Wishlist entry

"Explore an open world in this Victorian steampunk cRPG. Choose from three playable characters with branching stories that intertwine. Investigate, interact, and take action to leave your mark on the world and its inhabitants. No random stat points here, use your skills to level them up, and trust your fate to our tarot card chance system.

So, how will you solve your problems? Combat, persuasion, magic, explosives? The choice is yours and all your cards are on the table; but be careful, the docklands aren’t for the faint of heart.

Features:

Tarot Card Chance System - Leave your dice at home as you interact with a variety of characters. NPC’s react to your gender, race, appearance, behaviour, and choice of dialogue, so you’d better look and act the part if you want the “right” results. But not everything is certain, luck plays a role and it’s all in the cards with our tarot card chance system.

Skill and Etiquette System - The skills you use will improve your ability, while ignoring others will cause them to stagnate. Master the skills you choose and learn more about the world and its inhabitants to unlock special dialogue and skill-check options.

So go, see, do! And don’t be afraid to try the unconventional. Drown yourself in gin? Sure, provided you’ve got the constitution for it. Smoke that opium? Certainly, but be careful not to doze off- it might not be safe here. Put it all on black? You only live once, as they say. Even in failure you learn something...

A Rich Open World To Explore - A steampunk fantasy-inspired Victorian London awaits; filled with interesting characters and locations. Explore the back alleys, opium dens, brothels, and more at your peril, or relax and enjoy their simple pleasures. Investigate, interact, and take action to forge your own path.

Three Characters, Three Different Stories - Play as one of three characters with stories that intertwine through the city’s docklands and unfold based on your choices.

- Atticus Daley, an orphaned minotaur magician crawling out of the bottom of a bottle to find a sense of belonging, and his next fix.
- Clara Reed, a corsair with a checkered past, and a cunning woman with a rebellious streak. Follow her on a search for vengeance, and the courtesan killer.
- Otto, the trusty automaton and companion of engineer Theodore Redgrave. More than just the sum of his parts, Otto wants more to life than servitude and utility.

Each character has their own mix of skills, equipment, and expertise, and they might just have to work together to succeed. Will you trust your companions, and should they trust you? Not everyone is a hero after all."

https://www.crimsonherring.com/
Trailer

Looks like it might be interesting, thought personally I kinda wish they went with more... low-key fantasy elements than steam robots and minotaurs. You know, a setting where fantastical elements are rare, hidden, mysterious, rather than cow-people in top hats galavanting around.

I'm also a bit apprehensive about the "Rich Open World To Explore" - I think a big part of why the Shadowrun games worked so well was that they didn't even try for an open world, instead focusing their limited resources on a tighter, more focused kind of game.

But hey - we'll see. My complaining aside, there's certainly potential here. I hope they actually make something great.

I really like it, you have my vote!
https://twitter.com/HerringStudios?s=09 they have a Twitter Account.

Ah well, I'm sure we can forgive them for that if the game is good.

Hey, Thanks for posting this over here, My name's Isaac and I'm the founder of the studio and lead game designer for Sovereign Syndicate. Happy to answer any questions about the game.

Appreciate the feedback, we wanted some fantasy elements but steered away from the traditional fantasy races and tried to go for more of a Greek Mythology vibe, so minotaurs, cyclopses, and centaurs with automatons and other Steampunk elements. Thought the Victorian era was really interesting to write for and gave us a lot of narrative exploration to do on socio-economic and political issues of the era.

Definitely heavily inspired by Shadowrun, initially inspired to make the game because I was disappointed there weren't more Shadowrun games after HK and thought I'd rather make my own game over doing a UGC for it.

Other primary influences are Disco Elysium, and Arcanum (steampunk obviously) still in the early prototype stages but it's coming along nicely. Lol, Twitter is really about getting journalist and publisher attention more than anything, trying to manage the business side of things so we can get enough funding to put out a quality product, a necessary evil of sorts I guess...

I can't think of any gamedev without a Twitter account besides Byzantine Games. It's pretty much free, accessible marketing.

Anyway, this is made by Canadian gamedevs. Will support if it comes over here!

Greek mythology plus Steampunk sounds cool. In the end it will amount to gameplay and writing, but at least you've already got a great setting.

I hope the game finds its way to GOG.

So you can't make your own character, but you're forced to play as a monster, a stroooooong woman or a tin man. That pretty much kills my interest in the game.
Some of the stuff about design also sounds potentially irritating..."not everything is certain, luck plays a role" can easily lead to frustration and save-scumming if done wrong.
My laptop couldn't run it anyway, but doesn't sound like something I'd want. Life's too short for all those new games anyway.

Add a DRM-free native Linux build on top of that, and you get a sale no matter the asking price ;)

Thanks for your support! Thanks! We're definitely interested in being on GOG, starting with a Steam page because that's where most of the market is but definitely plans to come here too!

Appreciate your support! Appreciate the feedback, we decided to go with pre-made characters over custom character creation because we wanted to do more tailored stories and have NPC's react to things like gender, appearance, and race. We've got an indie budget so doing character customization well with enough art assets and the same level of story tailoring we wanted would have been cost-prohibitive.

We're trying to lean in to helping people save scum because we know they're going to do it anyway, working on a unique "save tree" mechanic where decisions auto save and you can rewind and play out alternate possibilities. I found myself save scumming a lot while playing Disco Elysium and this is a feature I would have liked so we're building it in.
Thanks for your support! We're initially targeting Windows PC but we're developing in Unity so have the flexibility to port based on demand. I assume by native Linux you're not a fan of Proton? Lots of chatter on that lately with the Steam Deck. Thanks for your support!

Arcanum had a lot of reactivity to race, intelligence etc., but you still could create pretty much any character you wanted, so I don't think that's necessarily exclusive.
If you want to create a story-driven game with pre-made characters, that's certainly a legitimate choice, but I think you should be aware that it will limit the appeal of your game, because many crpg players want at least some freedom to create/customize their characters. And to be blunt, appeal will drop even more if you're going with such "exotic" characters like a minotaur or an automaton, because it is far harder to identify with that than with most other pre-made characters like Geralt in the Witcher games.

Always good to see devs willing to bring their offerings to GoG, and at this early of a stage at that.
Cheers.

Interesting, I assumed that's where the Disco Elysium-influence comes in, but not quite in this way.
Was more thinking along the lines of how the fail states would often result in equally acceptable or even more preferable outcomes or open up other opportunities/ways to approach/go about things and you not even wanting to reload because of that.
I guess, me personally I'm also too used to (frequently) failing miserably and getting utterly fucked over by RNGesus without any consolation whatsoever to even consider save-scumming in the first place.

I’m a long-time WINE user, but I would have difficulties to trust a dev team promising perfect WINE compatibility, seeing as it is often trickier than a native build. Maybe if it becomes more common in the next years I’ll revise my judgement ;)

The Steam Deck on the other hand, like anything from Valve, is something I am not going to touch. DRM-free is to me much more important that native Linux support.

that is a welcoming honesty different from the usual linux fan lies that every one of my game works well on linux just use wine mantra

btw why most of these devs responsible for release are so clueless about linux?
look like linux is even less used by them than by the average gamers