Hello, Hitchhiker.
I’m Craig Hauser, level and combat designer at Angry Mob Games. We just released Trinity Fusion, an all-new action roguelite where the only way to save the multiverse is to end it. We’ve been working on the game for four years now, and we’re happy to finally get the game out there in the wild, available now on Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S!
So, What’s the Story?
Trinity Fusion is a 2.5D action rogue-lite set in a doomed, man-made multiverse. In it, you’ll play as Maya, a woman psychically connected with her three parallel selves.
Their worlds are literally falling apart around them, and you and your counterselves are the key element in a plan to reconnect them, fusing each of their scattered worlds back together into one stable whole again.
The story is put together in collaboration with Ada Hoffmann, author of The Outside, The Fallen and The Infinite, which we are big fans of.
The Tricky Art of Hitting Things Good
Trinity Fusion, more than anything else, is all about great-feeling combat. Mechanics focus on slashes, dodges and satisfying special moves. We’re taking everything we learned from building our previous platform fighting game, Brawlout, and applying it to a purely PvE experience. Every strike and stagger is beautifully animated, every hit giving just the right amount of feedback. This is, and I’m not trying to brag too much, probably some of the best hit feedback you’re going to get in this niche.
Combine that combat feel with three characters that have their own unique weapons and abilities, the usual roguelike-ish interconnected systems of permanent and temporary upgrades and our new Character Fusions(!) and players will find that they have tons of flexibility to play the game the way they want to play it, and get rewarded for doing so.
Get Amped Up
The flexibility and power of our mid-run upgrades, called Amplifiers, is what we consider to be Trinity Fusion’s “special sauce”, the thing that takes our already great-feeling combat into an escalating endorphin rush as players get further and further into their runs.
For each Amplifier you equip, you’re not only getting an immediate upgrade, but you’re making progress toward what we call synergy powerups, massive upgrades like Critical Vampire that heals you for a percentage of the critical damage you deal. These synergies can quickly change how you might want to set up your build going forward.
By Your Powers Combined…
Finally, let’s talk about character fusions, where you combine two of your counterselves to get access to both of their toolsets at once. Fusing your characters isn’t just about giving yourself an extra ability or two, it can be essential to crafting a powerful build as you get to the later stages of your run. Keeping that “Critical Vampire” upgrade from earlier in mind, let’s talk about how fusions can play into buildcrafting.
As your run progresses, you’ll find more and more weapons that have bonuses like dealing guaranteed critical damage to enemies afflicted with specific status effects. Fusing your current character with Altara, whose Energy weapons can inflict Weak, Chill, Freeze, Electric or Fire effects, can make late-run, crit-focused builds significantly easier to plan for. Having a tool in your back pocket that automatically doubles the damage of your other weapons and feeds into any crit-powered Amplifiers can be devastating, and can keep individual weapons viable for much longer than they would have been otherwise.
But I Don’t Want to Make Builds, I Just Wanna Hit Things
Let’s say you don’t care about any of that build stuff and just want more combat options. You can do that too! The fusion of Kera and Naira is actually my personal favorite way to play, switching between Kera’s melee launchers that carry smaller enemies into the air for air combos and blasting the tankier units that I can’t launch by using Naira’s guns. Combining abilities like Kera’s Dash Uppercut and Naira’s Glitch Dash abilities lets me temporarily become a hypermobile, invulnerable human wrecking ball.
Whether you want to work towards a specific build from the start of your run, want to try and complete the game with a single character, or if you want unmatched versatility in combat, Trinity Fusion is designed to ensure that there’s no “wrong” way to go about saving/ending the multiverse.