Untitled Paper RPG has been floating around for years now. Adam Robinson-Yu, who developed the critically-acclaimed exploration walking sim A Short Hike, started the project shortly after Paper Mario Color Splash was announced for the Wii U. Robinson-Yu wanted to make a turn-based tribute that stayed a bit more true to the RPG series’ roots. Almost a decade later the game is now officially on ice, but a one-to-two hour demo has been released that we can try for free.
“After releasing A Short Hike and working on the subsequent updates and ports…I didn’t really want to go back to this game?” Robinson-Yu wrote in a recent update on his itch.io page. “The development for the RPG had become difficult, which was why I took a break from it in the first place. I might return to this project someday, but I’ve been working on other things and don’t see myself making time for this RPG in near future.”
He said the scope of the game, which included a mechanic to recruit most of the monsters you face, had gotten to be a bit much. Between the battle system and overworld, he felt like he was almost making two games instead of one. Plus, he didn’t really have a story for the RPG and was worried battles felt monotonous compared to the strategizing of an Into the Breach or Slay the Spire. “I wanted to get it to a point where combat felt strategic and puzzly,” Robinson-Yu wrote. “But I got the sense that battles just felt like an annoying obstacle to players interested in exploring.”
The developer said that A Short Hike, a chill, pretty, and occasionally bittersweet journey, was unexpectedly lucrative for him, so he hasn’t been pinched for time. But a Paper Mario-like adventure wasn’t necessarily feeling like a fit for the type of games he’s interested in making. “I thought there was some dissonance between the cute and grounded world I was trying to make and the requirement for an RPG story to justify lots of fights and violence,” he wrote. “I’m not against video game violence, but it always felt at odds with the kinds of feelings I wanted to express at the time.”
Outside of a Pumpkin Carving MMO, Robinson-Yu hasn’t released anything since 2019, but he’s working on a bunch of things that might come out eventually, including an “action adventure game,” a different micro-RPG using Claymation, and an online platforming roguelike. Hopefully, one of those makes it to release, or at the very least we get a demos for them as well.
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