Forgive the gushings that I’m about to deliver, but we’re huge fans of Jasper Byrne here at Indie Statik – long before Lone Survivor grabbed everyone’s interest (hipster, blah, blah) – and any kind of news about any of his projects sends us a little dizzy in the head. As if lemonade just whooshed up our nose or something. But then with NEW GAME+ we see him combining many of our favorite things about games together. So it’s a double rainbow of fantastic developer and interesting gameplay mechanics and ideas. Dribbling is a must for us.

We made sure the game was right on top of our list of most anticipated games of 2013 so that everyone knew about it, such is our compassion and excitement for the game. But what is it all about? Well, that’s the big question, isn’t it? Jasper has laid some details down before and shown a number of screenshots, but there’s still something of a mystery about how the game plays and what we should expect to find when we get our hands on it eventually. Mostly, that will be due to the development process still being in the early stages – it didn’t help that he postponed working on the game for a number of weeks to then change his mind.

But I’m delaying again. NEW GAME+ is an isometric RPG inspired by the Legend of Zelda series, Dark Souls and Final Fight. Ponder each of those influences for a just a second and imagine them mashed together. Now take on board that the game supports 4-player co-op play and PvP within that as well if you should get fed up of trying to work together, I suppose. Obviously, with a game like this, the focus is on exploration and combat – focusing on the class that you’re specializing as is also very important so you can help your team out. At the moment, it seems that there’s at least two classes – a warrior type and a mage.

Enemies inside the game are supposed to be tough, and like in Dark Souls, they should be quite formidable. Obviously, there is variation in how each one acts around you, but they have all the same abilities as you do – the dodging, wandering around maps freely and picking up any items they feel like. So that treatment of enemies in the game will make the game fluid, changing it up each time as your foe react to your movements and progress.

And Then It Moved…

So over the weekend, Jasper took NEW GAME+ over to the London Indies meetup and had a few other developers play it in 3-player versus mode (they also played 4-player co-op later too). And one of the genius buggers (Jasper’s brother) actually captured the footage! It’s not brilliant, but this is the first time we’ve ever seen NEW GAME+ in motion, and we really wanted to share this moment with you. Enjoy!

London Indies footage of a fairly relaxed friendly 3UP (with enemy aggro): m.youtube.com/#/watch?v=-wji…

— Jasper Byrne (@JasperByrne) February 6, 2013