New Throne of Darkness Screens

Click Entertainment, based in San Francisco, California, visited GameSpot recently to show off its upcoming RPG, Throne of Darkness. The game is an isometric role-playing game set in medieval Japan. In this game, you play masterless samurai - ronin - who are attacking the castle of the demonic warlord that killed and corrupted your daimyo.

Throne of Darkness is a 2D game with a look very similar to Diablo's, not surprising when you consider that key members of the Throne of Darkness team worked on Blizzard's Diablo. The main difference, of course, is the Japanese setting and characters. You'll be able to guide a party of characters, although apparently you can only control one character at a time. The party in the demo consisted of a spellcaster and a warrior. The environments look appropriate enough, with sliding paper doors, beautifully painted walls, tatami mats on the floors, and so on. The monsters are a mix of fantasy creatures and undead or demonic Japanese soldiers and spellcasters. We saw monstrous turtles, shambling undead, and skeletal archers.

In the demo, we also saw a few of the spell effects, such as a chain lightning attack that electrocuted every enemy on the screen, and a fire attack that engulfed all on-screen opponents in a geyser of fire.

Throne of Darkness was originally being published by Acclaim until it let go of it. Sierra then picked up the rights to the game, and is now the current publisher. Throne of Darkness is slated to ship later this year. GameSpot will be receiving a build of the game within a week and will post an indepth preview shortly thereafter.