La-Mulana is something of a cult hit in the indie gaming community. It balances exploration, experimentation, brain-wracking puzzles, catchy music, tough bosses and brutal traps (lots and lots of them) in one monumental effort that pays tribute to Japan’s MSX computer games of yore. So when its creators, Nigoro, announced that they would be making a sequel using an improved version of the 2011 remake’s graphics engine, fans were understandably elated. La-Mulana 2 kicked off its career with a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign that was ultimately successful, and Nigoro projected a 2015 release date for the game.

That 2015 release, though, was regrettably pushed back to an unspecified date in 2016 due to an extended production schedule. La-Mulana, after all, was made by just three individuals, and it’s difficult to imagine just how much responsibility Takumi Naramura, duplex and Samier have to shoulder to surpass the near-flawless exploration experience offered by La-Mulana 1.

Since then, updates on La-Mulana 2’s progress have been rather sparse. But that doesn’t mean Nigoro has stopped working on the game. Far from it, actually. This Tuesday, Playism (its publisher) posted a for-backers-only announcement on the Kickstarter page that the La-Mulana 2 team has finalized the game’s logo. You can view the final one below, at the bottom of the stack of logos:

The main reasoning for the redesign: La-Mulana 2 had been using La-Mulana 1’s logo as a base, and Nigoro wanted to avoid customer confusion between the two games while browsing the Steam store.

We agreed that was a fair point, and proceeded to make a new design taking an entirely different approach. Again, this was to be a temporary design which we would eventually work into a final version. However, using the design at events we found we didn’t really like it that much. It became clear to us that it was too bland compared to the design of the first game’s logo, with inferior illustrations and too many fiddly decorations. When shrunk to a smaller size, the image lost all its impact, and so on.

The logo redesign had actually been planned much earlier, but was put on hold to refine La-Mulana 2’s core gameplay. The final result is a logo that is bold, exotic, mystical, and truly unique from that of its predecessor.

The official splash image for the game has also been revised, and includes the new logo. It’s pictured in the opening image for this article.

La-Mulana 2 still has no official release date, but those who are attending UNITE 2016 (a convention for Unity developers like Nigoro) in Tokyo this year will be able to play a demo of the game. Who knows? Maybe we’ll get even more news out of the event!