Lone Survivor dev hints at next game: "...it may be Zelda x Dark Souls"

Jasper Byrne, the sole developer behind atmospheric indie horror Lone Survivor , has revealed his next game on his website . Like Lone Survivor before it, the currently nameless (at least to us) project has gone through a number of different prototypes and art styles, but he appears to have settled on a gorgeous isometric viewpoint with detailed sprites, as evidenced by the picture above.

As with PC Gamer favourite Dark Souls, the game – seemingly a dungeon crawler – will feature two-handed combat and good old-fashioned rolling, plus a hooded mage character in some capacity. That's pretty much all we have to go on at the moment, but if it's anything like his previous games, it will be a cocktail of exquisite pixel art, thoughtful design, and catchy music (see the lovely Soul Brother for further proof).

It's fairly rare for a developer to be this open about the creation process, so the post is worth checking out to see the sorts of changes games go through before they end up on your PC. For example, the game originally resembled a more purpley Ultima Underworld – something that now obviously needs to exist. Jasper made a similar post detailing Lone Survivor's origins earlier in the year.

Tom Sykes

Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.