Summary
- Yaga is an action RPG where you play as a one-handed blacksmith named Ivan, cursed with a great deal of bad luck
- Ivan and his fellow villagers are inspired by old Slavic folk tales and folk belief
- We wanted to bring you a slice of the worlds we were privy to growing up in a country with Slavic influences
Now that Yaga is finally available on Xbox One, I thought it would be interesting to share a bit about our main character and the inspiration for our game’s world.
Yaga is an action RPG where you play as a one-handed
blacksmith named Ivan, cursed with a great deal of bad luck. The protagonist is
being softly shunned from the kingdom by the Tzar who tries to send him on a
fool’s errand. This turns out to be the start of Ivan’s biggest adventure. You
will get to help Ivan through a series of adventures while at the same time
getting you to meet famous Slavic villains and characters and lots of people in
need of your helping hand.
This is a key element in giving you the chance to roleplay
your characters. As Ivan’s voice, you’ll be able to make choices that lead him
to one of four different personalities: selfish, righteous, aggressive or
foolish. The narrative and gameplay get wrapped together when the choices you
make end up changing how you experience the game and define what kind of
upgrades you get, and what outcome you can expect at the end of the game.
Right from the start of the game you’ll learn that life was
not very kind to Ivan prior to your adventures. The village people brand him as
the unluckiest person they know, ever since he lost one of his arms in a fight
with an evil creature. Which doubles as a tragedy when you consider the fact
that he is a blacksmith.
Ivan and his fellow villagers are inspired by old Slavic
folk tales and folk belief. Our main goal was allowing you to discover the
mythical world that enriched peasant life and their quirky beliefs from 14th
century Slavic countries. We tried to also include the more humorous sides of
that culture as best we could. This stemmed from our belief that there’s a rich
and untapped amount of great Slavic stories that people in the West and other
parts of the world are rarely being exposed to. For us that’s a sad fact and we
were lucky enough to be able to change that.
We wanted to bring you a slice of the worlds we were privy
to growing up in a country with Slavic influences. I can still remember the
voices on the records my mom used to put on when I was a few years old that
were filled with stories about Baba Yaga and the beasts roaming the kingdoms of
the Red and Green Emperors. There’s an aspect of those stories that we rarely
get to see these days. In the more popular Grimm fairy tales, there a certain
amount of positivity and goodness that you just don’t see that much in Slavic
tales.
What we love about the former is that they are filled with black humor and cynicism regarding life itself. The Slavic people are famous for using humor and self-deprecation as a form of escapism and it reflects heavily in the stories they share. Yaga is how we hope to give the players a peek into that world.
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Embark on a Paranormal Adventure in Ghost Simulator on Roblox
Source: Xbox Blog
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