Recently, we had the luxury of telling you about our time going hands-on with Rever Games' dungeon-crawling action roguelite project, Clockfall. Set to come to Early Access on PC via Steam soon, the game plays around with the idea of roguelike action and takes it in a slightly different way by focusing less on difficult combat and more on giving the player a limited amount of time to achieve their goals, a limit that can be expanded by completing more runs and venturing further, if you will.
With this unique take on a dungeon-crawling roguelite in mind, we had the chance to speak with Rever Games recently, where we asked the developer about why they wanted to make Clockfall and also where the idea came from.
Answering this question, founder and CFO John Pirson explained: "It was a bit of a complicated production. So at first, Clockfall was never supposed to be what it is now. At first, we were supposed to do a roguelike. And then through production, after a year, we separated from Zero Games, which we're working with. And I ended up a bit going on my own with the Alexandre [Dournel] and then Florian [Meskers] and then the team picked up a bit. We decided that as roguelike fans, we would be more into a true crawler, but with a small twist. So therefore, that's why time got involved and the village defence, which made it quite... So after a few tries, we tried and we thought, this is fun. And so there was a lot of balancing, a lot of development, a lot of fails, obviously. So it went quite slow as we tried to connect two, almost three different types of gameplay together. It makes things quite complicated. But in the end, we ended up with a result that is quite satisfying, even though it still needs a lot of work. But the idea for us is quite something that we're really happy to work on."
We then also inquired about how Rever intends to ensure Clockfall stands out among the competition, to which lead programmer Florian Meskers told us: "There's one thing that we wanted to have different. So it's the time USP. So in every roguelike, you have time to explore. The difficulty is not dying, basically. Here, we want you to work with the time. We want you to feel pressured to explore as fast as possible, but also make sure you build your character as you go along with your run, because once the timer is out, then you're back to defending your village for as long as you can. So it's really quite critical that you manage your time properly and manage your time in a way that you're going to be strong enough to each time go further in defending your village. So that's where we separate from classic genre, I would say."
You can see the full interview with Rever Games below for more on Clockfall's biome variety, Rever's ultimate ambition for the game, and even what to expect from the Early Access arrival.
