‘GreedFall’ is Spiders Studios’ 17th-century role-playing fever dream

By Gabe Gurwin February 9, 2017

GreedFall - Reveal Teaser

Spiders Studio, the developer responsible for action role-playing games like Mars: War Logs and The Technomancer, has revealed its latest project: GreedFall. Though the role-playing game takes place hundreds of years in the past, its world is just as fantastical and creative as anything the studio has done to date.

With a visual style “inspired by Baroque art from 17th century Europe,” GreedFall takes players to a remote island rumored to contain physical riches as well as “lost secrets,” both of which are sought after by other settlers and mercenaries. Don’t let the game’s more traditional setting fool you — the game might not take place on Mars, but the island contains plenty of supernatural elements that play to Spiders’ strengths.

“The island of GreedFall is a living, ever-evolving world. Your actions, from seemingly trivial choices to the most important political decisions, will influence and affect its course as well as the relationship between the different factions established on the island,” publisher Focus Home Interactive said in the official reveal.

The game’s first teaser trailer shows a dichotomy between supernatural abilities and traditional weaponry that some are already comparing to Bloodborne. Armed with a muzzle-loading musket, a settler fires a lone shot at a fleeing target. Moving in to finish her off with a pistol, the ground around her begins to glow and a skeletal antler monster launches the shooter into the air.

Though the monster looks like it could come out of one of From Software’s games, don’t expect to be fighting your way through every encounter in GreedFall. Spiders CEO Jeanne Rousseau refers to the game as “an RPG at its core,” with multiple options to get through quests including diplomacy and stealth in addition to the standard “kill everything” option. This appears to build on the open-ended options in The Technomancer, which took clear inspiration from BioWare’s Mass Effect series.

GreedFall hits PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC in 2018.

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Former Digital Trends Contributor

Gabe Gurwin has been playing games since 1997, beginning with the N64 and the Super Nintendo. He began his journalism career…

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