A young swordsman gets caught up in a feud between rival martial arts families and must set out on a journey to improve his skills and become a hero. It’s the delightful plot of so many fantastic wuxia stories, and Wandering Sword, an upcoming tactical RPG from Chinese developer The Swordman Studio, aims to create this rich world in beautifully lit 2.5D style.
Wandering Sword will be an open world game about exploring, making friends and learning mystical kung fu techniques in a fantastical world reminiscent of ancient China. Building friendships with NPCs is an important way to both recruit new characters for your party and learn new martial arts. Of course, in true wuxia fashion, the developers say that you can “even fall in love!”
We first saw Wandering Sword in early 2022 (opens in new tab)when it was announced, but it’s definitely come a long way since then. Released as part of the current Steam Next Fest, the demo has plenty to recommend if you’re skeptical of the aesthetic and premise.
For my part, it has the variety and weird techniques you’ve come to expect from this genre. It plans to master and use hundreds of martial arts forms and weapons, each of which has a tree of skills and powers laid out over a skill tree shaped like acupuncture meridian points on a human body. Combat is either turn-based or played out in real-time on a battle grid, allowing you to take your time in tough fights or plow through weak enemies in real-time.
The demo has a lot of these to play around with and is about three hours long. It’s a pretty neat system. While the tactical moves aren’t too deep, I think there’s scope for the design to become interesting and complex over the playtime of a full RPG.
As a fan of the fantastical wuxia and taoism-inspired xianxia stories by the likes of Jin Yong, I love the idea of a video game world built around the idea of mythical martial artists fighting for supremacy in technique and morality. Here is for you practitioners of 18 Dragon Subduing Palms.
You can find Wandering Sword and its demo on Steam (opens in new tab). The English translation is a bit shallow for now, so hopefully a good editor and translator can hammer some personality into it ahead of release later this year.
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