When I first read Kristala, a 3D fantasy RPG starring anthropomorphic and (thanks to a massively successful Kickstarter) hugely customizable cat warriors, it 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.” However, she points out, it’s also not quite accurate.
Kristala is Astral Clocktower’s Bloodborne 2. The game was made because its founders wanted to see a game like it, including Brutman herself. It’s more Sekiro than Dark Souls, more Assassin’s Creed than Elder Scrolls, and one of the most promising Souls-likes I’ve seen in a while.
I’m going to make my own Bloodborne with cats and ninjas
Kristala and Astral Clocktower have their origins in Bloodborne. Around the time the blood-soaked RPG was released, Brutman was a software engineer, but she wasn’t happy with her job. When she became “completely obsessed with Bloodborne,” she started “daydreaming a lot about what kind of game [she] would make” and eventually decided to return to school for game programming. In 2018, she started to seriously consider opening her own studio.
She says, “We all know there will never be a Bloodborne 2, but I wanted one so badly.” “So I thought, I’ll learn to make my own dream game, and that’s basically what Kristala is.”
In the process, Brutman brought in Schaffstall and co-owner Tiffany Gomez, and Astral Clocktower has grown to over 30 developers all over the world. It really started with just the three of us for a while,” Brutman recalls. During the first three years, we were an all-volunteer team of students and anyone else who wanted to work with us. Then we were able to get some funding in, and that’s when we began to grow, and this is how we ended up as a bigger team. The game went from being meh to really awesome because we were able to pay people. “I’m glad we had time to make mistakes.”
When 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. Because of this, it felt like we spent the first three years building this demo prototype, and when we got some money in the studio, we were like, “Yeah, I don’t think that thing is that great. Let’s start over”.
It is a Souls-like game, but Astral Clocktower hopes to make it more approachable than some standouts. “It all 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.”
Astral Clocktower hopes to release Kristala in 2024 on PC, eventually on all major platforms, though a Switch port is still in the works. As a result of its Kickstarter campaign, which raised over $110,000, the studio has more time and freedom to prepare for the game’s release. As the studio pursues a publishing deal, the team has been planning out the game in an almost modular manner. (I think people or publishers didn’t quite see the cat link being as cool as it is, thinking it was just gimmicky or stupid – because they weren’t thinking about how much the internet loves cats,” Brutman explains. According to the devs, the Kickstarter campaign has alleviated some pressure there, and Kristala will be released in the near future, with the possibility of adding additional “episodes” or zones afterwards.
