Soul Fjord, the next game from Portal creator Kim Swift and the team at Airtight Games, is an Ouya-exclusive dungeon crawler with rhythm-based combat.
"The typical recipe of a rhythm game meets rogue-like dungeon crawler, set in a fantasy universe where Norse mythology has gotten an injection of '70s funk and soul," says Swift, is what makes Soul Fjord special. Its grindhouse-y, 'sploitation elements, which you can see in the trailer below, definitely hit those points.
Disco Wizards, Lounge Dragons, and Norse-Funk music.
"As a team," she continues, "we have this sliding bar between '70s funk and Norse mythology. Every decision we make from music, to atmosphere, to characters, to environment we have to make a choice on where we want that slider to land. What that means to you is...Disco Wizards, Lounge Dragons, Norse-Funk music and the baddest Viking in town, Magnus Jones." As Jones, players explore procedurally generated dungeons as he clobbers his way through random enemies and into Valhalla.
Something nutty like this would typically find a welcoming home on PC, where communities live for indie games, or PlayStation Network, where Airtight's own Quantum Conundrum found a loving audience. I asked Kim Swift if Soul Fjord would ever make its way outside the unproven Ouya and onto those markets. "Currently, Soul Fjord is slated to be a console exclusive only to the Ouya, and is designed around the console," she says. Like DoubleFine's Broken Age, this open-endedness allows Airtight to bring Soul Fjord to mobile and PC as well.
For Swift, what sets the Android console apart is "that it’s not trying to fit into the arms race of the next-gen consoles. I do believe that there’s space for Ouya with the rise in popularity of indie games, coupled with the fact that [Ouya's] price point will make [it] the most reasonably priced gaming machine on the market."
Vikings and soul. Hell yeah.
Swift is over-the-moon positive about Airtight and Ouya's relationship, which she sees equally opportunistic and beneficial. Ultimately, it comes down to the hand-in-hand leap of faith that typically comes with launching a new game franchise.
"We’re taking a chance on Ouya being a new console, and they in turn are taking a chance on us."
IGN recently spent significant time with the hardware, and came away impressed, but were let down by the games. Soul Fjord is just what Ouya needed. Will you be taking a chance on both?
The Ouya blog will have a developer diary for Soul Fjord today, and IGN will have plenty more before its to-be-announced release.
Mitch Dyer is an Associate Editor at IGN. He’s also quite Canadian. Read his ramblings on Twitter and follow him on IGN.
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