After debuting with the eccentric and inimitable Stray Gods: The Roleplaying Musical, developer Summerfall Studios finds itself in more familiar territory with Malys, billed on Steam as an unholy roguelike deckbuilder.
Malys is currently shooting for a 2025 launch on PC, regardless of how its Kickstarter ends up. Its promise of adaptive storytelling in a world of demon hunters and exorcisms, explored through a tried-and-true card game loop given a little twist, grabbed me immediately. It's more gameplay-heavy than Stray Gods, but still follows Summerfall's guiding star with a focus on characters, many of them already giving Hades' beautiful and beloved cast a run for their money.
Just as Stray Gods leaned on roleplaying, there's a fair bit of RPG juice in Malys. There's also a lot of David Gaider, Summerfall co-founder, Bioware alumni, and former Dragon age narrative lead.
In some ways, Gaider says Malys is yet another stepping stone on Summerfall's path to one day hopefully making a big RPG of its own. Get this: it turns out making RPGs is really, really hard and expensive, especially when much of the games industry is treading water.
"Our intention has always been to move into RPGs, but like I mentioned before, RPGs require a certain amount of size," Gaider told me in a recent interview. "We've always wanted to get there, but that means we need to sort of lay down the building blocks where we get the pipelines in place." That goes for 3D work, voice over, writing, and more.
Malys needed a new pipeline that could support more design and systems legwork, which was "a whole new sphere" for Gaider after his writing background. Summerfall is threading a needle, balancing roguelike deckbuilder systems of planning a path and drafting a deck and budgeting resources, paired with a robust narrative where you get to know protagonist Noah and the people he's saving from the demons he encounters on his hunt for this titular ancient evil, Malys.
Rather excitingly, it's also finally expressing some of the ideas, or at least evolutions of the ideas, that Gaider originally had for Cold West at Beamdog, which would've been a Western exorcist RPG, now in a film noir style. Delicious.
Keeping your head up
Summerfall actually pitched a "middle-sized," more AA RPG years ago, but publishers didn't bite. The team made a prototype that got more interest, so then they made a bigger prototype, and then that got more interest, but Gaider says the goal posts always seemed to keep moving. "Do you want to see a finished game?" he recalls. "Is that what you're aiming for? Because if we had the ability to do that, we wouldn't need you."
Publishing deals and other opportunities have dried up in recent years as the games industry has contracted post-covid boom; we heard a lot of horror stories last year, and I heard even more at GDC this year. RPGs are hard to make even in ideal circumstances, and Gaider says the climate has been anything but ideal.
"We're encountering that everywhere," he says. "All everybody wants are existing IPs, and they want sequels. Zero risk. It has to be some sort of guaranteed hit, whatever that means to them. Otherwise there's almost no money to go around."
So, Summerfall's RPG blueprints went back on the shelf. Then Stray Gods came out, and Summerfall proved they can make a good game, but an RPG still wasn't in the cards. "And it's not to say that Malys is sort of second-best," Gaider stresses. "We love Malys. But it's sort of our last hope to keep the studio alive. It's where we invested all our remaining time and effort into so that we can see Summerfall go on, the Summerfall experiment. Maybe it won't work out. I don't know! We'll see."
With only three days left in its Kickstarter and just over half of its goal raised, Malys' crowdfunding campaign is looking uncertain, but Gaider says the game is already far along and will come out in a finished state no matter what.
Under any normal circumstances we'd already be underway. But this is not normal circumstances for us or for anybody.
David Gaider
If the Kickstarter succeeds, Summerfall will have a comfier runway ahead of it for post-launch support and planning. But Summerfall's ongoing struggles, and the fact that the team turned to crowdfunding to begin with, demonstrate how difficult it is even for proven teams led by well-known industry veterans to get a game out the door right now.
For Gaider, it's also about protecting the studio's culture. They've fought hard to keep the four-day week that's worked so well for them, he says they've never done crunch and any intermittent overtime is compensated, and it's "one heartache after another" to "slowly let staff go to try and keep expenses in line."
"We made Stray Gods, it did pretty well, it got us some notice, it got us a Grammy nomination. We got a lot of awards for it, we got a lot of prestige." Gaider says. "We proved that we can make games and good games, and we thought that would mean more, you know, on the second time around."
Assembling Summerfall and building Stray Gods was a huge challenge in part because Gaider had never run a company before, nor had fellow co-founder and writer Liam Esler, and it was their debut game.
"But this time around it really falls directly on the state of the industry, I think," Gaider says. "I say that, but there's always that part in the back of my head that's like, maybe it's you. You end up second-guessing yourself, and you're like, no, the pitching we've been doing is solid. The reaction we've been seeing is solid. Everybody we show it to says this looks good, under any normal circumstances we'd already be underway. But this is not normal circumstances for us or for anybody."
The dream RPG
Gaider's dream RPG would obviously be character-driven. You can see that preference in Dragon Age, Stray Gods, and now Malys. He reckons "I can only care so much about the world, this fantasy world and the danger it's in or whatever, but I can care about characters. So if they care about the world and they care about the conflict, then through them, I'm going to care about the conflict. To me, that's the most important element."
If Summerfall could make a full-fat RPG of its own, Gaider speculates that its characters might be emphasized much more than companions were in Dragon Age. He reflects on "the formula" that Bioware built and adopted, and thinks that there's still "a lot of ground" to explore.
"I think, over my years at Bioware, we found our way to a place I think was pretty good, where you had these followers, and to a lot of the players, I think to a significant portion of the player base, these followers were the game," Gaider says. "And I think part of the thing that I always wondered myself is, the thing is, despite everything, despite all these players and how much they love it, that element was always treated as sort of a tertiary part of the game. It's there, it received a lot of focus, but it's beside the point. The point is the story and the combat. And if you just took out the followers, outside of their role in combat, it would be ultimately irrelevant, you know what I mean?"
"So what if there was more focus?" he continues. "What if the point was the relationships and the characters? What if they played more into the plot? I can think of a few, like, say, Dragon Age: Origins. There are a couple of followers that have more relevance than the others. For instance, you couldn't take Alistair or Morrigan out of Dragon Age: Origins and still have the throughline of plot remain the same. So what if you had more of that? What if there was more interplay where they played a stronger role? Or what if there's things we haven't yet considered about the role of romance?
"As much as the followers themselves were tertiary, the romances with followers were even more so, that was sort of just an added, tacked-on bonus. But when you think of the movies you see on a regular basis, the romantic element, or the characters, are the main arc of the plot, they play into it overall. So what if you romanced a character and not only did they have an important role in the story, but what if romancing them changed the story? I just think there's so much room left to explore ... I think that there's a lot more things to explore with characters and their role in the narrative than we've kind of tried yet."
Nothing lasts forever, right? But so far, it's been a really great experiment.
David Gaider
The bottom line, Gaider added, is that Summerfall hasn't done all this legwork and experimenting just "to get to an RPG that's like everything we've already seen. Ultimately, we wanted to get to an RPG that, like our other games, takes the narrative, takes party-based mechanics and romances and stories, and tries to do something a little bit new and different with them."
Sadly that blue sky RPG is still just an idea. Right now we have Malys, and it looks like a promising addition to one of my favorite genres. And, Gaider says, "if Summerfall, in the long run, didn't work out and we had to shut down, well, I'm still very proud of the years that we've had together. Nothing lasts forever, right? But so far, it's been a really great experiment."
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