Haunting PS4 adventure Toren arrives on PS4 next week

Hello PlayStation Blog readers! Along with developer Swordtales, we’re proud to announce that Toren will be heading to PlayStation 4 on 12th May! We’re also extremely happy to announce that we’re doing a special 10% discount for all PS Plus members for the first week of our launch.

Toren is the first adventure game from Brazilian indie developer Swordtales. You are Moonchild, destined to climb the tower (known as Toren) on a hauntingly solitary journey to find your purpose. Over the course of our journey to debut on the PS4, we have learned a ton about game development and we’d like to discuss the importance of growth and inspiration to both the game’s content as well as to its development.

In Toren, growth is an especially powerful idea, since you start the game as a small child and you have to learn how to walk, as well as how to interact with the world. As you progress through the game, Moonchild will age and grow up, learning new powers and abilities which, in turn, let you interact with the world in increasingly different ways.

By the same token, with the help of Sony’s support for indie games, we have also grown from being a group of starry-eyed hopefuls into full-fledged game developers – an incredible journey for the studio that has made everyone a little older and a little wiser (and a lot more sleep-deprived!)

 
Toren is also a game that came about as the result of inspiration. You’ll no doubt mark the similarities between our game and the classic PS2 adventure game Ico. Like that game, Toren features a beautiful, silent world to explore lacking an obvious narrator. The Swordtales team felt that this style of narrative and explanation fit our vision of what we wanted the game to be, while also infusing the game with a uniquely colorful look and feel that draws on the traditional artwork and mythology of Brazil.

And in the same way, we pushed through all those late-night coding and testing sessions by drawing great inspiration from both the input of fans – whose thoughtful feedback really spurred the team to move forwards – as well as from the opportunity to join the eclectic PS4 indie games library. Standing shoulder-to-shoulder with fantastic indie developers like Klei Entertainment, Doublefine, and many more has been a great source of inspiration that has led us to constantly challenge ourselves to do better.

 
We’re very proud to be working with Sony and helping grow the video game culture of Brazil, as well as helping contribute to Sony’s indie game culture. Sony’s indie-friendly approach and ability to work with us (even all the way down in South America) truly made this effort worthwhile and we cannot express enough thanks to them. This is our first game and one of the few to come out of Brazil, but this will surely not be the last!

We encourage all of you to not only check out the game, but please get a conversation going with us! We truly enjoy your feedback (as it makes us better developers). You can reach us on Twitter at @TorenGame and on Facebook.