Ashen’s developer leads the Soulslike through an industrial revolution in Flintlock: The Siege Of Dawn

BY JEREMY PEEL

Humanity might have defied the gods when it first brought fire down from the mountain, but it only truly troubled their omnipotence once it trapped that flame in a barrel – igniting gunpowder to propel itself into a new age of power, volatility and self-determination.

It’s at this precipice that mankind finds itself in Flintlock, the second project from New Zealand’s A44 Games. Founded by talent from Weta Digital, and having made its debut in 2018 with gorgeous action RPG Ashen, the studio is now a part of global studio collective Kepler Interactive. Flintlock represents a major step up in ambition for A44, made possible thanks to the help of that backing. It has the Soulslike elements of the studio’s previous title, plus a setting expanded beyond dungeons and plains to a full open world.

This isn’t the only leap forward A44 is making with this game. Where for Ashen it stuck with a swords-andsorcery setting, it’s placing Flintlock within a burgeoning fantasy subgenre with which it shares a name. Magic is still in play but faces competition as technology progresses to the cusp of the industrial revolution. And the gods of Flintlock’s world? They aren’t best pleased about it. “Humans had found themselves in a place where they felt like they had a seat at the table,” explains Derek Bradley, A44 CEO and Flintlock’s game director. “And then the gods turned up and just absolutely disregarded them. They would enthrall a human instead of speak to them – mind-control them and treat them like puppets.”

In an attempt to shore up their authority, the gods threw open the door to the afterlife, not much caring how the influx of undead might impact human society. “The gods don’t need society,” Bradley says. “They just exert this magical power around them. They don’t mind pushing humanity back into the dark ages, just as it was on the precipice of technological advancement.”

MAGIC FACES COMPETITION AS TECHNOLOGY PROGRESSES TO THE CUSP OF THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

“IT’S QUITE EXCITING TO IMAGINE CHALLENGING A LORD OF THE RINGS-STYLE MONSTER WITH A CANNON”

Nor and Enki’s symbiosis recalls the close relationship of platformer protagonists born in the ’90s and ’00s, such as Banjo and Kazooie, but it doesn’t feel anything but modern.

FOX TALES

Nor’s fox-like companion, Enki, shares his name with the Sumerian god of creation, intelligence, crafts, water, magic, mischief, fertility and (it says here) semen. But his makeup in Flintlock comes from a mixture of ancient sources. “We’d researched the Mesopotamian afterlife for a while,” Bradley explains. “The creatures that inhabited it and gods of the time and all of those kinds of things. We looked at a lot of those stone reliefs and statues you get if you go to the Louvre and check out their Mesopotamian collection. Imagining if those creatures were real was the beginning point for Enki.”

There’s a scrappiness and scrounginess to Enki that belies his divinity

Flintlock opens 50 years later, as a coalition human army approaches the gates of Dawn, the city stronghold of the old gods. The closer they get, the louder the whispers of the divine on the wind become. Newly secular but still superstitious, the soldiers put black powder in their coffee to ward off celestial influence. “This really gritty, unstable, probably unhealthy stuff,” Bradley says. “Something that they’re subject to, but also experimenting with.”

Our protagonist, Nor, is a sapper – an explosives expert right at the front line of not just this sacrilegious war but also the dangerous and unpredictable technology that has enabled it. In her arsenal are hand cannons, mortars, shotguns, flintlock pistols and rifles. But while these weapons represent the state of the art in Flintlock, the one that ties it all together is the boarding axe –a sapper’s tool Nor uses to pry the armour from bosses before taking them down in Soulslike fashion. In the real-life age of sail, boarding axes were used to cut through nets and lines, clear fallen rigging, smash through the doors of cabins and ultimately to kill. There’s an all-purpose practicality there that suits Nor, while the sheer specificity of the weapon speaks to Flintlock’s air of historical reenactment, even given the fantastical context in which it is being used.