Yoshio Nishimura’s independent game label Digitalis Publishing has announced that the fantasy RPG Veritas Tales: Witch of the Dark Castle will launch on July 9 for PC (Steam). Six years in the making, this title is inspired by old-school gamebooks and tabletop RPGs, having the player interact with a literal book in-game.
With a 30-year track record in the game industry, Nishimura started his career at Capcom (where he eventually became the chief background artist for the Monster Hunter series), before joining George Kamitani’s studio Vanillaware. At Vanillaware, he was involved in the development of titles like Odin Sphere, Dragon’s Crown, and 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim over the course of 20 years.
As he recently told Denfaminicogamer, Nishimura left Vanillaware on positive terms following the COVID 19 pandemic, during which he’d moved to a remote mountain village in Japan and got accustomed to a different lifestyle far away from the studio’s offices in Osaka. Becoming independent, the developer fully devoted himself to the passion project that would become Veritas Tales: Witch of the Dark Castle. Nishimura initially started working on the game as a personal side-project during his last three years at Vanillaware, so the title has been in the works for 6 years now.
With a gameplay system that blends visual novel and RPG systems, Veritas Tales is a digital fantasy gamebook in which the player rolls dice, makes choices, faces enemies, and progresses along a branching storyline. The title draws inspiration from James Herbert Brennan’s “The Castle of Darkness” and intentionally keeps some of the inconvenient and cruel characteristics of old-school gamebooks, so suddenly dying after a wrong choice shouldn’t come as a surprise. On the other hand, the game modernizes the format with a save feature, voice acting, and music (by Final Fantasy Tactics composer Hitoshi Sakimoto).
Veritas Tales offers about 20+ hours of gameplay with 300 hand-drawn illustrations by Nishimura. Generative AI was not used at any stage of development, and the developers say the game “has a soul that can only be found in something truly handmade.”
Veritas Tales: Witch of the Dark Castle is scheduled to launch on July 9 for PC (Steam).
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This is great news, just seen the trailer and seeing the no AI used and handmade messages make me want to support developers like this!
And yet it looks ai made
Looks really nice, hope the game sells well!
How long Japanese indie developers continue to make games that super niche and are sold just around thousand copies?????? Especially it comes from veteran developers, they can’t keep having small mindset forever by having indie excuse. Being indie doesn’t mean can’t reach wide mainstream aufiences while retain full creativity. It’s totally doable. Silksong, Dispatch, Expedition33, Stardew Valley, Hades, Disco Elysium, etc. are undoubtedly today’s gold standard. If Japanese indie devs can’t make games that are near that standard and nobody cares about, they shouldn’t make games at all in the first place
Are you even listening to yourself? “don’t make stuff you enjoy when it’s not mainstream”
I hope you stub your toe repeatedly today, that your pillow is always warm and sticky, and your batteries empty. This mindset is the worst advice ever for any kind of creative work. Do what you love. The rest follows.
Yeah, they can make “anything they love”, while letting their country leapfrogged by China, Korea, or Western devs🤣 “Do what you love” isn’t enough in today’s intensified competition, even for indie devs. That’s just poor excuse.
Also, I dont bother to your bad prayer. It may go back to yourself