimes, that's how you select options or advance through a scene. Sometimes, it's how you leave one moment in time—potentially forever.

You might be starting to get the idea now. Benny's life is not an?? easy one, and you sit in the driver's seat as he goes through family drama, growing pains, and difficult moments in life. To say more is to spoil more, and for a game that will take just about 90 minutes to see through, it's really best to just go in as unaware as possible.

Because really, Before Your Eyes has become one of my big knockout surprises of the year. In the way that fellow indie game Unpacking—another on my backlog—touches on the tactile, Before Your Eyes hones in on the visual. And, ??by nature, the fleetin??g.

It was so easy, early on, to accidentally blink and skip th??rough a major scene. Every time an advance is coming up, a metronome will appear, signaling that your n??ext blink will take you further into Benny's life. It's a nice reminder that can, in some circumstances, become menacing. What if you don't want to leave? What if you want to stay here, in this moment? Better keep those eyes open.

Every once in a while, an indie project simply stuns with its execution on an idea. Games like Florence and Gorogoa take one concept, and then twist and turn that concept to tell a story that fits so well. And Before Your Eyes belongs in the same conversation. The usage of eyes—blinking and staring and shutting—as a mechanical co??ncept works incredibly well.

It's somet??hing we do that's so mechanical, it's automatic. We don't think about blinking, at least not until someone points it out to us. It flits by, much like the little events in life. The notes we passed in history class, playing with a toy boat in a tub, listening to a loved one play a tune at the piano. Every little car trip, every little conversation, can all blink right ??by so mechanically. Even major life events punctuating the mundane are all, eventually, just blinks of your eye.

Before Your Eyes definit??ely has a few stutters. I had to recalibrate my? eye tracking a few times, and its best experience requires a very specific setup. Needing a PC and a webcam to play isn't always the easiest ask.

Yet if you have the capabilities, Before Your Eyes is an experience you absolutely ne??ed to undertake. At some points, I thought I knew what emotional strings it was going to pull on. But even when I was right, the way in which it did so, and how it used the eye-tracking as part of it, worked so well that it still floored me.

In a year of some big games, Before Your Eyes is something you're not going to experience anywhere else. And it is, in my opinion, something you need to set aside an evening for. It's currently available on PC via Steam here.

The post Before Your Eyes is ??clever, heart-wrenching, and a must-play appeared first on Destructoid.