It happened. The Schools of Magic of the known world – driven by an insane power craving competition – finally pushed the big red button. We don’t really remember who did what exactly, but the effects were felt everywhere, instantly. A plain and definitive annihilation of 95% of living things in a joyful purple explosion of pure magic.

Cities were crumbling, littered with oozing corpses. The air changed too. It became saturated with a more or less compact mist, the only thing that was left from the string of explosions caused by the madness of the mages. Of course, this mist, even if displaying nice and vivid colors, caused death. And sometimes worse. They say that the curious and the fool alike who lived in mist-infested areas came out of there transformed in bloodthirsty monstruosities.

After the confusion, came the time of action. Most of the surviving beings succombed to a cosy insanity, blaming and killing each other. Others decided to fight until the very end. They naturally gathered in places where the mist was less thick and tried to keep some cities afloat.

The survivors understood quite rapidly the infernal cycle which was now their daily routine. Days were quiet and peaceful. They could take time to organize themselves, heal their wounds and search the surroundings for anything useful. But the nights… The mist thickened and from their bowels unleashes hordes of mutated monsters, craving for blood and magic.

So now they have to repel them, until dawn. Stand strong, at all costs. And above all, keep them from destroying our walls, last remnants of their glorious past. And protect those freaking mages. They say they have a plan.

In 2014, we decided to shift our focus and stop trying to force ourselves to make games in which we didn’t believe in. We wanted to try for the first – and maybe the last – time to make games that we liked to play ourselves, without the artificial constraints we put on our shoulders all of these years.

In 2015, we released Dead In Bermuda, a survival management game in which you lead a team of 8 survivors from a plane crash on a strange island. We experimented on the core gameplay loop and managed to come up with an innovative mix of genres which appealed to some players. We managed to create something new, and people liked it! It was the sign that we could continue towards this path.

This led us to make Dead In Vinland, its sequel/spin-off. This time the game was about a Vikings’ family exiled from their home. In this game, we introduced many new features: a combat system, recruitables characters, non-linear quests, dynamic endings, traits system… Dead In Vinland was an even bigger success with PC players! One year after release, we currently have 400+ positive reviews on Steam (80% user score), and the game made us known a bit more as indie developers. We wanted to go all the way with Vinland, so we released a lot of free post-release patches and 3 DLCs, as well as porting the game to Nintendo Switch.

After the end of Dead In Vinland’s development, we started to think about what was next for the team: a third episode of the “Dead In” series, or something else? We wanted to focus on the battle gameplay, because it was still something we didn’t dare to go “full sails”. This is how we came up with the concept of The Last Spell, a tactical RPG with roguelite elements about a group of heroes trying to save the world, against all odds.

Our main references are games like UFO/XCOM, Jagged Alliance and Fire Emblem series, along with indie gems: Battle Brothers, Into the Breach, Slay the Spire.