Feist coming to Steam July 23

Bekah and I are both immensely excited to announce that award-winning survival-platformer FEIST is joining Night in the Woods and Panoramical as the newest member of the Finji family. You can find it on Steam and other stores on July 23rd, 2015. But first, a little backstory: In 2008, Swiss indies Adrian Stutz and Florian Faller (now Bits & Beasts) started building a playground for testing game mechanics, visual styles and to overcome the limitations of existing digital tools and frameworks. Even though they built something to satisfy their own curiosity, awards from Unity and later the IGF made it clear their efforts were striking a chord. They called this game Feist. Subsequently, the team got buried under jobs and other design projects, and the independent, self-funded development of Feist ground to a near halt. For several years, Feist grew slowly but steadily, relegated to nights and weekends. Gradually, through sheer force of love, the game grew larger and much more detailed, though it still retained a wild and chaotic landscape. Somehow shaping a coherent game of that anarchy, particularly without ruining its playful origins, would be a huge challenge. In 2013, encouraged by weekly emails asking for Feist’s release, and a series of exhibitions and awards, Adrian and Florian set out to rebuild and reshape the prototype into a full game. They founded Bits & Beasts, a small game development company in Zurich, Switzerland, and began the next and final stage of development: finishing and releasing Feist. Which brings us pretty much to today!

Feist is a beautiful, poetic and action packed game, with an enchanting and spooky atmosphere. It tells the story of a small creature surviving in a mysterious, hostile world. Once players escape the crude crate the strange, lumbering beasts used for a trap, players journey through sprawling forests, mountains, caves, and swamps, brought to life in a cinematic physical-effects style reminiscent of Jim Henson’s The Dark Crystal, or Hedgehog in the Fog. The dreamlike world of Feist is a striking and mesmerizing place, but dangerous AI-controlled enemies keep pushing the players toward their fate. Enemies and traps, without scripted sequences, interact and produce surprising emergent consequences, creating a physics-driven environment with its own rules. The gorgeous, lush backgrounds are brought to life by a haunting and restrained soundtrack by Kold aka Tomek Kolczynski.

I’ve admired Feist for years, and so it is an immense honor to get to help them bring the game to the wide audience it deserves. We’ll have lots more info over the next couple of months, but in the meantime I hope you are as excited as we are for Feist to be seeing the light of day finally!