King's Field-inspired Lunacid releases out of early access to overwhelmingly positive reviews

Lunacid, an indie title that was finally released out of early access recently, has been making headlines for good reasons. Developed by Akuma Kira, the game is heavily inspired by FromSoftware's classic dungeon-crawler series, King's Field, a franchise that has been dormant for more than a decade at this point.

Lunacid is essentially an homage to King's Field, which many consider to be the spiritual ancestor of FromSoftware's "Souls" games. While King's Field does look and play a lot differently than Dark Souls, the titles share plenty of similarities in terms of gameplay themes.

FromSoftware has long since abandoned the King's Field IP, putting it on ice in favor of their iconic "Souls" titles. However, since then, there have been plenty of indie developers who tried to replicate the studios' old-school dungeon crawler to varying degrees of success. Lunacid is the latest among such King's Field-inspired titles.

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Lunacid receives positive reviews despite some complaints regarding technical performance

Akuma Kira built Lunacid entirely on the original "Sword of Moonlight" engine, which was also used to create King's Field. Back in 2000, FromSoftware started distributing its proprietary engine as a commercial product, opening the door for many fans and indie studios to create their own King's Field-inspired games without having to pay any royalties.

Upon its recent release, this title received overwhelmingly positive reviews from players. Currently, it has a total of 3,525 "very positive" reviews on Steam, with most players praising the game's adherence to its source material. There are some complaints regarding its technical performance, but those will probably be fixed with future updates.

Much like Dark Souls, King's Field lets players loose on a dark and gritty fantasy setting filled with monsters and creatures. Players take on the role of an unnamed character tasked with obtaining a powerful artifact capable of eradicating evil in the land. While the premise of the title is pretty straightforward, the gameplay isn't so.

Similarly to FromSoftware's recent games, King's Field focuses on giving players complete freedom over their actions, letting them choose how they want to pursue their goals without pointing them towards any particular objective.

Lunacid follows this idea to a T, letting players decide the outcome of the story based on their in-game choices. The title even has "mimic-chests," a staple of the Dark Souls experience.

Akuma Kira's King's Field-inspired title also brings to light the idea of FromSoftware going back to their older classics and reviving them. The Japanese developer has recently revitalized their decade-old mech-action franchise Armored Core with a new installment - Armored Core 6: Fires of Rubicon.

As such, there is a chance that FromSoftware might eventually go back to creating a new King's Field game, especially with the years of experience the studio has in developing some of the best dark fantasy role-playing games out there. However, for the time being, if you're itching for a King's Field-like experience, you just can't go wrong with Lunacid.