David Gaider wants to make a new RPG and, with credits that include the original Baldur's Gate games, Dragon Age: Origins through Inquisition, and Star Wars: The Old Republic, it's no secret as to why. Gaider's writing has launched franchises, paved the way for the romance systems we see in games like Baldur's Gate 3 and, in many ways, changed the way that we approach narrative-focused videogames. But before we get another big RPG, there's Malys, an "unholy roguelike deckbuilder" that oozes high gothic elegance. Cast as Noah, a former priest turned exorcist, your job is to hunt down the titular demon and bring about its end in the most bloody way possible. It's a marked shift in tone from Summerfall Studios' first game, Stray Gods, but it doesn't skimp on style.
Nevertheless, the Malys.
"I didn't actually think about [the genre] being crowded when we made the decision," he recalls. "We said 'oh, there's quite a few out there, but they all tend to be semi-successful, there's obviously a hungry audience for it. But you don't really make decisions based on like, where you're looking at a calculator and seeing where there's the most potential; it's a small sandbox, but you do what sings to you.
"For us, our follow up to Stray Gods wasn't initially Malys," he continues. "We were pitching and shopping around a medium-sized RPG codenamed Phobos, and there was just no publisher interest in anything of that budget range, it had just dried up – not just for us, for everyone industry-wide. It was really tough.
"So we actually had Malys as a side project at the time while we were working on this RPG and pitching it so that we could keep the team busy on a project. That just happens to be what Malys is."
But why a deckbuilder? While Gaider says that Malys does have its own unique narrative, it feels like a marked shift away from the story games he's worked on before. "Honestly, I just really like deckbuilders," he says with a laugh. "We had several options, but we were like 'do we want to make another game like Stray Gods?' Stray Gods you could say was more along the lines of a visual novel – a good friend of mine called it an audio visual novel, and I was like 'that's pretty clever' – but we decided [not to]. The one thing Stray Gods didn't have was gameplay – I mean, it had lots going for it, but it wasn't gameplay driven. If we really want to work up to doing an RPG we really need to get that pipeline in place where we understand gameplay, that we have a design team and we know how to work with them and with game systems, combat systems especially. We need to get that experience under our belt, so that was when I went 'what about a deckbuilder?'
"For us, doing a deckbuilder in the Summerfall way means having a layer where there's narrative and characters on top of [the gameplay], without overshadowing it, which is really easy to do – if you have too much story, then people who enjoy the deckbuilder genre itself will go 'well, that's taking me away from the thing I like.' So ideally [the gameplay and narrative] have to work together, and for me that presented a challenge like Stray Gods, because apparently I can't go without a challenge. 'How can I build a Constantine game [2005 film featuring Keanu Reeves] without calling it Constantine (sorry) and give it this cool noir aesthetic that I like and have good characters, but also have the roguelike elements?'
"For me, it wasn't so much the deckbuilder [side of things], it was the roguelike part [that was interesting]" he recalls. "I love roguelikes where the run, the repeating element, is a diegetic thing, where the characters know it's happening and not just 'we try again.'"
But there is, of course, the elephant in the room – what comes after Malys? There was, of course, Phobos, which he tells me drew inspiration from Tamsyn Muir's book series, The Locked Tomb. Gaider explains how the game might have worked. "What if you took this world where magic was waning and disappearing, and you're one of a group of wizards that all found their way to a ruin that was supposed to contain the possibility of bringing magic back to the world?" he muses. "And it was them competing against each other as they go through this room, you solve the puzzles, you have these seven other people you could become allies or enemies with, and the story would change radically depending on the choices you made. I just love giving the player room to make choices to screw themselves. These seven characters would represent very different ideologies and character types that would have presented a really interesting challenge to the player because they would need allies – the road would be impossible to get through on your own."
But Phobos is gone, and Malys feels like the precursor to something else, so what does that look like in Gaider's head? "There are a lot of possibilities, but I can't get away from the idea that there's room to develop romances in RPGs. I think it very often gets pushed to the side as if they're not important. Even in Baldur's Gate 3, which did its romances well, they were tertiary content: if you didn't engage in any romances, the game ultimately didn't really change in any way. What if there was a story where romance was part of the point; where having a romance actually changed the game?
"We're fine with the idea that our big adventure movies or science fiction movies have romance baked into the main plot, and we don't question that. With games, it's still sort of a side deal, and it feels like there's this undercurrent where romance isn't what boys like, and therefore not really worth making part of the main plot thread. I'm not saying that all romance is great and it's definitely possible to do romance poorly, however it does feel like it's got pushed off to the sidelines as a result of us deciding that games are made for boys, and boys like action. That's a base assumption that I don't think is true. So that's always been my thing: what would I do with the romances now that I have the chance to say 'no, I'm not going to push it off to the sidelines, I want to make it the show.'"
While we'll have to wait and see what happens with Summerfall's proposed RPG, Malys' Kickstarter is live now. There's only a couple of days left to pledge, however, so if you're keen on ing the project (or, alternatively, naming one of its demons after one of your exs) then head on over to the game's official page. In the meantime, however, I'll be musing over what that RPG could look like – as a longtime Dragon Age fan and recent Baldur's Gate 3 convert, it sounds pretty damn good to me.