We got the opportunity to take a first, very early look at Koshmar: The Last Reverie, a dark fantasy action game by Purple Ray Studios. Formerly known only as Project: Nightmare, its haunted world and fast-paced action combat suggests a sort of straightforward action-adventure, but some time with the studio revealed that they are aiming high to exceed expectations.
“We wanted to do something completely different,” said Kornelia Blazynska, Co-founder of Purple Ray and Creative Director of Koshmar, in reference to the complete tonal shift from their last game, the upbeat 3D platformer Boti: Byteland Overclocked. Trading in sunlight and cheery gothic steampunk architecture with that sort of hand-painted visual feel, it wears its Lies of P and Arcane inspirations on its sleeves.
Set in a fictionalized society resembling 1900’s Europe, Koshmar stars Violet, a girl whose life is bleak and mundane when she’s awake, but has vivid and active adventures into the darkness when she sleeps. Only she can see the truth, that her world is suffering from some sort of waking coma, and that something is feeding on the spirits of the people around her. There’s real-world inspiration for this as well, from the real plagues of sleeping sickness that baffled Europe and the US in the early 1900s, as well as “fables, phobias, and folklore from around the world.”
To save her city, Violet uses her unique sleepwalking abilities to dive into the so-called Nightmare Rifts that paralyze its citizens to free them through force. Robert Baranowski, Head of Studio and CEO of Purple Ray clarified that its combat leans more towards a hack-and-slash than a Soulslike, combo-focused with weapons and active abilities being the core of the combat’s flexibility and variability. These rifts are procedurally generated stages full of puzzles to solve and baddies to slay, with weapons (and their passive stats) changing every run, similar to another inspiration of the team’s, Remnant.
We couldn’t see any of Koshmar’s action at this point outside of clips from the mysterious reveal trailer, but Baranowski described how different passives could determine different styles of offense that these active skills could provide with one of the six weapon types, the Daggers. “A normal skill that was based on throwing a dagger, now causes that dagger to bounce around enemies.” The current plan is to have up to 500 variations of these active skills across all weapons.
This can help add a strategic element to combat, so that you can choose the right tools for the job ahead of time, but he also described some tactical wrinkles as well. Environmental elements that can be used to do damage to enemies by throwing them off of ledges or throwing pieces of the stage at them directly. They weren’t ready to go into specifics about what that means yet, though.
Koshmar’s exploration, narrative, and combat systems are all affected by Violet’s sanity, a sort of morality system that can be influenced by choices made by players. “This is our most important narrative system,” Baranowski said, describing that there are narrative and gameplay decisions that affect Violet’s behavior. This is as explicit as making choices in the story that lean either towards Delusion or Madness, not literally good or bad in the way that the Light Side and Dark Side meter works in KOTOR, but the specifics of what they represent will be revealed later. But like KOTOR, abilities have an implicit effect on this system, as some drive you towards one alignment or the other through repeated use.
This accumulates to create Violet’s aura, which changes how people interact with her, her physical appearance, and will determine which of the multiple endings you get. Details are slim about these – though the trailer shows a Violet drenched in shadows sporting monstrous fangs, so maybe that is a clue.
Taken together, all of these early details describe a game that remembers the best parts of a type of action game from yesteryear and wants to bring that back. It has the striking aesthetic of Alice: Madness Returns, Mass Effect-era morality systems, and the third-person hack-and-slash action of your favorite character action game from the past few generations, brought into modern day with roguelike elements. Koshmar: The Last Reverie hopes to launch by the end of the year. Will it scare up a fun action-RPG when it does?
Jarrett Green is a longtime contributor to IGN. Say hello on X @Jarrettjawn.
