Toronto’s Drinkbox returns with a kickass new action-RPG, Blighted

One of Canada’s most talented and prolific indie developers is back.

During this year’s Summer Game Fest, Toronto-based Drinkbox (Guacamelee!, Nobody Saves the World!) unveiled a new Metroidvania action-RPG called Blighted, and then showed off a bit more in the wonderful indie-focused Day of the Devs presentation. While in LA for Summer Game Fest, I got to go hands-on with Blighted alongside two Drinkbox developers, and it looks to be every bit as good an experience as you’d expect from the beloved Canadian developer.

In case you missed it, Blighted follows a lone survivor who must consume the brains of his enemies to reclaim the memories of his people, all while surviving the reality-altering Blight. Right away, I was impressed by how well Blighted takes Drinkbox’s signature vibrant colour palettes and expands them into the team’s first-ever 3D experience. Naturally, I was curious: what made Blighted the right time to make such a big pivot?

“The last few times we started a new game, we’ve been discussing [whether] we should move to 3D,” says Graham Smith, Drinkbox co-founder. “And since we use our own engine, there’s a lot of costs associated with [moving to 3D]. We got pretty good at making games in 2D, but there’s a risk associated to moving to 3D, and our team doesn’t have the 3D skill set.” But we do have a really talented team, and coming out of Nobody Saves the World!, we just thought we wanted the challenge. And we also had another idea that was going to be in 2D, so if things didn’t work out in the 3D path, we could always fall back onto the other game idea.”

Thankfully, things worked out quite well — better, in some ways, than Drinkbox even expected.

“It turned out that there are some things that are actually easier in 3D,” he admits. “For example, when you’re making a new enemy or a boss, if you’re doing it in 2D, you have to draw every possible orientation of that enemy. In Nobody Saves the World!, enemies could only really face the cardinal directions. And some of them were just flipped versions of the other ones. But if you have an attack in a certain direction, you have to do every frame of the attack in that orientation […] If you want to change an attack, you’re going to change all of the art — all the individual drawn animations.”

That wasn’t a problem in 3D, he says. “In 3D, if you want to change an attack, you just change it. And you have infinite orientations.” On the flip side, he notes that the process of designing levels is naturally “a lot slower because you have to take into account a lot more things like elevation and how players can get to different places.”

He adds that programming “is more complicated” in 3D due to the extra layers on effects and other elements. “So there’s trade-offs. But one of the big reasons why we want to go to 3D at all is that the types of visuals you can get with 3D effects are much more spectacular, and so I think you can make a much more impressive game if you can take advantage of those.”

Of course, 3D also necessitates some changes to gameplay.

“One thing we immediately noticed is that we needed to have some kind of lock-on mechanic [in 3D], because it’s easier to miss enemies,” says Smith. “When you’re completely top-down like Nobody Saves the World!, you just have to hit in the cardinal directions. It’s not as important to have a lock-on mechanic, but in 3D, it feels super important, especially with some precision.” He also teased more “complex” level design than Drinkbox has done before.

I got to experience all of this firsthand in my demo, which I played with lead designer Ian Campbell in the drop-in, drop-out co-op mode. The combination of more real estate for me, Campbell and my enemies meant that things might have gotten too chaotic without a proper lock-on, especially since the game has a handy and powerful long-range gun you can use in between your basic melee attacks, dodges, blocks and parries. Naturally, 3D also better illustrates a sense of scale, with the first major boss we fought being this intimidatingly towering skeletal beast that was a cross between a horse and a spider.

Upon our victory, we also unlocked a special move that expended rechargeable mana to summon an astral version of the creature that could stomp down hard on the ground for area-of-effect damage. The impact of the striking blue aura and earth-shattering force of this also felt all the more pronounced in 3D.

Another benefit of this perspective pivot is that it helps Drinkbox fully realize its vision for this darker world and story, which it describes as a “psychedelic Western nightmare.” While the team is perhaps best known for the colourful and charming Guacamelee! and Nobody Saves the World!, Smith is quick to point out that it did make the creepier and more visceral Severed in between and wanted a similar tonal shift with Blighted.

“We just like to do something different every once in a while. We were working on a humorous, funny game for a long time, and then it felt like, ‘Okay, maybe we should work on something that’s darker in tone and more serious,'” says Smith. “So the story of the game, and the tone of the game, is definitely darker this time around. We want to challenge ourselves. We don’t always want to do the same thing.”

But while there is more of a macabre element here (you are literally eating brains, after all), Smith says there’s an emotional undercurrent to it all. In the game, the player’s village preserves their memories and culture by planting a seed in the head of the deceased, and the fruit from the tree that eventually sprouts from it would allow people to see through the eyes of those who came before. “Just think about if you were to lose the entire history of your culture — that’s kind of the main theme of the game,” says Smith. “It’s about preserving memories of your culture, and so it’s a pretty serious topic, and it’s interesting to dive into that.”

All the while, the titular sinister Blight story beat actually proves to have a genuinely fascinating impact on the gameplay itself. As you progress, your character gets increasingly overcome with Blight, which increases the power of both you and your enemies, among other benefits and trade-offs.  It’s an interesting way to approach difficulty without just having the usual “Easy,” “Normal” and “Hard” sort of settings. On the flip side, you can reset your Blighted at any checkpoint if you don’t want to bother with any of it.

With all of that said, Smith is actually hesitant to talk much about the Blighted mechanic, citing a desire to want players to discover such things themselves.

“We don’t want to explain everything about the game. Some of the mechanics we’re just not going to explain. Even one of the main mechanics, the concept of Blight, we want players to come in and start playing the game and then start noticing things and start trying to figure them out,” he says.

“Maybe [they’ll] talk on the internet with the community to determine what are the rules of this game world, what are the secrets that aren’t defined, and things like that. So that’s part of it I’m the most excited to see. How do people discover all of the deep secrets of the game, and we’ll see how that goes.”

Blighted will release sometime in 2026 for PC. You can wishlist the game now on Steam.

Image credit: Drinkbox