Okay, why does this look like Hyper Light Drifter crossed with The Legend of Zelda and yet it's not in my hands right now? This is Songbringer. You're a sword-swinging dude in a top hat that apparently just woke up a Big Bad Evil Thing, and now you're exactly the person stuck with the job of putting the Big Bad Evil Thing back down. Welcome to Ekzera, a procedurally generated land of dungeons—nine of them, to be exact—that you can explore in any order, and coming from any direction.
Sometimes that's all you gotta say to get my explorer senses tingling.
Sure, it looks like it's trying a little too hard, concept-wise, when you're an actual shirtless guy wearing an actual top hat. But that's not important. You're in a science-fantasy epic, where it's you, your sword, and a whole lot of sword swingin' in that wonderful 8-bit retrogaming art style.
Songbringer is the name of the game, which is named after your starship. You get to travel between worlds, typing in different words (and/or just jumbles of letters) to create a seed in which the entire world builds off of. If you seeded a world called "GamingNexusIsRad," for example, then you could have anybody type in that same seed and they would get the exact same world you got. That's where leaderboards and speedruns come into play, if that's your thing. But the leaderboard also takes into account how much of a world you've explored, not just how fast you killed the bad guys.
Songbringer is out today, September 1, on Steam. I want to get my Hyper Light Driftin' hands all over this one.
