A lot of fighting games may be going back to their roots for gameplay, but this is as grassroot as things can really get.
According to multiple sites including Automaton and WWG, a team of former SNK developers that worked on the KOF series and were probably a part of the FatalFury/AOF R&D division are working on a new fighting game called Unholy Night: The Darkness Hunter.
While it's not too uncommon to hear news on Ex-SNK developers returning to back fighting game development, the big surprise about this new title is that it's for the classic 1990s Super Famicom platform.
Unholy Night: The Darkness Hunter is being developed by studio FOXBAT in Osaka, a small-scale company founded in 2002 that mainly works on cell phone games. The studio coincendently happens to be located about 15 minutes to SNK by train.
FOXBAT's top page currently features a Japanese teaser page for the game, hinting that it may see a release in its own home country as well as Hong Kong where the game was unveiled this weekend.
Some first gameplay footage from the Hong Kong Retro Game Expo is already available on YouTube and it shows the game running on a CRT 4:3 screen like how vintage gaming should be.
According to detailed coverage from Post76.com, Unholy Night mainly plays with four buttons with three of them for attacks (weak, medium, feirce). While the game seems to stick with fundamentals in terms of systems and gameplay, it still has some advanced features such as guard canceling and attack clashing.
Keeping things genuinely Super Famicom, Unholy Night will be a 32mb cartridge, which was a popular capacity for the SNES during its later lifespan. Keep in mind that this is 32 Mega"bits", meaning that it's actually only 4 Megabytes--it's peanuts in the modern era where a single photo with a smartphone can be way larger. But lots of SFC/SNES games have packed a big punch back in their years, and hopefully we'll be seeing the same with this new potential gem for the year 2017.
Unholy Night: The Darkness Hunter is targeted for release this winter. For character portraits and screenshots, check Post76.com's coverage from the links below.
Reflex Tester
