Both part of Italy’s “not very big” developer community, Morbidware’s Diego Sacchetti and Misbug have known each other for a long time, but hadn’t had the chance to collaborate together until 2019’s The Textorcist: The Story of Ray Bibbia – a bullet hell where you dodge projectiles and type in exorcisms to banish demons. They worked well together, so started looking for their next project – something full-time that could take the place of the increasing instability of freelancing.
It was a shared passion away from videogames that ended up moulding the shape that project would take. “We love tabletop RPGs,” says designer and programmer Sacchetti. “So when we stumbled into Mörk Borg, and then we started to play, we looked at each other in the eyes and said, ‘Why don’t we make a game out of it?'”
Since releasing in 2020, dark fantasy TTRPG Mörk Borg has gone on to capture adoration, several Ennie awards, and a cyberpunk follow-up, Cy_Borg. Through creators Pelle Nilsson and Johan Nohr’s – let’s face it, punk as hell – Mörk Borg licence, it’s also inspired a trove of expansions, hacks, and modules, all of which are free to be monetised without the creators taking a cut. However, Morbidware’s game Heresy Supreme (currently crowdfunding on Kickstarter) is a little different. After sending a prototype demo to the creators, they got not just their approval, but their involvement.
For artist and designer Misbug, the task of working inside the world brought to (un) life by Johan Nohr’s arresting visuals has been challenging, but incredibly fun. “One of the things I like about my work is basically finding solutions. I trained myself to do the best job possible when I was doing freelancing, because most of the time I was working on concepts that were created by others. The new thing for me is that I’m trying to make graphics that also have a graphic design element. So it’s not just illustrations, or animations. It’s also about lettering, how graphics look against certain UIs. Colours and shapes are really important.”
He feels lucky, then, that Mörk Borg’s creators have “basically joined the team” as consultants. “Johan helped me a lot, understanding his style and providing suggestions on how to improve certain graphics, not only on a concept level, but also on editorial design level. When we start work in more depth, his contribution will be the most important thing.”
While something like a CRPG might have seemed liked the obvious choice, Morbidware didn’t just want to have players interact with character sheets. “We basically decided to go for something which was at the intersection of a Metroidvania and a roguelike,” says Sacchetti. “We don’t want to have the players think too much about the stats of the weapons or the armour. We want players to think about their choices during gameplay, and know that each choice could lead to death. But we try to make death fun.”
“You don’t get used to having a hero,” he continues. “Sometimes you’ll have to sacrifice the characters you’ll spend the most time on, maybe to try and avoid something very nasty coming at you. If the game is ‘unfair’, I don’t know. It’s unlucky. It’s unfortunate. But it must feel fun.”
Making death feel fun, says Misbug, is “all about the type of reward that you give the player at the end of the experience. What we’re trying to do – which is a really hard task – is to translate unfair into fun. We know that unfair games are not fun to play. They look like chores that don’t reward you for anything. But we’re trying to create a system that basically puts the player into situations that there’s always ways out of – but they’re hard to achieve.”
“We want that moment to have a narrative reward like: okay, now your character is a goblin”
Misbug says it’s about leaving the player with a reward – “be it narrative or a new way of playing the game.” He gives the example of a character dying from the ‘goblin curse’ – a rule from the TTRPG where a character attacked by a goblin will transform into one if that goblin isn’t caught and slain in time.
“That’s really unfair. You get attacked by a goblin, you get the goblin curse. You will turn eventually into a goblin when that happens. We don’t want that moment to just be ‘Okay, I lost a character.’ We want that moment to have a narrative reward like: okay, now your character is a goblin. He’s trapped in this monster. He looks at all the atrocities through those dead eyes of the Goblin, and he can’t do anything. This is the story unfolds, the destiny of that character.”
For Sacchetti, it depends on the stakes. Imbalance, he says, works both ways – critical misses make critical hits that much more satisfying. “You may get your hands on a Fanged Deserter class with a very high strength, but one HP. With just a few blows, you kill everybody, but that only lasts until you get hit once.”
“An example of that is also the ‘broken’ state, from the original manual of the game,” says Misbug. “Basically, when you reach zero HP, you have this bullet time effect. If you’re able to slay the enemy that provoked the broken state on your character, you will gain back one HP. We’re helping the player in a way, but at the same time, things are not really easy if you have just one HP. So it’s always a balance of putting the player in a situation of stress and then rewarding them.”
Levelling up in the game won’t involve experience. Instead, says Sacchetti, it’s “more like small achievements.” Kill 10 goblins without taking a hit, for example. Once fulfilled, these milestones can be spent on bonuses at Galgenbeck, the game’s hub. Like in the TTRPG, though, levelling up can actually make your stats worse if you roll poorly.
“About the getting better and worse,” says Misbug. “The idea is always to not be completely unfair. So this means that even if some stats go below the previous value, the player will still be able to complete the game.” There are no restrictions on weapons or armour, so “if you find that super duper knife that kills the enemies in just one hit, you can still use that even if your strength is minus three. You’ll probably be slower. You’ll have less stamina, less hit points. It will be really dangerous for you to get close to certain enemies. But at the end of the day, you can still complete the game.”
A major design rule for Morbidware that keeps coming up in our conversation is the idea that, no matter how abstract or stat-based an element might seem, it has to have a concrete counterpart in the action gameplay – something players can feel, touch, and experience “more than knowing them by heart or reading them somewhere,” says Sacchetti. “There must be some kind of counterpart in the action, so you can feel what happens. If you have very low strength, maybe you’ll be slower dealing blows.”
Something that might feel a little less tangible – a little more baroque, and rightfully so – are Miseries. For each day that passes in game, tracked by departing from the hub for an adventure then returning, there’s a chance to trigger one of these awful events. If this ever happens seven times then… well, I’ll let the book explain:
“The seventh Misery will always be 7:7, and the world finally dies. The seventh seal is broken for the seventh and final time. The game and your lives end here. Burn the book.”
The Miseries themselves are suitably baroque and evocative in the TTRPG, taken from a dice table written to resemble biblical prophecy. “In the heart of Sarkash fog and dusk shall breathe beneath the waking trees. That which was hewed by man shall now hew in its turn,” and “The great shall be made poor and the poor poorer still.”
Sacchetti says that once a Misery is triggered, it’ll affect the entire game from then on, but “you’ll be presented with options to maybe sacrifice a character, or lose something very important to you. Not to avoid the Misery, but just to be more lucky with it.”
If these sound too punishing though, the team are planning on working in tweakable difficulty parameters – similar to The Texorcist – for the miseries and other elements, like how harsh the randomness ends up being. On the other end of the scale, there’s a planned “Mörk Borg mode” – effectively a hardcore options for players who want the full, punishing experience. You’re also not completely alone out there. You’ve got your party, vendors at the hub, and you might meet others out adventuring. Friendly characters, I hope?
“Well,” says Misbug. “Friendly is a big word,” though, you will get the chance to meet other lost souls through a “semi procedural” quest system. Conversations mean stat tests. An NPC might try to rob you, and you’ll have to try and convince them you’re actually skint. Sacchetti also mentions what they’re calling “Friend or Foe” situations.
“You encounter one of the playable classes, and they may want something from you. And everyone in your party has their own agenda. If you don’t make them happy, they might turn their back on you. You may need to fight them. And maybe you levelled them up a lot, maybe you gave them better equipment, and that’s a problem. Or maybe they just leave, but then you encounter them later. Again, It’s a friend or foe situation.”
With the bright yellow book obviously acting as a design bible of sorts, I’m curious about the team’s influences outside of Mörk Borg. “I really love some Nintendo games for for the atmosphere they have, like the old Super Metroid,” says Sacchetti. “I may like the way they explain things, the user interface. Another game that I love very much is Devil Daggers, I could say that’s my inspiration for some kind of mood, some kind of emotions. The Binding of Isaac is a good match for this, too. Still, our game is not linear, so it’s not a descent into a single dungeon.”
“It’s bit trivial to say, but probably Darkest Dungeon, Dark Souls and stuff like that. But these are grim, dark fantasy scenarios. The comedy aspect is lacking if you compare it to Mörk Borg. It’s just so over the top, sometime that becomes funny.”
Sacchetti also mentions one of my favourite dark fantasy RPGs, Fear And Hunger. “I love those games. It’s quite cool and very unfortunate. At the same time, we try to have the same thing in a more deliverable way. I think that Fear and Hunger, for example, doesn’t necessarily want you to succeed at the game. We want you to to succeed in the end.”