A lot of studios focus on one type of game. Landfall is not one of them. Haste is a freerunning roguelike that I fell in love with during Steam Next Fest, but it's only a tiny part of the studio's eclectic history. Content Warning is a humorous send-up of social horror games. Totally Accurate Battle Simulator is a strategy game defined by ragdoll physics, a trait it shares with its battle royale spin-off, TABG. Stick Fight: The Game is a simplistic platform fighter. To find Landfall's last real similarity with its new game, you'd have to go back nine years and eight releases – bringing us to 2016's Clustertruck and its vehicular freerunning.
Despite that, however, the studio's head of community Hanna Fogelberg tells GamesRadar+ the team "never really stopped" making games like this. "The actual sidetrack thing we did was making TABS – that's the weird side-plot of the studio, which is strange because it's obviously one of our biggest games and what we're very much known for." The similarity between this ragdoll strategy game and Haste's fast, elegant, flow-state-inducing gameplay might not immediately be clear, but TABS begat TABG, which has remnants that are "very, very reminiscent of the early Haste stuff."
Even before launching to thousands of positive reviews on Steam this month, Haste was the eighth most-played demo of the most recent Next Fest. In a field of more than 2,500 games, that's impressive, especially when you consider that this was the first time Landfall had taken part (and that it might have passed on the opportunity were it not for the advice of some of its friends at other studios). Its premise is simple: facing a spreading corruption, protagonist Zoe must run faster than the end of the world. Evoking 3D Sonic as she soars across the undulating procedural landscapes of her shattering existence, piloting Zoe is an exercise in maintaining a glorious flow-state at the fastest possible speeds.
Keep running
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If you're an OG Landfall fan, that might sound familiar. Writer Petter Vilberg says that early in Haste's development, composer Karl Flodin sat down to get a feel for the new game. "He was the first person to [...] be like 'oh my god, it's happening, we're finally making Clustertruck 2'." Tonally the two games are very different, but you can feel the similarities when you play Haste. As Fogelberg admits, CEO Wilhelm Nylund "has a couple of categories of games he likes to make," and Landfall isn't afraid to retread old ground.
Nevertheless, one thing does set Haste apart. A roguelike formula underpins Zoe's desperate sprints – die three times and you're done, sent back to the start of the web-like Slay the Spire-style map that shapes your journey. Vilberg says that the iconic deckbuilder was "obviously a touchpoint" for Landfall, but it's a structure that only evolved with the game gradually.
Haste has always been about running extremely fast - "we had this core gameplay very, very early on," Vilberg claims - but its actual formula has evolved a lot. "It started out as this idea where it made a certain amount of sense for it to be a multiplayer thing," a battle royale-style system in which players raced each other. Unfortunately, "it became clear that we were moving so fast that it's really difficult to interact with players in any way." Vilberg tells a story about the brief weekend where Haste was – and then wasn't – an MMO. "This game has been so many things," says Fogelberg, just a little exasperated.
Eventually, the roguelike structure settled in, but even that came with its difficulties. Landfall's early formulas had dedicated tracks that were too big and complex to be generated on the fly alongside the networking complexities of a multiplayer game. Suddenly, however, Haste wasn't a multiplayer game anymore, and the procedural generation tools that the team had written off were fast enough to fit its new roguelike structure.
Even once the team was finally settled in, however, there were still hurdles to overcome. "There's been so many different iterations of what the game could be," says Fogelberg, that "a lot of people have very different expectations." Perhaps they saw an early development video from three years ago "when we were like 'maybe we'll make it into a battle royale'." To solve that, she says that Steam Next Fest was crucial. "It was also really good to have a demo out so people could play it and not come on launch day and be like 'hey, I thought this was a battle royale game, what happened with that?'"
Eventually, it was Next Fest that helped abate those concerns. Haste's performance, which saw it go toe-to-toe with heavy-hitters like Among Us, Dune: Awakening, and Mecha Break, means that Landfall went into launch with "some confidence" – in short, knowing that players dug what was being offered. Two weeks from launch and boasting an enviable 91% approval rating on Steam, it seems that confidence has been rewarded.
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