"Bound By Flame": Can Art Direction Conquer All? (Video)

"Bound By Flame": Can Art Direction Conquer All? (Video)

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Complex Original

Image via Complex Original

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With well-established genres like fantasy and scifi, it can be exceedingly easy to fall into the trap of generic artwork, but with their new RPG Bound By Flame, French developer Spiders seems to be giving it their all to avoid doing just that. Perhaps coming off the tepid reception to their last game, the sadly generic-looking Mars: War Logs, or maybe inspired by the recent trend towards the twisted dark fantasy direction of the Souls games and The Witcher, Bound By Flame (whose layout admittedly still kind of resembles War Logs at a glance) at least looks visually interesting, with some rather bizarre permutations on the kind of fantasy character and creature tropes (one trailer shows off a giant turtle shelled-tusk-faced monster, to name one example.)

In the video above you also get some weird beasts like bipedal backward-legged things that resemble a mix of a metroid and Resident Evil 5 mutant insects. (The sound design seems cool, too.) Jury's out on how it'll actually play, and the production values make it definitely look like more of a cross-gen game than a true next-one even on PS4, but if you're looking a potentially (visually?) interesting RPG for the Summer, you might want to look into this one when it hits the PS3, PS4 and Xbox 360 May 9.

 [Via Youtube]

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