When a collection of former Irrational devs, who worked on BioShock, Freedom Force, Tribes: Vengeance and more, tell you they’ve got a first-person roguelite for you to play, it’s well worth paying attention. City Of Brass [official site] is an Arabian Nights-themed procedurally generated FPS, arming you with a whip and a scimitar, and challenging you to see just how far you can get through its permadeath streets. The first footage and more details lie below.

Let’s dive straight into the footage:



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Uppercut describe the game’s setting, saying,

“Players assume the role of a cunning thief, battling to reach a fabled treasure at the city’s heart, wielding a blade and whip that can be used to disarm, trip or stun enemies, to swing to safety, grab inaccessible objects or even break through flimsy barricades. But the city itself also has teeth. Players have to leap across pits, slide under blades, dodge spears or arrows, evade or employ sprung paving slabs, and sidestep poison gas traps – all the while manipulating these hazards to their advantage against diverse supernatural foes.”

And, crucially, die a great deal. Permadeath means the game is designed to provide a unique city each time you start over, about which Uppercut tell us (in an interview appearing later today), “the scripts that generate them are careful to make it feel like a realistic city, not a random collection of chambers, corridors and courtyards stitched together.”

Uppercut’s previous game was Submerged, a gentle exploration and climbing game – City Of Brass looks to be just about the opposite. This is a game, we’re told, about mastering its systems, and most of all, learning to use your whip and blade, along with the game’s traps, in ways that allow for experimental approaches to combat. Project lead Ed Orman tells us a bit more about that, too.

“We’ve taken particular inspiration from the potential of games like BioShock to generate combinative combat situations. For example, you can use the whip to stun an enemy before slicing them with your scimitar; or you can run, slide and push them into a trap; or bait one enemy such that in its rabid desire to kill you, it actually destroys other enemies nearby. We think City of Brass will generate a ton of cool combat moments.”

Oh, and genies grant wishes.

There’s not long to wait, either – the release is set for this autumn, via Steam.

Check in later today when we’ve got an interview with Uppercut finding out a bunch more about the game.