Within the first hour of its Kickstarter campaign, Quest of Souls managed to raise over 10% of their $42,000 goal, a stat developer King Crow Studio proudly proclaimed on its Steam Greenlight page. Impressive, but the first hour of any campaign often has to do with backers anticipating a project’s launch and jumping on it right from the get-go. And unless devs have already got thousands of backers madly in love with their concept even before it’s on Kickstarter, the actual campaign is when they end up doing most of the heavy legwork. And unsurprisingly, ever since Quest of Souls’ first mini-surge in funding, it’s since been rolling along at a steady but much slower pace.
The game itself is a “multiplayer fantasy shoot ‘em up RPG” about a bunch of quirky creatures: a “corgi dragonslayer”, a “lizardman samurai” and a “goodly lich”. If you have no idea what those are, it might be better to just check out the picture King Crow has posted on Kickstarter. There are definitely tons of RPG fans perusing Kickstarter and the appeal is there: the project has already been Steam Greenlit.
As I scrolled through Quest of Souls’ Steam Greenlight page, I noticed more than a few people confused about what Quest of Souls was really about: “Anjinjol” posted, “love the art… but still after checking this [out] I don’t know what the game is about. Yeah there [are] skills and shit but I need to see more”. “Varivox” had a similar issue, commenting that this was “one of those ‘could be’ games that look like they have potential, but I can’t upvote simply because there isn’t enough info available”. Even though both comments were posted early December 2015, they still pertain now that the Kickstarter is up and running.
Most campaign overviews are extremely thorough but Quest of Souls’ is pretty bare-bones. There isn’t much of an explanation regarding gameplay, characters, story and the like. Instead, they jump right into “Necroball”, the multiplayer portion of Quest of Souls, a competitive pixelated soccer involving enemy zombies. My guess is that they’re aiming to attract potential backers with their demo, which incorporates both single-player, and “Necroball” once you finish the game. But it’s got to work both ways. The majority of people are going to go through Quest of Souls’ Kickstarter page before they get to the demo, and if even if the demo is truly amazeballs, people have to be given enough impetus to download it and give it a whirl.
Quest of Souls is at 25% with under two weeks to go, and is definitely going to require some sort of jump start to meet its mark. King Crow has been keeping backers in the loop with an update every other day or so, and yesterday they sent out an urgent message imploring backers to spread the word via social media to gain some much-needed traction. Quest of Souls could very well reach its $42K goal, but only if people know about its existence and are given enough of a reason to play the demo.
