Lone Survivor creator's gorgeous "Zelda x Demon's Souls" action-RPG is back in development, over a decade since reveal

"i never fell out of love with it"

About 12 years ago, we drew our breath 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 a single person to make," Byrne wrote at the time. "This is the root of the problem. It wasn't that I fell out of love with the idea, just that I can't physically do it." That was then and this, thankfully, is now. Byrne has tentatively returned to the project and begun sharing screens on social media.

If you never played Lone Survivor, it's an excellent side-scrolling survival horror that mixes together ideas from Silent Hill into something wholly its own. "The strongest praise I can supply is that this is a game clearly made by a man who understands why people still hope for a return to the glory of Silent Hill 2," Adam Smith (rest in BG3) wrote in 2012. "It's a game made by someone who appreciates that the best way to get under someone's skin is to make them think about that skin, not just the way that it peels off when a knife is applied, but the way that if feels to touch, the way that it covers our skulls and helps us to express ourselves, and the way that it wrinkles and ages." I will only add that the soundtrack bangs.

I'm not sure when, exactly, Byrne decided to revive his action-RPG project - he's been posting WIP screens for years, perhaps more for the pleasure of sharing than as an indicator of progress - but in one of this week's surprise Xitter updates, he says he rewrote the whole thing to run in Unity at some stage. He also took an extended break from development when Covid hit. "[It] feels so fresh after a nearly 5 year hiatus," reads another TwiXter post. "i never fell out of love with it but when covid started i got too much anxiety about it and made the call to hit pause. i only recently felt brave enough to try, so i'm seeing how it feels to work on again. let's see what happens".

Here's a shot of the project from 2013, back when it ran on the Blitzmax engine.

Image credit: Jasper Byrne

And here's one of the screens Byrne has shared this week. I really like the fog and how the choice of perspective works with the terrain textures.

Image credit: Jasper Byrne

In a further update, Byrne says that he's "written down the 8 milestones needed to get this thing out the door. nothing but the bare minimum, because 12 years is plenty enough already". Fingers crossed it's relatively smooth sailing from here. If you'd like to give him a hand, and you've yet to play Lone Survivor, you can find a remastered version on Steam.