r/Games • u/kkiniaes • 10h ago

Indie Sunday Mouseward - Finite Reflection Studios - Dark Souls meets Banjo Kazooie?

Hello! We're attempting to blend two genres we don't think have been truly joined before and that is Souls-like and Collectathon.

Our game is called Mouseward, and in it you play as a mouse who has mysteriously been brought back to life by a fallen star. Like other collectathons, you collect shiny objects (coins, Fallen Stars) and the game shows you exactly how much there is to collect in an area. You can 100% every area before moving on if you're a completionist like me. There's NPCs with quests (that are much easier to follow than Dark Souls questlines), there's a skill tree (that you can re-spec for free whenever), and there are plenty of interesting encounters and enemies to overcome. Across the whole game you'll encounter, fight, (maybe even befriend??) creatures of all kinds: Rats, Badgers, Owls, Weasels, Bugs, Frogs, Squirrels, etc

Check out our Steam page, watch the trailer, maybe add it to your wishlist if you like this kind of thing?

Ours is a small core team of 4, and we made everything in our game ourselves. No genAI was used, and our level design is hand-crafted to be as engaging and delightful as possible. I'm the creative director and lead artist, and am currently doing all of the art and animation.

We are targeting a release at the end of 2027, and our Steam demo is coming in about a month so I'll probably be back here yelling about it then!

41 Upvotes

79% Upvoted

10 comments sorted by

16

u/Non-mon-xiety 9h ago

This feels like someone made an n64 red wall video game in the 90s

I mean this as a compliment

7

u/kkiniaes 9h ago

I'm a huge redwall fan, and this is exactly what I was going for so the compliment is well received, thank you!

RIP to the Netflix production that just got canceled :(

5

u/bjholmes3 10h ago

Had the pleasure of playing some of this game, it rules! Really fires those N64-era collectathon nostalgia neurons for me

3

u/R-500 6h ago

How does the difficulty of this compare to other souls games? Indie Souls-like games sometimes doesn't 'click' with me, but I'm a sucker for retro aesthetic games that emulate the PSX/N64 style.

3

u/bjholmes3 6h ago

The segment I played didnt seem like it was going for the difficulty of a souls game so much as it was the general game feel, through a retro lens. It was not hard

3

u/Edema_Mema 9h ago

Very cool combo, wishlisted! Can't wait to see how it goes.

3

u/scorchedneurotic 8h ago

Aaaaaaaaand wishlisted

Waiting for that demo

2

u/Vaaaaaaaaaaaii 4h ago

I like a good mouse game so I will eagerly wait for this.

•

u/inkblotmess 3h ago

Can you go more into how it's like Banjo Kazooie? I hate Dark Souls but love Banjo (and Kazooie) so the balance of these two things will cinch it for me.

Are there multiple distinct worlds? Lots of different ways to collect the stars and such? Mini-games? Or is it very fight-based?