The February Game Release Zelda Fans Shouldn't Miss
The Legend of Zelda remains a spectacularly influential game franchise — and if you're a fan, there's a Zelda-inspired game coming soon that you should put on your radar. A new gameplay trailer reveals that Blue Fire, an indie title that's being developed by Argentina's ROBI Studios for publication by Graffiti Games, will be released on Feb. 4 on Nintendo Switch and for PCs through Steam.
The single-player action-adventure, which looks like it was also inspired by the movement of Hollow Knight and elements of Dark Souls, was first shown during a March 2020 Nintendo Indie World Showcase and scheduled for a summer release. That clearly didn't happen. However, the release of the game is imminent now, bringing players to a desolate and forgotten kingdom called Penumbra, full of temples and strange quests that provide fast-paced gameplay, with versatile Zelda-like dungeon combat, daunting enemies, and plenty of traps. Players will need to "master the art of movement" to get through, according to the game's description on Nintendo's site.
The game features all the trademarks of a hardcore 3D platformer with role-playing game components, including collectibles, boss fights, trading and looting, and ways to upgrade equipment. There's also a mostly black-and-white lost world-within-a-world called the Void, which can be reached through entrances around Penumbra for players to access "abstract platforming challenges" with rewards hidden inside. The main character, Umbra, traverses the world using parkour. Wall-running is a thing here, and there seems to be plenty of hack-and-slash action that makes Blue Fire, as one Twitter user who played a demo put it, feel like a "mix of Mario and Dark Souls."
And that is exactly what the developers, an eight-person team making their first game together, were going for with Blue Fire.
"I would say its kind of like a Dark Souls meets Zelda meets Mario game, and that's pretty much what we went for. Because what we kind of felt was that we grew up playing Nintendo games, and we're huge fans of Mario, Zelda, all those games – Donkey Kong, Banjo Kazooie," Gabriel Rosa, ROBI Studios' CEO, said in an interview with YouTuber Relyea. "We ... wanted to play games like those, but I kind of felt that even with the resurgence of 3D platformers the last two, three, maybe four years, I ... felt all of them were kind of the same themes and I really wanted to play like a very dark platformer. And I just didn't feel like something like that was out there."
But it will be, very soon now, and the reviews so far are encouraging. Blue Fire will cost $19.99 when it releases in just a few weeks. If you don't play on a Switch or a PC, you still may be in luck — eventually. At its initial announcement, Blue Fire was called a timed console exclusive, so it will hopefully appear on the Xbox and PlayStation later. However, nothing has been announced as to when those ports might be available.