You can pet the dog in Fretless

During our time in Gamescom in late August, we had the chance to sit down with Ritual Studios, the developer behind the upcoming and promising Fretless. During our session with the team, we also got to go hands-on with the game (read that preview here), all before getting to speak with engineering designer Maximilian Lubbers and artist Connor Smith.

In that interview, we asked the pair about how the combat and the deck-building element of Fretless works and how the team has infused every aspect of the gameplay with musical moments and design choices.

"The deck building mechanic is because there's definitely a plethora of abilities for your single character that we'd like players to have access to and feel like they're in control of customising their build in such a way," said Lubbers. "In terms of combat, as a music game we definitely knew we wanted to incorporate the expected, such as a rhythmic event, but we didn't want to go into a full rhythm game. So we mixed in the deck building and the turn-based combat for the strategic element with the rhythm component to exercise your skill, something players would expect in a music game."

Smith then continued, "As an artist, I'm trying to infuse all these moments of cool combat with little bells you can hit that make noises. You can pet the dog. All these other aspects that we love from other video games, but having musical themes throughout everything. So all the enemies are musically based. Instead of swords and shields, you have guitars and you're playing with riffs and stuff like that. You have guitar picks as the currency. Every aspect of the game, I feel like, is musically inspired."

You can catch the full interview with Ritual Studios below to learn more about Fretless and when it will be looking to launch on PC.