A few months back I talked about a roguelite I am very excited for, Beyond the Long Night. As of two days ago the Kickstarter went live and with it came an updated demo. This beautiful pixel art twin-stick roguelite has so much potential and fans of the genre seriously need to take a look at this game. I’ll give a brief overview of the game and dive into checking out the Kickstarter.
Beyond the Long Night
Beyond the Long Night is a twin-stick shooter roguelite where you will be exploring a subterranean world because you have “unfinished business.” You are an explorer (as your Indiana Jones hat shows) flying around by balloons. This underground world is full of monsters, secrets, and characters to chat with. You will solve puzzles, upgrade and battle your way through three major biomes to escape to the Overworld. As you explore this dungeon you will unravel the mysteries of demigods and other explorers trapped within an endless time loop.
Features
This little gem has quite a bit going for it. Straight from their campaign, we got a lovely list of features to expect.
- A charming single player adventure set in a world caught in a time loop.
- Characters met along the way remember and form relationships with you across multiple runs.
- Shoot, dodge, throw items and use Superpowers to fight your way through The Dark Mountain.
- Outrun a deadly storm that spreads from chamber to chamber, chasing you up the mountain.
- Motivational cows! ????
- Puzzles are scattered across the map, with some taking multiple runs to complete.
- Upgrade a unique build for your character every run.
- The bunting has physics!
- All upgrades are infinitely stackable and combine with each other to create chaotic combinations.
- Randomly generated maps built from individually handcrafted rooms.
- Lovingly crafted retro inspired visuals and music.
- Secrets?!? ????
- Your very own portable one-man-band.
Gameplay
Inspired by the greats of modern roguelites (The Binding of Issac, Enter the Gungeon) Beyond the Long Night twin-stick shooting is central to the game. Finding upgrades allows you to stack and combine multiple upgrades leading to crazy combinations and synergies.
Aside from shooting, you can dodge, and pick up items like torches and throw them to apply burning damage to enemies. There is also a secondary ability known in this game as a Superpower. These strong powers can be calling giant gusts of wind to blast your enemies back or cast out a growing circle of swords. There are even environmental effects like spike walls. What’s great is these also interact with enemies so using a gust of wind to blast groups of enemies into a spike wall can yield stunning results. the devs are looking to have 64 upgrades and 16 Superpowers at launch.
The Devs
Noisy Head Games is comprised of three sound designers that met at Frontier Developments (Elite Dangerous, Planet zoo) and decided to give it a go at making their own game. Having met in the audio department you can immediately hear their expertise in the sound and music of Beyond the Long Night.
Steve Hollis
Steve began work on Beyond the Long Night in early 2020 and founded Noisy Head Games in 2021. He used to do all sorts of programming and audio-related things at Frontier Developments, and now spends much of his time trying on as many different hats of indie game development as he can get his hands on! He has a deep passion for game music too, and the soundtrack to Croc: Legend of the Gobos has been reverberating around his head since 1997.
Steve has created much of Beyond the Long Night himself but has had some help along the way from some supremely talented audio folks.
Pablo Canas
Pablo is our very own “King of the Mix!” and has been bringing both linear and game audio alive since 2015. He’s worked in some pretty nifty places, including EA, Frontier Developments, and Ninja Theory. He has a passion for telling stories through the use of sound.
Ross Stack
Ross has over ten years of experience working in audio. He kicked off his career working in audio production, before making the transition to game audio in 2014. He relishes the opportunity to bring a story to life through the creative use of sound, and now runs his own independent contracting studio in Ireland called Sound Out Studios – https://www.soundoutstudios.com/
Pablo and Ross make up the audio team for Beyond the Long Night, and together are crafting some seriously funky sound effects!
Stretch Goals
At the time of this writing Beyond the Long Night’s Kickstarter is about 50% of the way done with 28 days left. Noisy Head Games is a very small team and resources are limited so their main focus is to develop the rest of the game for PC. The team has experience in porting and has already been accepted by Nintendo to develop for the Switch.
28 days left
At 50% by day 2 things are looking good for this promising title. However, they still have a way to go. So try the demo out and then read their Kickstarter campaign. If you liked what you played and saw then back the game. You have until March 10th to get in on supporting Beyond the Long Night. As I said above fans of the roguelite genre and twin-stick shooters definitely don’t want to pass up on this.
You can try out the demo to Beyond the Long Night on Itch.io & Steam. Check out the Kickstarter to get more information and back the game.
