Rusted Moss is an action-exploration sport advanced through solo folks (no longer a part of any building studios) that revolves round its bizarre manner of traversal: an absurdly bouncy grappling hook. We received’t lie: the physics-based grappling will deliver you each nice ache and nice pleasure. However the triumph whenever you grasp it — you’ll almost fly during the sport whilst blasting enemies along with your arsenal of weapons when Rusted Moss involves PS5 on June 20.
On this melancholic international, people get ready for an invasion through capricious fairies from some other realm. You play as Fern, a changeling decided to place an finish to the warfare. As you discover the tale at the back of the sector, you’ll in the end make a selection a facet: fae or human?
With the PS5 liberate, we also are including in seven to 8 hours of extra content material — roughly as a lot content material as the bottom sport itself. This contains new zones (starting from average to very tricky), a chairman rush, and an extra playable persona.
A novel grappling hook
All through a show-and-tell with indie builders, Emlise (the principle dev) confirmed a grappling hook that labored like a bungee rope or rubber band. She carried out improbable, loopy maneuvers that made conventional platformer skills like double jumps and dashes appear so restricted. I had by no means noticed anything else like that — grappling hooks in maximum video games both simply pull you to the anchor level or swing the participant in static arcs.
It appeared so polished that I used to be positive she would expand it right into a complete sport. However she had no plans to. She noticed it as a programming workout to be informed about verlet integration (a numerical equation used to calculate trajectories).
“Avid gamers would to find it too tricky. It takes a while to get used to,” says Emlise.
Each and every people then performed our responsibility as pals and peer-pressured her into proceeding building. My sister and I additionally joined her, forming our 3-person building staff. It was once unusual as a result of we had no purpose of constructing a sport in combination earlier than that second.
Rusted Moss was once made to deliver this mechanic to lifestyles, no longer for the sake of constructing a sport or to move full-time on indie dev (my sister and I paintings day jobs out of doors the sport trade).
I believe its foundation gave a purity to Rusted Moss’ basis as a result of there was once unquestionably as to what sort of sport it might grow to be. The whole lot would revolve round only one core mechanic — the grappling hook.
Please break our game
Synergy with the grappling hook became the focus of Rusted Moss’ game design. The abilities you gain all enhance the physics-based traversal — whether it’s a charge jump that lets you fall further, or the kickback from your guns.
This maximizes the opportunity for player expression and creativity. Progression is not based on a simple lock-and-key solution, which is a design pattern often found in other action exploration games.
With these synergistic abilities, we’ve seen the same platforming challenge solved in five different ways. If a player is creative, determined, and skilled enough, they can “break” our game and show us moves we didn’t even consider during Rusted Moss’ development.
We took this philosophy to the extreme during our quality assurance testing period. One tester found a bug that gave them an unintentional movement ability. Rather than fix it, we added a visual effect when that ability is active. We love seeing our players discover this “secret ability” in-game.
Unusual children
The main character, Fern, has a sharp and acidic personality. Women are often pressured to be nice and think about what “nice” means to the people interacting with them. Based on our experiences as an all-female dev team, Fern is a power fantasy that opposes that narrative, sometimes to an extreme. She says what she thinks, which is often quite nasty and honestly… hilarious!
This aligns with her identity as a changeling — a fairy that has replaced a stolen baby. In folk tales, children who acted strangely were identified as changelings and treated cruelly. Nowadays we might think of them as neurodivergent or unusual in some other way. We wanted to explore themes around children turning out to be something the parents did not want or expect.
Prepare to learn all the tricks at Fern’s disposal and maybe discover some new ones when Rusted Moss launches on PS5 June 20.
