Image: Riot Forge
Last year was a busy one for Riot Forge, which published three solid, indie-developed games set in the expansive Runeterra universe (The Mageseeker, Convergence, Song of Nunu), each featuring totally unique art styles and gameplay. Now the company is turning its attention to its 2024 slate, which will kick off next month with the adorable Bandle Tale by Lazy Bear Games.
Fans of management sims may recognize Lazy Bear as the developer behind Graveyard Keeper, and while we weren’t huge fans of that release when it came to Switch a few years ago, Bandle Tale is certainly shaping up to be a much more colorful and engaging release that fans of titles such as Stardew Valley and My Time at Sandrock will want to take note of. We recently got to sit down with some key staff behind Bandle Tale for an extended gameplay demonstration and came away quite impressed by what was shown. You’ll find our interview further down the page, but first, our initial impressions of the game.
Image: Riot Forge
The hands-off demonstration began with a portion of the tutorial, where our Yordle (an adorable little gremlin creature) was tasked with learning how to cook by the local chef. To begin with, we were sent out to a nearby garden to collect some ingredients—a few bunches of luminous ‘glownanas’ and some beets. Gathering the ingredients themselves required the first skill in an extensive tree that gates further progress into various kinds of cooking, baking, hunting, and resource-gathering activities. And that’s just in the Nature tab—we were also shown equally lengthy Knitting and Engineering tabs that cover other activities you can participate in, and your ticket to progressing deeper into any of these trees is receiving Inspiration from creating new things via the various activities.
Once the resources were gathered, beets were chopped and a beet dish baked for the chef, who rewarded this hard work with a rug that would allow our Yordle to set up their own food stand and a ‘horrifying’ carnivorous plant that would act as a form of garbage disposal. The Yordle then returned home and laid out the rug in front, where they set up a chopping table and an oven to cook dishes in.
The demo then jumped forward several hours further into the game, after our Yordle had made significant progress on the skill trees and several expansions to their house. The interior had now been transformed into a small palace full of elaborate decorations and furniture, all of which we were told is craftable and customizable.
Image: Riot Forge
With the party over, our Yordle then took a brief tour around the island, gathering various ingredients from natural or planted sources and greeting a few of their neighbors along the way. We were assured that Bandle Tale is the kind of game where you’re encouraged to take things at your own pace, and while there is a central main story quest to follow that drives progression, there are plenty of side activities like fishing, cooking, and hunting to participate in, along with a wealth of quests you can fulfill for your neighbors.
All told, we were thrilled by what we were shown of Bandle Tale—it’s looking like this release will fall comfortably in line with the level of quality we’ve come to expect from Riot Forge while bringing a wealth of unique new ideas to the table with its cozy and slower-paced gameplay approach.
During the presentation, we also got to spend some time talking with Rowan Parker, Creative Director and a co-founder of Riot Forge, and Nikita Kulaga, Creative Director and co-founder of Lazy Bear Games. Here are some key snippets from our conversation about Bandle Tale and the Riot Forge project in general:
Nintendo Life: This is a question for you, Nikita. What are some lessons that you learned from your work on Graveyard Keeper that you would say Bandle Tale will benefit from?
Nikita Kulaga: I’m a game designer and I’m all about mechanics, so we have a special system that will block some progress through the skill tree.
To make more progress, you need to earn badges, and you earn them basically by doing quests and unlocking new locations in Bandle City. It allows us to be sure that you’re not going further and unlocking something that you can’t use yet. For example, you only have access to areas with the resources that are needed for the craft that you’ve unlocked.
So, everything is smoother now. Because in Graveyard Keeper sometimes the player would get frustrated, “Why did I unlock this technology when I can’t immediately get the benefits from it?” and “How can I progress?” Now everything is in line, and we make tutorials and other things simple.
Now, probably, you won’t need a paper notebook and a pen to play our game, because we have hints, so we learned our lessons.
Rowan Parker: I think [the story] might be better, too, compared to when you guys did Graveyard Keeper. The advantage of the badges is that they’re all part of the story, so as you just make friends with Yordles and you do the jokes and dialogue, you push the story forward and those badges are nice tempo gates.
I think the backpack is a big lift as well compared to Graveyard Keeper being able to take your Tardis (it’s kinda like a Tardis) base and take it with you wherever you go. I kind of wish a lot of games of this genre had something like that, where I could just take it with me and keep upgrading and evolving it. It has pocket dimensions where I can go into a garden for gardening and time keeps flowing, even when it’s on my back. It’s just very convenient. But then, it’s not just convenient, there’s actual reasons to have to go to certain parts of the islands because there’s magic auras on the ground or there’ll be beautiful scenery so a particular party might have a beauty threshold where you actually can’t throw it except in that one spot.
So, would you say this is a pretty open-ended game?
NK: You have a lot of stuff to do and you can plan your day and do stuff in your own order, but we have a really cool story that goes from the beginning to the end, so you will learn everything about Bandle City, how it works, learn everything about Yordles, and save the city after all. In the end, the game has [a] final cutscene and I hope that you will enjoy the story as much as you probably enjoy crafting.
How do you decide which other League champions feature in this game? Or in any Riot Forge game?
RP: The process is pretty organic because it’s usually gameplay-driven by what makes sense for the kind of game. When Nikita and the team were looking at Yordles and Bandle City as a great way to have the freedom to do this genre of game, it was obvious that you never really just put one Yordle in something. Yordles always come as a bunch. You don’t just have one, you have, like, six.
So, I think we have almost all of the usual suspects for Lulu, Rumble, Tristana, Teemo. But that’s why I like playing as your own character instead of as a hero, like one of our champions. In fact, I think this is the first time we’ve ever let a player self-insert into one of our games. That’s sort of what makes sense for this genre, right? You wanted to play yourself in this world.
You’ve talked before about how Riot Forge has a very organic process for finding developers to work on projects. So, how did this game get made?
RP: I had already played Punch Club and then I played Graveyard Keeper a heap, so we reached out to the team and were like, “Hey, we love Graveyard Keeper, would you maybe consider working with us?” And the guys were nice enough to respond and then we started talking. But yeah, straight up, Graveyard Keeper and Punch Club, I love both those games. I love the style of humor that they have as well, and we just really wanted to work with them. Because they’ve already made one of the most successful lifestyle-type games, making and crafting RPGs, we get to lean on all of the lessons they learned making Graveyard Keeper.
I think Nikita has like four games in his brain. It’s priceless.
And I think that’s a great way to approach things from the publisher’s side. I know you’ve mentioned that in the past, how you [have] that more hands-off, “let them cook” kind of mentality.
RP: Right. Why would I try and tell Nikita what to do? They’re the experts, they make Graveyard Keeper, they know how to make these types of games. We’re here to help and support.
If there are particular things that we can help with, with either knowledge or design or research, we will. But otherwise, leave them alone, let them cook.
NK: And that support was appreciated. It was quite a challenge, initially, as to what Bandle City is, because there was not much information for Yordles already developed.
RP: Yeah, of all the parts of League of Legends IP, Bandle City and Yordles were one of the least developed parts, which is hard playing like Nikita said because we have to make everything ourselves, but it’s also kind of an advantage because it means we can do whatever we need to for the game.
Image: Riot Forge
NL: You’ve talked before about taking kind of blank canvas approach, where there are some corners of Runeterra that aren’t really developed yet in Leagues lore, and you let the developers that you’re working with come up with their own ideas for that. What are some of your favorite examples of novel ideas that some studios have come up with?
RP: As Nikita mentioned, we started this four years ago. The idea of Bandle City being these islands in the spirit… so if you’re familiar with League’s lore, the spirit realm is where Bandle City is, and they are these disparate islands that are floating within the ether of the spirit realm. That’s an idea that we initially came up with when we were chatting with Nikita and the team, and then it actually permeated into other parts of Riot.
So, Legends of Runeterra, when they did their Yordle set in, I want to say, 2021, were the first player-facing asset where they showed the spirals and the island clusters. But that idea actually came from Bandle Tale, where we were working together in the background. And players, they didn’t know this, but even though Legends of Runeterra was the first thing to put out, we were all secretly working on this in the background as well.
So, a lot of the work that we do here sort of bleeds or permeates sideways into other parts of things we do at Riot; even just the idea of floating islands in the Aether and spirals, this kind of came from Bandle Tale initially.
Our thanks to Rowan and Nikita. We’ll be sure to share our full thoughts on Bandle Tale: A League of Legends Story with a review when it launches on 21st February.
If you’re already sold on the concept, preorders just opened today, with a Deluxe Edition available for $29.99, and a Collector’s Edition for $149.99 — you can check out Riot’s site for more details.