Runwild Entertainment has been a work-for-hire studio since its founding in 2016. It’s now showing off its first original project — Almighty: Kill Your Gods, a co-op action-RPG coming to PC and consoles later this year. It made the announcement today during the Guerrilla Collective indie game presentation, all-digital event that developed after the cancellation of the annual Electronic Entertainment Expo game industry trade show.
Versus Evil is publishing Almighty, and this fits the company’s MO: finding intriguing games from independent studios and helping them bring their products to market. Versus Evil has a special affinity for RPGs, with the likes of The Banner Saga and Pillars of Eternity: Deadfire. You and your co-op partners take on giant monsters and evil gods, and in some ways, it sounds like games like Monster Hunter and Dauntless.
In Almighty, you play the role of an alpha. These are magical warriors who use the power of their ancestors to pull off their feats against the people’s oppressors, the Elder Gods, who have a tyrannical hold on the world of Anun.
Your weapons are a set of magic gauntlets, which can pull off ranged attacks as well as melee. How? You can throw fireballs like a wizard at a mage fair. You craft gauntlets from power stones and other loot you gather from your fallen foes. Powers include shooting ice, healing your friends, and creating magical shields.
Killing your gods
The world’s gods aren’t kind. They’ve turned their worshipers into slaves. And the people are tired of it, ready to cast off these beings.
“You are killing gods to get from under their tentacles of oppression and flipping the tables,” said creative director Darran Thomas, a cofounder of Runwild. “You are now feeding on them where they once fed on you. [It] just so happens a god heart is rather tasty and feeds a family of four for a month. You start the game with them having just harvested your home island for resources, and you must rebuild and fight back.”
But if you can kill them, are they really gods? Or are they fooling you into thinking they’re gods?
“There are many gods in the game universe, well, [they’re] not really gods as it turns out, just powerful beings, and the first type that you encounter are the Elder Gods,” Thomas said. “These tentacled-like creatures use technology to harness magic and are corporate-like in their organization. They represent order and are authoritarian in nature. They are spreading influence throughout your lands, consuming all in their quest for progress.”
Who are you?
No, you aren’t Batman. You’re an alpha. These warriors are leading the fight against the so-called Elder Gods. And they’ve got more than just a touch of lycanthropy.
“An alpha takes responsibility for protecting and providing for its people, and in this world they just happen to be werewolf-like creatures,” Thomas said. “The players tribe is called the Kun Anun, which comes from the Welsh Cwn Annwn, which means ‘Hounds of Otherworld,’ where the initial inspiration came from. There’s various mythological stories about these characters, they were later called ‘Hounds of Hell,’ which we think has the right level of mischievousness.”
Why Almighty?
Thomas and his cofounders started Runwild in 2016. It’s been a work-for-hire studio, but they wanted to make a game that brought people to play together.
“We wanted to make a game that encouraged co-operative play in a seamless multiplayer experience, where you could be hunting as a lone wolf one minute and battling a god in a pack of alphas the next,” he said. “Where you are not just focusing on individual character progression, but have a sense of home and family. Kind of like having a real world home and family with a 9-to-5 job, but this job involves hunting and killing monsters and gods, and making sure those monsters and gods don’t end up eating your home and family.”
Runwild will have more details about Almighty later this year.
