For Tiny Bull Studios, one thing always remained the same throughout the years of development and various prototypes for The Lonesome Guild: It was always a game about loneliness.
“All the thematics of the game, all the game play has been built around this contrast between loneliness and teamwork,” producer Luca Cafasso told Polygon over a recent video call. It “was also really important for us to treat it well as an adult even if the graphics are so cute. That was one of our pillars.”
Tiny Bull started work on The Lonesome Guild in 2021, and the game was born out of “the concept of loneliness,” as fellow producer Simone Pellegrini said. The team wasn’t sure about the gameplay direction to take for The Lonesome Guild, which, in its final state, is an isometric action RPG. “We first started thinking about something more like Pokémon Mystery Dungeon, then we shift[ed] to a turn-based tactical RPG,” Pellegrini said.
Publisher Don’t Nod was brought on board a year later, and the game was still a tactical RPG at the time. However, the team felt like the gameplay then “wasn’t useful to convey[ing] the story,” according to Pellegrini.
The contrast of loneliness and togetherness comes first in The Lonesome Guild, and the developers wanted to make sure the gameplay reflected that. “We try to then define all the features around the requirement of the narrative,” Pellegrini said, explaining how Tiny Bull then shifted the gameplay toward real-time action in which the player must utilize all the party members together in combat to succeed. “All the combat mechanics try to allow you and force you to use your full party because otherwise you are not so good at combat.”
That full party includes six playable characters, all adorable anthropomorphic animals, plus Ghost. He is an amnesiac specter who doesn’t know where he is, where he came from, or how he ended up in the forest where he meets Davinci, the first of the game’s party members.
Ghost can’t hug or high five the others, exasperating his loneliness and causing Tiny Bull to want to center him as the protagonist. Imagine longing for physical contact with your friends, but being unable to do so. “What can be more lonely?” Pellegrini said.
“Every character is lonely, but in its own way,” Pellegrini noted. Davinci is a rabbit with wings, though his are mechanical as he was born without the wings his people in the sky have. “He feels he was abandoned by his family because his biome should be in the sky and he’s trying to go back to his family from which he was separated from [for] a lot of years,” Pellegrini said.
The curmudgeon Mr. Fox, on the other hand, has suffered a terrible tragedy and “he decided to go in[to] exile because he didn’t [feel] that he was worthy of guiding his people. So at some point in the story he will be forced to face his people again and overcome his kind of loneliness,” Pellegrini said.
Though you may expect the producers to have a difficult time picking favorites, that’s not the case for Cafasso and Pellegrini. “We also did this variety of heroes so that any one of us could relate,” Cafasso said. He’s really into the Capybara named Ran Tran Trum, “this character with punk hair” and a torn vest. “His kind of loneliness goes against his family and he has a big fight with his father […] so he react[ed with] strength and stubborn. So I can relate it like that,” Cafasso said. “I’m thinking of myself going up in the ‘90s, that video games were bad and now I’m getting [a] living out of it.”
“Mine is, of course, Mr. Fox,” Pellegrini said. “I like his cynical way of being and his sassy humanism and all his backstory about the sense of responsibility toward the people he has around. It’s something that I can relate [to].”
With favorites also come least favorites, and Pellegrini wasn’t shy about sharing his. “Maybe I personally hate Davinci because he’s this optimist guy that always talks too much. It’s not my way of being. So I don’t like him,” he said. The optimist Davinci and the cranky Mr. Fox are the game’s first two party members, making a contrasting pair. Cafasso defended the bunny, saying, “But I [am] also glad that Mr. Fox is so effective thanks to Davinci […] the cynicism of Mr. Fox would be not so effective without Davinci too and the dialogues that our narrative designer put together.”
“Yeah, but I still don’t like him,” Pellegrini quickly added.
Tiny Bull Studios began working on The Lonesome Guild while the world was still in the throes of the COVID-19 pandemic. “Of course, in Italy [COVID] hit really hard and we were the first western country that started to feel this is serious,” Cafasso said. “The first lockdown [affected] the country’s social relations, the way of entertainment. And so it left that footprint to us. And when our writers pitched the idea to talk about loneliness, that’s also one thing that made us think, okay, let’s push this project more than others’ ideas that we had at the time.”
Still, though, the team wanted to make sure “how we treat the loneliness inside the game is not something that you have to be in a lockdown to feel.” Cafasso noted how loneliness and isolation are “nowadays in the life of everyone,” and how the team knew “that thematic loneliness, if not written seriously, could be a wasted opportunity.”
An in-game opportunity to build bonds between characters comes via campfire conversations. Ghost and the party will gather around the chat, and by befriending Ghost, the characters’ skill trees will gradually unlock. “We wanted to make sure [the gameplay] was incentivizing the teamwork and togetherness,” Cafasso said. Characters will get stronger the closer they get, but players won’t be locked into their choices; you can respec the skill tree at any time.
Davinci, Mr. Fox, and the rest will display their togetherness and strength in combat. They’ll be aided by Ghost, who can possess the characters to enhance their abilities, a mechanic that originated from the game’s writers. “Ghost’s power is the apex of togetherness,” Cafasso said. As Ghost, you’ll jump from character to character to give them a boost in combat, which “incentivize[s] you as a player, that wants to play more efficiently, to not just stick on the character that you like most, but to use all the team members as a one character,” Cafasso said.
Those who’ve played indie isometric gems like Tunic and Death’s Door will see the influence on The Lonesome Guild. Pellegrini noted those titles as well as other indie stalwarts, like the Ori games, as inspiration. He also mentioned Pokémon Mystery Dungeon again as inspiration for The Lonesome Guild’s art style as the team wanted to make its characters cute like Pokémon.
Most people first encounter Pokémon as kids, and Cafasso commented on how the games the team played as children influenced The Lonesome Guild. “When a team has the chance to make a game like the ones that we play[ed] as a kid, of course there have been, in every department, there have been some inspiration of games, of medias, that you got imprinted as a kid,” he said.
The Lonesome Guild will look to join the ranks of those fan-favorite games when it launches Oct. 23. As of now, the team is sticking to that date in the wake of Hollow Knight: Silksong’s impending release, which has caused other indie companies to shift release dates for their upcoming games. “We hope that everybody plays Silksong on day one, so on the 23rd of October they will be free to play ours,” Pellegrini said.
It’ll launch on PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X. Like some of Tiny Bull’s indie peers, the studio has not yet received a Nintendo Switch 2 devkit, despite requesting it. Cafasso and the team want to “make this story accessible to as many players as possible,” and hope to eventually bring it to the Switch 2 to do exactly that.
