Nearly 12 years ago, we held our breaths in pain to report that Lone Survivor developer Jasper Byrne’s new “Zelda x Demon’s Souls” action-RPG was no more. “It was too big for one person to make,” Byrne wrote at the time. “That’s the root of the problem. I didn’t fall out of love with the idea, I just physically can’t do it.” That was then, and thankfully, it is now. Byrne has reluctantly returned to the project and started sharing screenshots on social media.
If you've never played Lone Survivor, it's an excellent side-scrolling survival horror game that distills the ideas from Silent Hill into something entirely its own. “The highest praise I can give it is that it's made by a man who understands why people still hope to return to the glories of Silent Hill 2,” wrote Adam Smith (of the rest in BG3) in 2012. “This is a game made by someone who appreciates that the best way to get under someone's skin is not just the way it peels when you stab it, but the way it feels to the touch, the way it coats our skulls and helps us express ourselves, and the way it wrinkles and ages.” I'll just add that the music is blasting.
I'm not exactly sure when Byrne decided to revive his action-RPG project – he's been posting WIP screenshots for years, perhaps more for the fun of sharing than as an indication of progress – but in one of this week's surprise Xitter updates he says he rewrote the whole thing to run in Unity at one stage. He also took a long break from development when Covid hit.[It] “It feels so fresh after almost 5 years,” another TwiXter wrote. “I never fell out of love with it but when covid started I got really anxious about it and decided to put it on pause. I've only recently felt brave enough to try it so I'm seeing how it feels to work again. We'll see what happens.”
Here's an image of the project running on the Blitzmax engine back in 2013.
And here's one of the screens Byrne shared this week. I really liked how the fog and perspective selection worked with the terrain textures.
Byrne says in the next update that “I've written down the 8 milestones that are needed to get this thing to market. Just the bare minimum, because 12 years is more than enough.” Hopefully, everything goes relatively smoothly from here on out. If you want to help him out and haven't played Lone Survivor yet, you can find a remastered version on Steam.