The story-driven action RPG Mandragora’s official trailer has been released. The indie developers at Primal Game Studio have teamed up with Marvelous Europe to publish the game. Despite not having a set date for the game’s release, we can still get excited by the trailer. To set the scene, the world of Faelduum has been overrun by monsters and the force known as Entropy. With the burden of heavy ethical decisions on your shoulders and mercenary work to be done throughout the world, prepare yourself.

Coming to the PS5, PC, Xbox Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch in the future, players can expect a whole host of features to experience. Marvelous Europe listed many of the game’s features on their blog that you can see below for yourself.

Game Features

• Explore a universe of gorgeous paint strokes: Immerse yourself in a rich, dark, painterly 2.5D world as the epic and twisted music composed by Christos Antoniou brings this atmospheric world to life.
• Delve into a story-driven dark fantasy adventure: Leave the sanctuary of Crimson City and travel through a vast, interconnected world that will take you from dark forests to deadly swamps, burning deserts, and more.
• Enter the dark realm of Entropy: Acquire the legendary Witch Lantern and enter the dark realm of Entropy through tears in the fabric of reality.
• Encounter horrific monsters and terrifying creatures: Add fallen foes to your bestiary as you battle distinctive enemies and unique, deadly bosses to discover what lurks in the shadows.
• Play your way: Master the punishing side-scrolling action as one of multiple unique classes and customize your character’s active skills through a deep and rewarding character development system. Complete the game and start anew on countless NG+ difficulty levels.
• Upgrade your toolset: Find artisans to join your growing caravan to unlock new upgrades. Grow herbs to brew beneficial potions and craft powerful weapons, armor and trinkets to help you along the way.

The developers have been working on this game since about 2020 using the Unreal Engine. The industry staple game engine is developed by Epic Games, who award what they call Megagrants. These grants are a part of Epic Games’ commitment of, “$100 million to support game developers, enterprise professionals, media and entertainment creators…doing amazing things with Unreal Engine”. Primal Games Studio’s Mandragora must have proved to be amazing because last year they were a recipient of the mega grant.

 

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Mandragora’s developers talked to PCGamesN about using the Unreal Engine and how it has played a role in their design process. The engine aided in the team’s primary goal to, “keep the painterly style of the very first Mandragora concept art” proposed by Ildiko Tothe. They were able to do this, “with the help of the lighting and post-process tools of Unreal Engine”, which played a part in their decision to “not to use normal maps, specular maps and other modifiers that would make the objects look ‘too real’”. The Hungarian indie team went on to use, “film grain, depth of field, and chromatic aberration, and atmospheric VFX”, to ensure the visuals were not too flat or dull. Now if all of that technical jargon is over your head, no need to worry, you don’t need to know it to enjoy the game. To get a better idea of what the game might be like aside from design talk, Primal Game Studio mentioned a few games that inspired them. Elements from Dark Souls III, The Witcher 3, and Hollow Knight went into the think tank conjuring up Mandragora. According to GameInformer, creative director Istvan Zsuffa said that,

Mandragora is a genre-blending mix of everything we love about our favorite games…[we have] our vision for a title that doesn’t fit into just one box

Whatever boxes it ends up falling into, we hope to get our hands on it soon.