Murals might look like a stylish take on the Hades roguelike formula at first glance, but Disney Illusion Island developer Dlala Studios isn’t aiming to copy Supermassive’s homework. Instead, the studio is looking to put its own spin on the genre, as it fuses dark fairy tales and hews closer to the action-first approach of modern-day Doom and Diablo. One other big difference in Murals is that it’ll offer a customizable approach to difficulty, as Dlala Studios says it wants to prioritize player fun over punishing runs–unless you’re into that kind of thing.
“There are difficulty selectors, and you can kind of tweak some of the individual settings,” Dlala CEO, Aj Grand-Scrutton, said to GameSpot. “We’ve kind of got some of the high-level ones you’d imagine: enemy damage, enemy health. We’ve also got stuff that affects the player’s health. Something that [design director] Grant Allen was really keen on in Disney Illusion Island, we tried to make it as welcoming as possible.
“And whilst this is obviously a slightly more core genre, we tried to do the same here. When we’re building, we don’t care about player deaths. Our goal isn’t to kill the player; it’s to make sure they have fun. We try to make it as customizable as we can so everyone can get through. Even if you’re a button-masher, that’s a legitimate tactic in our rules.”
Grand-Scrutton added that the moment-to-moment gameplay of roguelikes like Hades inspired the fast, frantic combat in Murals, but the goal was to capture a “persistent, linear” experience within the fairy tale worlds that players will explore. As mentioned above, Doom and Diablo also helped inspire the game’s design, and Allen added that an indie game called Blazing Beaks also served as an influence.
“For me, it was kind of like looking at those games and understanding the experimentation that they had,” Allen added. “But obviously, it’s very finite how long you have those for in those games. It was more like looking at our game as more like a child’s science kit.”
Revealed during Gamescom Opening Night Live, Murals will see players trek through hand-painted fairy tales that have gone spectacularly wrong. For example, Sleeping Beauty is an insomniac, and Rapunzel’s own hair is trying to murder her. As the amnesiac protagonist, it’s up to you to defeat distorted legends from lore and take down the enigmatic Creator. Murals will launch for PC in 2027.
