Tired of waiting for Bloodborne 2, these devs decided to make their own – now it's Sekiro with cat ninjas and Assassin's Creed DNA

My initial read of Kristala, an upcoming 3D fantasy RPG starring anthropomorphic and (thanks to a massively successful Kickstarter) hugely customizable cat warriors was essentially "Dark Souls 4 but you play as an Elder Scrolls Khajiit." When I share this description with Alexis Brutman and Sarah Schaffstall of developer Astral Clocktower, Brutman says "that's a good first impression, can't be insulted by that." But, she explains, it's also not quite accurate. 

Kristala is Astral Clocktower's very own Bloodborne 2, the game that the founders of the women-owned studio – especially Brutman herself – ended up making largely because they wanted to see a game like it. It's more Sekiro than Dark Souls, it's more Assassin's Creed than Elder Scrolls, and it's one of the most promising Souls-likes I've seen in a while. 

Gonna make my own Bloodborne with cats and ninjas 

The origins of Kristala and Astral Clocktower can be traced back to Bloodborne. Brutman was a software engineer around the time the blood-soaked RPG came out, but while her job paid well, she wasn't super happy doing it. As she became "completely obsessed with Bloodborne," she started "daydreaming a lot about what kind of game [she] would make" and eventually decided to go back to school for game programming. Around 2018, she started to seriously push for a studio of her own.  

"We all know there's never going to be a Bloodborne 2, but I wanted one so bad," she says. "And so I was like, well, maybe I just need to go learn and I'll make my own dream game, and that's basically what Kristala is."

Brutman looped in Schaffstall and co-owner Tiffany Gomez along the way, and Astral Clocktower has since grown to a studio of over 30 developers based all over the world. "It really did start with just the three of us for a while," Brutman recalls. "And we were an entirely volunteer team of students and just anyone who was willing to come in and work with us for the first three years. Then we were able to bring some funding in, and that's when we started really expanding and how we ended up being a bigger team. We were actually able to pay people and the game went from being kind of meh to being kind of awesome. I'm glad we had that time to make mistakes."

"It was slow going in the beginning. Because you're working nine to five, you get home and you have to do stuff, but all you want to do is pass out or play video games. That's why it really felt like we spent the first three years making this whole demo prototype thing that, as soon as we had some money in the studio, we were like, 'Yeah, that thing sucks. Let's start over again.'"

While this is a Souls-like, Astral Clocktower hopes to make it more approachable than some standouts of the genre. "It started with that label," Brutman says. "Part of the reason why we tried to back off a little bit from it was that people are automatically afraid when they hear the term Souls-like, which I'm sure you've seen time and time again. We'll say we're making this game and people get really excited because there's cats, and then you mention it's a Souls-like and they're like, 'Oh, never mind, I'm terrible at those, I don't want to play them.' I'm hoping it will help people feel like it's a little bit more friendly, not quite as toxic as some of the other experiences they may have had with Souls-likes. Because I hear that constantly." 

Assassin's Breed  

The core seed of Kristala actually started out as a 2D side-scroller about a cat on a little adventure – loosely rooted in Gomez's love of the cats in the series Fairy Tale – but Brutman's darker, Souls-like vision steadily gained ground. The feline motif stuck around, however, and ended up adding a unique flavor to Kristala's stealth-action combat. 

"At the time – this was before Elden Ring had come out – they hadn't introduced any sort of jumping mechanics [in the Souls games]," Brutman says. "And so we thought, how cool would it be to have a Souls-like or an action RPG where you actually get to traverse and jump the world with a lot more athletic ability, kind of like a ninja but even more agile. So that's kind of where we went with it and it evolved more with time. It started out with the cat just kind of being a cat because we like cats, to being a cat that now can climb and jump and do all sorts of things that you don't normally get to do in a game like this."

"You'll also have a special branching leveling tree within the game," Schaffstall explains. "It's a feline skill enhancement tree. So in addition to having that ninja-like agile combat and traversal mechanics that Ali mentioned, you will be leveling specific feline-related skills. So it actually gives even more purpose to, 'Hey, I'm playing as a cat.'" 

"It's more like a blend between Sekiro and Assassin's Creed," Brutman says of Kristala's gameplay. "There's a lot of verticality and you're up on roofs and you get to do sneaky assassinations and things like that. But also, you know, a touch of Dark Souls, Bloodborne-like gameplay. There's a lot of flexibility in how you can choose to play. You can go in full on, you know, Dark Souls greatsword tank, or you could decide you're just going to be a sneaky assassin no one sees and you stealth kill everybody." 

Amusingly, this shift to stealth and verticality has apparently been a stumper for some Souls-like fans. "We just exhibited at Play NYC over the weekend," Schaffstall says. "And one of the things that I found really rewarding was that a lot of the Souls-specific fans that played, many of them were like, even in Elden ring sometimes you feel heavy and clunky in the combat, and it was really cool to hear people saying that Kristala's combat really did have that ninja-like, agile feel to it, quick and fast-paced."

"I had a couple of people mention that, a lot of times in those games, you get blocked off and you have to find another passageway," Brutman adds. "And I noticed that because people are so used to that when they play Souls-like games, they weren't seeing what we obviously put in front of them, which was like, you can jump over stuff, you know? You can climb and jump over things. So they would run around looking for the secret passage. And then they'd find the thing they could jump over and go, 'Oh my god. That's right. I'm a cat.'"

Today's demo and next year's release 

I catch myself making these same mistakes as I skulk through the Kristala demo available on Steam, which is rough in some areas – and again, due for some updates soon – but shows real promise. Some animations are a bit herky-jerky, enemies have almost no sense of awareness, and I'd like some more nuanced camera settings, but Kristala makes a good first impression. It almost makes me nostalgic for the original Dark Souls – the quaking parry sound effect, the cheesy backstabs, the familiar stat sheet, the glowing consumables strewn about. Except now I'm an expressive cat ninja disemboweling rat warriors, because who else would a cat ninja disembowel? 

I start to catch onto the visual language of the environments, picking out ropes and planks and boxes to climb up before squeezing through gaps in rotted huts or jumping into a plunging attack to pick off guards. Sekiro meets Assassin's Creed is apt; I can feel myself switching from stealth mode to parry mode. Melee combat is frantic, and thus far I'm having more success attacking reactively after deflecting enemy hits, though some cool spells and special attacks allow for greater openings. The most Sekiro moment of the demo comes when I encounter my first brute, which signals heavy attacks with yellow and red markers – dodge or parry, or outright dodge, respectively. Oh yeah, I'm picking up what this game's putting down. 

Astral Clocktower hopes to release Kristala in 2024 on PC and eventually all major platforms, though a Switch port is still up in the air. Thanks to its Kickstarter, which brought in over $110,000, the studio will have a lot more time and freedom to prepare for the game's release. The team's been charting the game in an almost modular way, scoping things out based on when they'll need to launch something in order to stay afloat even as the studio continues pursuing a publishing deal. ("I think people or publishers didn't quite see the cat link being as cool as it is, that it was just gimmicky or stupid – because they weren't thinking about how much the internet loves cats," Brutman reasons.) The devs say the Kickstarter has thankfully removed some pressure there, and come what may, Kristala will launch in the not-too-distant future, with potential for additional "episodes" or zones to be added after release. 

"Our goal was essentially, if we didn't meet $10,000 at all, we'd be releasing a bare bones Early Access in like a month or two," Brutman said back when the Kickstarter campaign was only around $45,000. "Now, with each stretch goal we hit, it's like, oh, well, now you'll get to make your own cat when you first play, or now there'll be a lot more area to cover, you'll have more bosses to fight, more ground to explore. So it's just a matter of, with each stretch goal, there's a little bit more content that will be in that release, and a little more time we have to make sure that it's really good versus, you know, having to do more of a haphazard release – which I've heard a lot of gamers complaining about lately. Would like to avoid that!"