NFT Horror game The Bornless will include “NFT owners-only” mode

Publication date of the original Japanese article: 2021-10-22 17:08 (JST)
Translated by. Ryuki Ishii

A Pre-Alpha gameplay teaser for a multiplayer horror game called The Bornless was released on October 20, and it is getting attention for its NFT usage. The Japanese horror game blog Horror Game no Susume reported. The identity of the developer is unclear at the moment, but Filmmaker Aaron Wheeler seems to be involved.

The Bornless will include multiple game modes, and one of them is the NFT owners-only Tournament Mode. NFT (Non-Fungible Token) is a way to provide and maintain ownership rights of digital files and data.

In this game, NFTs are “made up of 8 collections, each representing one of the 8 characters in the game’s story.” Each collection contains 665 NFT items, and only the owners of these NFTs will be eligible for the tournament. They will compete in teams of two, and the last team standing will be rewarded with the 666^th NFT in the collection.

The tournaments will be held periodically, and NFTs will be traded through the NFT marketplace OpenSea.

In the Tournament Mode, three pairs will participate in each match. They’ll start the match from a safe house, explore the forest, and fight using knives and guns. The forest is dark and quiet, so you’ll be using lantern lights, footsteps, and gunfire to locate opponents’ positions. There are catacombs located in the forest, which are filled with traps and other dangers, but the rewards are said to be well worth the risk.

Your opponents and traps are not the only danger, though. Orobas, the demon of the forest, is also trying to hunt down the players. There’s no way to defeat him, and trying to escape by just running away won’t do much. You’ll have to observe and understand the behavior pattern of Orobas to safely evade confrontation.

Furthermore, you can find incense in the forest. Bring it back to the safe house, burn it, and offer it to Orobas. He will prioritize the pair with the least offerings, so searching for incense is a key to survival. Players won’t know the number of offerings done by other pairs, unless they are in first. The pair that survives until the end wins. Match also ends if the match timer expires.

Aside from tournaments, there’s an eight-player co-op mode where the team work together to defeat Orobas, and a survival mode called “As above, so below” where players “work together in a team of four to explore the procedurally generated catacombs.”

Detail about this game is still scarce, but the developer is planning to hold online and real-world treasure hunts before launch. There’s an official Discord server that you can join as well.

They might be limiting the information to be in line with the game’s atmosphere and its dark setting. That said, developers will probably need to increase their transparency in the future, if they are to attract a larger audience and participants for the tournaments.

The release date of The Bornless is yet to be determined. Description of the PvE mode mentions “Steam Achievement,” so I think it’s safe to assume that the game will come out on Steam.

However, Valve recently notified developers that “applications built on blockchain technology that issues or allow exchange of cryptocurrencies or NFTs” are not allowed on Steam (PC Gamer). While it is unclear whether The Bornless falls under this category, it may have to use other platforms instead, if things don’t work out.