The Last Spell News

So, we’ve been working on The Last Spell for a few months now. I’m Matt (the creative director of the game) and today, I’ll try to talk a bit about the origins of the project and the main game design intentions we have.


I started thinking about our next game a few months before the release of Dead In Vinland . As a game dev studio, we have to make sure we prepare the aftermath of a project with another project. It means a lot more than just having a vague idea about the concept: I had to secure funds to at least start the pre-production, and so write a good chunk of the game’s concept on paper so that the team would know what to start working on.

We started to think about The Last Spell before the release of Dead in Vinland


It’s a bit of a weird feeling, because it was a time when we were in full rush to finish Dead In Vinland’s production, I wanted to cram everything I had into the game, but I had to step back a few days and think about something completely different… And talk the team about the concept and get them excited by it too. That was weird, but we had to do it.

But well, everything went well and we managed to prepare the project before the end of Dead In Vinland.

(In fact, when DiV released, it was the opposite feeling: we had to work on patches and DLCs because we committed to it, and couldn’t work on the new project full time, so it was rather frustrating!)

So what was our mindset when we decided on the concept of The Last Spell?

One of the first things I said to the team, is that I didn’t want to make another story-heavy game just after DiV. For DiV, I went way ahead my writing skills and desire… Don’t get me wrong, I had a ton of fun writing the dialogs of the game and playing with all these little characters’ lives, but it’s a bit like with chocolates: love’em, eat’em, until you get sick.

The combat system in DiV was our first step in our focus on combat-systems in our games


So yeah, first intention: “gameplay first, narration next”. The other intent, is that I wanted to really focus on combat-system. In DiV, we made the first steps in this territory. I am very happy with the result, but I understand some players complaining about the lack of depth of the battle system: it was just not meant to be too deep, because it was not the main focus of the game.

So for our next game, we wanted to focus more on battle mechanics, along with our own RPG system (abilities, skills,…).


So yeah, I knew that I wanted to make a turn-based tactical RPG. That’s really my main genre, I think I played nearly every T-RPG on GBA, NDS, PS1, PS2, PS3 and PC… That’s my thing.

The Last Spell will be a turn-based tactical RPG


But I also knew that it’s a VERY complicated and costly game genre to do… a lot of systems combined with each other. We had to find some shortcuts to be able to make something good considering the size of the team.

That’s when I thought about the setting of the game. What could be original? I had this idea of a post-apocalyptic game in a fantasy setting. A mix between Warhammer and Fallout. So yeah, big explosions, nearly every living being wiped from the surface of earth. Radioactive magical fallouts. Mutated monsters. Cool! And so all the parts came together nicely: a tactical RPG where you defend the last city of earth, in ruins, against hordes of evil creatures. No story, just fight for your life, in one single map.

Of course, the basic idea extended easily: we could think about city building elements, which would add a nice touch to the game. You can have scarce resources, so there would be some sort of survival aspect to the game, or at least optimization. But the key feature that I wanted was to really have this overwhelming feeling of “all is lost”, a bit like in the Battle of Helm’s Deep: a few hardened warriors against tons and tons of enemies!

This asymetry is quite rare in turn-based strategy games, so I thought it was strong enough to build a whole game around. And challenging for our team (they hate me now x)).

One last element we put into the game, we clearly wanted to have a shorter game, but highly replayable. That’s something we wanted for our Dead In games, but quite never perfectly achieved. So when you say that, the first word that comes to mind is “roguelite”… Short, procedurally generated, very hard runs. It worked well with the concept too of a “nearly impossible mission”.

There will be a LOT of enemies, so you will die a LOT


I am not a big roguelike type of player, but that’s about the time when we played A LOT of Slay the Spire (and Into the Breach) at the office, so… I think I kind of got bitten by the roguelite radioactive spider… I just added one constraint to the team: I want a lot of “meta” gameplay. I want that everytime I play and lose a run, I get the feeling I gained something, and I am excited to try a new run. So we aim to have a lot of unlockables and surprises to keep the game fresh and fun after dozen and dozen of runs. That’s something important for us.

Into The Breach is one of our inspirations for The Last Spell


So yeah, basically that was the genesis of the game, the basic intents were decided, I presented the idea to the team and they liked it, and of course we discussed it a lot during the following weeks so that everyone would bring his little something to the project.

Okay, I think it’s good for now! Next time, I’ll talk a bit more about the world-building of the game I think, and some of the “non videogames” references I had.

You can follow us on Twitter or you can come to our nice little Discord Server if you want to chat with us, so that you’ll be informed in time about new blog entries and important news.

One thing’s for sure, we’re super excited by this new project and we hope that you’ll be too! Can’t wait to show you more of it.

By the way, if you’re excited about The Last Spell, don’t forget to wishlist the game on Steam, it’s super helpful for us! 🙂

-The Last Team

Hello heroes!
First of all, we want to thank all of you. We’re so happy you liked the trailer of The Last Spell. Now, all that’s left to do is make the game. Easy peasy (no).

Today, we want to tell you more about what we have been up to since the game’s reveal!

Happy to show our baby for the first time!




Since we finally revealed The Last Spell in August, we went to Gamescom last week to officially present the game to the press and potential partners!


First night in Cologne!


Since the game is still in a very early state, this was a hands-off presentation (it means we were playing the game ourselves). We showed a lot of combat, big AOEs, and some base-building too!

This was the very first time we were showing actual gameplay, so we were quite nervous at first, but in the end, everything went smoothly!

Some chocolate we included in our presskits. We might have kept some for us.


We also showed the game to potential partners, so it was a very busy Gamescom!

Sometimes, we look serious

The event was as good as exhausting! It was a nice occasion to do some teambuilding and meet other developers from other countries! Now, we’re back in our office in France hyper pumped to continue the work on our new game!

Only one of us realized someone was taking a picture




Now that the game has been revealed, we’ll be making regular blog posts about the behind the scenes stuff, our intentions, our game design dilemmas, etc…

In the meantime, feel free to come to our Discord server! We might show some exclusive stuff from The Last Spell 😉

-The Last Team

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Hi Survivors!

It’s been a while now since the last time we wrote something about our games!

So what have we been up to?



At last, we stopped working on Dead In Vinland, almost exactly one year after its initial release! We didn’t think it would take us so much time, but well, we wanted to leave the game in the best shape we could. We’ve released 3 DLCs, made a lot of free patches too which enhanced quite a lot the overall experience (ie. ultra detailed difficulty starting options for the game, a cool hotbar for tracking important items, sorting options in the character bar, fast-forward options and rapid share the food/water interactions). We also released the game on Nintendo Switch a few weeks ago, it’s an accomplishment for the studio because it’s our first game showing on console!

For that last year, part of the team has been working on our new game, and we’re now sufficiently advanced in the development to officially announce it. So I’m glad to present to you our last baby’s name:





The Last Spell is a tactical RPG game in its core. But of course, we can’t possibly make a game which would fit in only ONE genre… It would be too simple… So the little twist here is that we built up the game around a rogue lite gameplay loop.

You lead the few remaining heroes of earth and try to protect the last bastion of humanity with everything you have against hordes of mutated monsters who come out at night from a strange purple mist.

You are strong. But also tired and underequipped. Mana doesn’t come cheap and munitions are scarce. Will you use those precious resources you scavenged from the ruined city you defend to make arrows… or to build makeshift walls?





For those who missed it, we have a cool video that you can check here:
https://youtu.be/dGC8NxV5vWQ

Important: this is NOT actual gameplay footage. It’s rather what we call a “mood video”, to show the atmosphere of the game and pitch a bit setting.

I’ll talk a bit more about the lore of the game in another blog post, but as you can see we are dealing with a medieval post-apocalyptic world, with glorious pixel art graphics and an isometric view. We also want to spice a little bit everything with some “arcade feels”, both in terms of gameplay and visuals.

Let’s keep it short for now, but don’t worry we will have a ton of features to explore with you in subsequent news! As we did for Dead In Vinland, we want to show our progress here and discuss the gameplay mechanics behind the game.

We have some fun things in store too to keep you waiting until the release of the game, and we will definitively try to some more live videos to show you our work.

You can follow us on Twitter or you can come to our nice little Discord Server if you want to chat with us, so that you’ll be informed in time about new blog entries and important news.

One thing’s for sure, we’re super excited by this new project and we hope that you’ll be too! Can’t wait to show you more of it.

-The Last Team