Having crash landed on a desolate alien planet, you must salvage enough scrap to repair your ship and make your way home. Along the way you will encounter strange creatures, ancient alien machines, and maybe even a new friend!
Astral Flux: Origins is a prequel to Astral Flux, which was released on PC and Nintendo Switch™ in 2022. Appropriately, it’s a Game Boy Color® game; this was a deliberate decision. We wanted to tell the story of how the base game’s protagonists met and do it in a way that reflects the design sensibilities of an older generation of games.
Transatlantic Therapy
Astral Flux: Origins was developed by Cosmocat Games, a two-man indie studio based in Canada and The Netherlands. Nathan is a psychologist, researcher, and artist; Adam is programmer, musician and sound designer. Our shared history and complimentary skillsets have enabled us to work together effectively for the past 5+ years, strengthening both our relationship and the quality of the games we make along the way.
Nathan’s background as a psychologist is evident in the game’s design: through his adventure we see Wrenchy overcome challenges and grow as an individual. This growth is paralleled by the alien species whose history he’s tracing, and arguably, not unlike our own growth as a studio.
Adam, adds an emotional element to the game in his own way–with music. Although he grew up with retro games, he’s continued to study and compose both game music and electronic music over the past three decades. He’s heavily inspired by deeper, more atmospheric and moodier genres, and while the Game Boy’s sound chip struggles to create “atmosphere” as we may know it today, he endeavored to deliver on this vision through a unique compositional approach as well as embracing the use of space and silence.
A Modern Take on a Classic
We have fond memories of playing games in the 8-bit era; despite their relatively simplistic graphics and sound by today’s standards, our childlike sense of wonder allowed us to be transported to those worlds. Although the bar for immersion is much higher these days, we can’t help but chase that feeling, so we asked ourselves: how can we transport the current generation of players to another world within the constraints of an older generation of hardware?
To achieve this, we drew on inspirations from the current generation: modern mechanics, modern VFX, contemporary music, modern conveniences like save points, etc. Many of us remember older games through rose-colored glasses–by smoothing the rough edges we were able to stay true to the ethos of these older games but do so in a way that better aligns with modern player expectations.
Nothing Borrowed, Something New
This probably goes without saying but we are especially excited to create something you can hold in your hands! In an era of increasingly digital ownership, where you don’t even own much of what you buy, it feels special to make something you can keep forever.
The team at ModRetro worked tirelessly to create a physical product that met our exacting standards. Special thanks to cover artist Larson Kilstrom, who was willing to endure a seemingly endless flurry of notes to deliver on our vision. The result speaks for itself: it both accurately depicts our vision, and does so in a style that is uniquely his own.
