Family Feuds: Children Of Morta Launches Kickstarter 

The family that slays together, stays together - or at least falls to gribbly enemies together. "Narrative-based roguelike" Children of Morta perked Adam's interest late last year with its detail-packed pixel animations, and it's now launched on Kickstarter. At the time of writing it's a promising third torwards its funding goal, and the pitch video has plenty more lush animations and hack-and-slash combat.

The combat looks a bit Hyper Light Drift-y to me - lots of tight dungeon spaces, sword-slashing and quick dashes.

I like HLD's combat a lot, but I'm always more interested when games say they're going to combine elements of narrative and roguelike, because the aspects that define roguelike for me are often those systems that produce dynamic narrative. Combining the two seems tricky, but that's what Morta is aiming for: "Procedural narrative events blend within the main game story and provide you with options to explore this rich world as you wish. Different players playing Children of Morta will have different experiences while following the same main story." Permadeath seems the most obvious way through which that will happen. The feature is present, and I'm imagining that family members can die and the game will continue, the other characters responding or reacting to the loss.

Or at least, I hope that's how it'll work. I have no real idea and the story trailer only fills in the static backstory.

$15 (around £9.89) will net you a copy of the game upon release with an estimated delivery date of October 2015, while $25 (around £16.48) gets you early back-only access sometime before that.