Announced at The Game Awards today, Hellboy Web of Wyrd is a "roguelite" action game in production by West of Dead studio Upstream Arcade, with a story written "in partnership with" Dark Horse Comics and Hellboy creator Mike Mignola.
"This roguelite action adventure game features monstrous toe-to-toe brawling," reads the game's Steam page. "Like the comics, the game sends Hellboy on a series of vastly different and wholly unique adventures; and while those stories stand on their own, they are all tied to the mysterious legacy of The Butterfly House."
The story of The Butterfly House, a gateway "into a terrible and fascinating dimension called The Wyrd," sounds pretty cool. Hellboy lore is mostly new to me (outside of the Ron Perlman movies), and the promise of "perverse angles and non-Euclidean geometries" has me interested.
- Romanian folklore, David Lynch, and heavy metal come together in a dark fantasy hack-and-slash action game 'with an even darker sense of humor'
- Blades of Fire is a God of War-style action game coming to PC from the creators of Metroid Dread, and it's almost definitely a spiritual successor to Severance
The immediately striking thing about Hellboy Web of Wyrd, though, is the game's thick-lined art style, which renders shadows as big flat fields of black. Emulating 2D animation and comic book art with realtime 3D rendering can miss hard, but at least in the trailer, Web of Wyrd looks pretty badass to me, if possibly disorienting in moments of combat where silhouettes get lost in the darkness.
As for that combat, we'll "chain together hard-hitting melee and ranged attacks to fight a diverse array of increasingly nightmarish enemies," according to the Steam page.
Web of Wyrd doesn't have a release date yet. Its Steam page says "to be announced."
