From criminal underworld to bloody revolution: upcoming indie narrative shooter A Thug’s Ascension
Infant Indian developer Moonwalk Games arrive at the indie scene with their dark, character-driven crime drama set in a divided metropolis, in the upcoming low-poly narrative-driven action-adventurer A Thug’s Ascension
Surat, India, 19 January 2024: It is easy for writing in games to have to take a backseat when producers get too caught up in discussing the next most innovative game mechanic, and while all that is great, indie Indian (Indiean?) writer-director Adi Chandra and his team at Moonwalk Games have deliberately developed their debut title A Thug’s Ascension with the opposite mindset.
The game was announced last year at the DevGAMM 2023 expo in Lisbon and the India Game Developer Conference in Hyderabad, with a two-minute trailer showing off the game’s cinematography and gameplay, and demonstrating the grounded and slow-paced nature of the narrative in the action-adventure title. The game was also featured in DreamHack
Beyond 2023, GamesGathering Bratislava 2023, and last October’s Steam Next Fest.
Players become the mercenary-for-hire badass known as just ‘Chief’, and launch themselves into a four-hour-long story driven by complex character arcs and a sophisticated plot. The game follows Chief’s personal quest of escaping the fictional megacity of Maratha—inspired from Mumbai—so as to leave the haunting pains of his past behind. This mission is compromised, however, by billionaire industrialist Dr. Sarkar, a rich power broker from the opposite end of the great economic divide, as he enacts his plans of rebuilding Maratha in his own image by trying to control and destroy the entirety of its organised crime network. A Thug’s Ascension explores the themes of loss, rage, family, and morality as it chronicles the events of Sarkar’s plans clashing with Chief and his gang of outlaws, and how the political intrigue and the calculated conspiracies arduously escalate into an all-out “war for the nation’s greatest city”.
A Thug’s Ascension, while easily guilty of more story than gameplay, presents itself as a first-person shooter, complete also with driving and exploration sequences. The campaign is divided into fifteen chapters, all demanding varying styles of gameplay, everything from raiding powerful fortresses operated by rival gangs to epic city-wide car chases. The fast-paced combat, while very simple in its mechanics, places a strong emphasis on using the environment as a weapon— falling ceiling fans, flying gas cylinders, hittable gas pipes, exploding cars, jerry cans, and oil barrels just to name a few.
“As a game, this is where A Thug’s Ascension draws its strength from,” director Chandra explains. “We enjoyed our limitations. The game enjoys its own. My job as designer was thus to come up with the most fiendish ways to put our three simple mechanics of combat, driving, and exploration together into exciting and highly intense gameplay sequences, whether it’s a high-stakes prison escape or an all-out gang war in the middle of town.”
Moonwalk has also released a ninety-second gameplay trailer for Steam, showing A Thug’s Ascension off in its full ragdoll-mowing glory:
A Thug’s Ascension released worldwide on 19th January for Windows and macOS, published by TheGamePublisher.com. You can buy the game now on Steam.
About Moonwalk Games
Moonwalk Games is an independent developer of narrative-driven ‘art games’ based in Surat, India. It was founded by now-creative director Adi Chandra in July 2017 when he was thirteen. Chandra and his school best friend Diwangshu ‘DK’ Kakoty—3D art generalist—started work on their dream game A Thug’s Ascension in September 2018.
Contact information:
Adi Chandra (owner & creative director @Moonwalk) ph.: +91 70024 04919 email: sa.aditya.chandra@gmail.com
