In a testament that it is truly the best console ever made, news has come out that the long-discontinued Sega Dreamcast is receiving yet another game. While it had a very short shelf life of only two years up until 2001, the homebrew scene has been flourishing ever since thanks to the ease of publishing games to CD-ROM disks.
The latest title will be called Reaperi Cycle and is being developed by the Ancient Hermetic Developers Guild. What does either of those things mean? This simple writer does not know – and for the time being, the premise of the game is just as mystifying.
So far, we have a few videos on YouTube, an Instagram page and an extremely basic website to go by. The website states that it will be an “isometric alchemical tale about fire, magic, merchants, statues and a temple”, while the few videos divulge little else.
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The announcement trailer (embedded above) shows a bunch of items in a surreal environment backed by some fantastic music and dialogue which I believe is in French. I think it’s in French because that’s what the sequences of text also interwoven throughout the short trailer is – at least, if Google Translate is to be trusted, anyway. In English, it states as follows:
“What is at the top, is like, what is below, in a flask.”
Okay.
The other video is of pre-alpha gameplay and is from all the way back in June. That mostly shows text, but this time in English. That doesn’t make the premise any clearer, though. See if you can decipher it yourself.
It does give a glimpse of a few seconds of gameplay after what is probably the storyline, however, and shows (in an isometric viewpoint as promised) what looks like a podium surrounded by four bells. The player mouses over one of the bells (at least, I think it’s a bell) and what looks like pieces of parchment start rotating around it. The text “les fioles” also appears, and it looks like that translates into “the vials” – so I guess they’re vials, not bells. Never trust me to guess anything.
If you were to at least consider my guesses, though, I’d wager that it’s some sort of puzzle game – and a heavily story oriented one at that. It’s a shame that the launch trailer is so equivocal, it’s hard to tell which environments have been captured in-game or generated otherwise to give us more clues.
Otherwise, there is currently not much else to say. There is no release date, mention of cost let alone solid information about the gameplay, so for now, we’ll just have to play it by ear. Watch this space or their Instagram for more clear info. Hopefully.
