Runes: The Forgotten Path is a single-player fantasy spell-caster from StormBorn Studio that puts you in the magical garb of a renegade wizard fighting for survival. Now after more than three years in development, the studio has finally announced that Runes is heading to Oculus Rift and HTC Vive on November 14th.
You’ve forgotten everything about your past, finding yourself in an accursed purgatory called Oblivion. Tasked with retrieving your long-forgotten spells and memories—your only means of escape from the strange world around you—you use the movement of your hands to cast powerful spells, solve puzzles and fight dangerous enemies.
Runes is also said to feature a unique locomotion style to go along with standard offerings, teleportation and smooth locomotion, which StormBorn calls ‘fourth wall’ locomotion. Fourth wall locomotion is said to combine first and third-person gameplay mechanics, letting switch between the two depending on the action. Interactions such as fighting and solving puzzles are designed to happen in first person, whereas traversing long distances can be done in the third person with a fixed camera. This, the studio says, “allows for many interesting new concepts, from puzzle mechanics to narrative choices.”
The studio originally tried its hand at a Kickstarter campaign last year, which unfortunately didn’t meet its €30,000 funding goal. Undeterred, the Trieste, Italy-based studio continued on with development of the room-scale game, something that the trailer reveals to be well past the demo provided last year to prospective backers.
You can check out Runes: The Forgotten Path on Steam here.
The studio maintains that both PSVR and Oculus Quest versions of Runes are slated for release sometime in 2019.