In 2021, I joined Ocean Drive Studio working on Lost Eidolons, a turn-based tactics RPG pitched as “Fire Emblem meets Dragon Age”. We worked our butts off on that game, but for various reasons not worth getting into, it didn’t quite come together the way we wanted.
Flash forward to 2023, and a spin-off/sequel is being greenlit for Lost Eidolons, with ya boy as Lead Narrative Designer. We called it Lost Eidolons: Veil of the Witch, and the pitch this time was “Fire Emblem meets Hades (or Slay the Spire)”.
A tactics game at heart, but with a looping roguelike structure, VotW was to serve as a quasi-reboot, repackaging the events of the first game as prologue in a way that would be accessible to new players, while also pivoting the franchise from gritty Low Fantasy to Dark Fantasy, and drawing to the surface a lot of the stuff that got left on the cutting room floor the first time around.
Development on VotW was an absolute whirlwind, not least of which because I/we were also stretched across a bunch of other games at the time (including Section 13, another game with a complicated development history that I was bumped up to Narrative Lead on about halfway through). Even now, if you ask me where 2023-2025 went, aboutnall I can remember of it is a fugue state of writing, rewriting, and a few hundred hours of voiceover sessions. (Also somewhere in there my brother died, which…yeah…)
Yet against all odds, by the time the game was hitting console cert, it was becoming apparent that we had somehow managed to make a halfway decent thing. Now, a little less than a year out from release, Veil of the Witch holds an 81% positive score on Steam, which anybody who’s ever launched a PC game could tell you is by no means an easy achievement.
Today I heard news that Veil of the Witch was chosen as one of 16 “Best Games of the Year” by the Korean Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, in partnership with the Electronic Times, The Games Daily, and the Korea Creative Content Agency. (Additionally, as a result of this selection, the game becomes an automatic nominee for Game of the Year in the Korea Game Awards, which will take place later this year.)
Surreal is an understatement. I am incredibly proud of this game, and the blisteringly hard work that our entire team put into it. Dragging it across the finish line almost put me in the ground, and I’m not always sure that cost is worth it, but today it is.