Mortismal Gaming reviewed the tactical RPG Iron Danger:

Iron Danger - Review After 100%

COG checked out the tactical RPG Iron Danger:

Iron Danger Review – A Perfectionist’s RPG

Iron Danger Review

If you’ve played a fair amount of RPGs you probably have abused quick-saving at least a few times in your life. Saving between every move, making sure everything is perfect, or reloading to just a few seconds prior when something goes wrong. It’s a little exploit-y but we accept it as part of playing hard RPGs. Well, what if I told you Iron Danger is a game built around that exact principle? With challenges balanced around your ability to rewind and without the annoying load times. No exploits here! Just good old perfectionist fun.

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I feel like in many ways we’ve entered an era of meta-design, where entire games are built around challenging or redefining tried-and-true mechanics. I see Iron Danger falling into that legacy and, in such context, I think it’s a game that is easier to appreciate for veteran players of the genre. I don’t mean to say that this game is inaccessible to newer gamers. Certainly, the low-stakes nature of it can accommodate them quite well. However, if you are a lover of RPG games such as Divinity: Original Sin 2, and are a frequent abuser of the quick-save button like me, you’ll find Iron Danger quite fun and refreshing.

Score: 79/100

The tactical RPG Iron Danger has been released:

Iron Danger

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Iron Danger is a tactical combat game with a unique time manipulation mechanic. A never before seen combination that combines the tactical depth of turn-based games with the exciting action of real-time games. 

RPG Site has reviewed the upcoming Steampunk RPG Iron Danger:

Iron Danger Review

We're settling into a busy time of year for game releases, with a number of big or highly-anticipated RPGs soon releasing for fans of established developers or franchises. Iron Danger is, however, not one of those games. It is instead a debut project from a small Helsinki studio looking to make their first mark on the world with a unique take on tactical RPG stylings and combat.

Iron Danger is set in a Nordic-inspired world following the story of Kipuna, a normal village girl whose home is unexpectedly razed by Northlander invaders. During the assault, while trying to escape from the madness, Kipuna ultimately falls to her death ... or at least that how it initially seems. Thanks to divine intervention from a forgotten god, Kipuna finds herself revived with the ability to manipulate space and time. Before she even has much time to mourn the loss of her home or even get a chance to think, Kipuna is soon thrown into a larger conflict that could decide the fate of civilization.

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The ending to the game actually caught me off guard a bit. While I could tell I was approaching the conclusion to the storyline, the game credits appeared suddenly before I expected them to, as I audibly blurted out 'wait, that's it?' to my computer screen. It's not quite a cliffhanger ending, but it felt premature as if the developers clearly want the story to continue in another game or piece of media, leaving an unsatisfying ending here. A few looming threats are mentioned in a handful of places throughout the game, but they are never quite explored in Iron Danger.

Iron Danger is a unique tactical game unlike most others out there. Clocking in at around 12 hours long, it doesn't overstay its welcome. It's an interesting take on a tactical style, but I don't think it will leave a lasting impression on me.

Score: 6/10

Iron Danger will be released on March 25 - here's the feature trailer:

Iron Danger - Feature Trailer

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Handsome Phantom has a short preview on Iron Danger based on what was shown at Pax East.

Everyone wishes they could rewind time and fix any mistake that they’ve made in life, especially when those mistakes are fatal. In Iron Danger, that’s exactly what you can do. The tutorial in our demo showed you all the basics with a single character. As you move through the world, you’ll need to come an eye on just about everything. You might be walking along and suddenly an arrow will come out of nowhere and strike you down. Thanks to the handy dandy rewind feature, all is not lost. All you must do is rewind right before you die and chose a different option. In this case, strafing to one side or the other should be enough to avoid the arrow.

Thanks Lucky Day.

Kordanor spotted that the RPG Iron Danger will be released on March 25:

Iron Danger - Release Date Trailer

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Iron Danger will release on March 25, 2020! Get a glimpse of the game's time manipulation combat in this trailer.

Daedalic is going to publish Action Squad Studio's RPG Iron Danger, which is an RPG which features a rather unique combat system:

The steam page reads:

You have control over time

The core of Iron Danger is its unique time control mechanic. You can rewind time for up to 5 seconds whenever you want, trying different strategies and combinations of moves until you find the right one for the task at hand.

The time manipulation allows us to combine real-time combat gameplay with controls from more traditional, tactical turn-based combat games. This gives tactical combat a puzzle-like element, as you can continuously keep trying new approaches to turn impossible odds to your advantage and synchronize the actions of your characters for the perfect outcome.

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Thanks Kordanor!

Iron Danger has been previewed by Wccftech who comment on the games time travel mechanic.

“A game without an end-state?” I hear you ask. I asked the same question and it doesn’t seem that there isn’t an end-state. This isn’t to say you won’t die. You’re going to die a lot. It’s more the fact that as soon as Kipuna or one of your characters dies, everything stops. I like to believe that Kipuna can’t fathom losing someone she values so highly, nor does she want to die herself, so stopping time and letting you go back is her defence mechanism.

It’s this mechanism that interests me so much about Iron Danger. Combat, in games, has always been a puzzle of sorts. Only now it’s more in line with that of a puzzle game than anything else of its kind. At any point, the games turns, dictated by a bar at the bottom of the screen, is measured by heartbeats and you can go back a maximum of ten heartbeats. Fortunately, you know exactly what’s going to happen and where the enemies are moving, letting you pre-empt them.

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Thanks Farflame!

Heikki-Pekka Noronen from Action Squad Studio answers some questions about Iron Danger and himself:

Heikki-Pekka Noronen (Action Squad Studio): Iron Danger - game development Q&A

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The first dev blog for Iron Danger tells the story of the story.

The Story of The Story

26.2.2019 - Joel Sammallahti

Some words from the writer

The development of Iron Danger is proceeding in an equal combination of fits and starts on the one hand, and leaps and bounds on the other. From the writer's point of view, it's an interesting time, as story beats and dialogue written months ago are finally seeing the light of the screen. All the while, I'm going back to those earlier pieces of writing, updating them to conform to changes in the game's mechanics, level design, characters, enemy roster, and so on: the script is constantly in flux. This is an interesting aspect of game writing: nothing is set in stone before the game is actually finished and shipped, but then again, without a solid script, there's no way to make progress on the actual levels in such a story-driven game. So I though this week we could have a look at the process of writing the story that we started building our actual levels on.

It Starts With a Secret Ingredient

When I first started working on Iron Danger, I talked with our lead designer about the story, and he gave me the kernel of it. He had been planning the game for a while, and wanted the story to have real emotional resonance, not just one event after another. His insight was that to guide our writing and design in a direction that would produce that resonance, the story should have an underlying metaphorical level: we should treat the story as an allegory of an inherently resonating core metaphor, like a symbolist painting or poem. I thought that was a brilliant approach, and we agreed immediately to construct the story on his core metaphor. We would not make the core metaphor explicit, but its dynamics would provide us with a foundation, on which to construct a coherent story and game experience. The events of the game and the supporting characters, seen from the point of view of our heroine, would symbolize experiences and forces, respectively, relating to this core metaphor.* What a kooky, romantic way to write a game!

Concept to Outline

The core metaphor provides us with an idea. But ideas are cheap, as any writer will go out of their way to tell you. So, the next step was to turn that idea into the outline of a story. For this purpose, I wrote up a sequence of major events over the course of the game, in a table with one column for gameplay events, and a second one for the underlying meta-level meaning. This table went through a number of revisions, until I was happy with the logic and structure of both sides. The meta-level was instrumental in making the surface-level story work: whenever I was in doubt about an event, or some element seemed off, I looked at the meta-level meaning, and used the logic of that side to figure out how to fix the surface-level problem.

When I was happy with my table, I turned it into a 3-page prose synopsis, divided into chapters. We dug into this synopsis with the lead designer and other members of the team, seeing how it could be improved, and translating it into an idea of the kinds of game content we would need. If I had invented a character or a place, someone was going to have to turn that into a game asset, after all. And if I had written an event, say "Kipuna collapses from pain", that implied another entry on our coders' and animators' checklists. Based on such considerations, we moved some of the characters and events around, fusing or removing extraneous ones, and tightening the whole skein a notch. Throughout it all, we kept the meta-level story in mind, to make sure we didn't lose sight of the emotional core of the game.

Scenic Route

Once we had a good story synopsis, it was time to further refine that into a list of actual scenes. We think of movies consisting of scenes, but games, of course, are made of levels. Right? Well, the approach we took was that from the story point of view, a level would consist of one or more gameplay scenes, interspersed by shorter, story-focused scenes that would just advance the narrative instead of serving up actual gameplay.

I went through the prose outline, splitting it up into scene-sized chunks. These I labeled either cutscenes, in which the player would more or less passively watch a short presentation of information, gameplay scenes, the meat and potatoes of actually running around, fighting enemies, and solving puzzles, and finally, interactive cutscenes in which the player would control the main character in exactly the same way as in core gameplay, but with the focus on dialogue. These were further arranged into levels, sequences of scenes that would carry from one to the next seamlessly, each level separated from the next by a cut implying the passing of time.

The spreadsheet containing all this became one of our main tools for managing the production, with required assets listed for each scene, and each one assigned to a specific level designer. Although we all collaborate on each other's levels, one person finally bears the responsibility of bringing the level to completion and making sure it hangs together. (Yes, I'm one of the level designers too, as are the lead designer, the producer, and the lead concept artist; nobody wears just one hat in our team.)

Two Steps Forward, One Giant Leap Back

Of course, no big project-even a moderately big one like ours-proceeds from point A to B in a straight line. Time and time again, I find myself going back to the story outline with revisions, and small changes to our level spreadsheet are always ongoing. That's how it should be, too! A game isn't a piece of writing, and its story isn't told when it's written down: it's only when we're actually playing what we've built that we can figure out what really works and what doesn't, and so we jump back frequently and make the changes to the story that our experience with the game, half-finished as it is, tells us are needed. I'll write another post about that, later! Now, I've got to fix some dialogue to take out references to an enemy we replaced with another one...

*So... what is the core metaphor? It doesn't matter. If we've succeeded, the story will be entertaining and evocative, and if not, knowing would in no improve it. It's nothing unique-on the contrary, it's almost universal-and once you know it's there, you can probably guess when you've played the game, if we've done our jobs right.

Iron Danger will soon go into closed Alpha testing and there is a new trailer.

Taking in applications for closed alpha testing + new trailer

17 OCTOBER - HEPPHEP
We are happy to announce that we are aiming to start closed alpha testing by the end of October. For that, we have started to take in applications to participate.

The detailed instructions of testing and how to apply, can be found from Iron Danger's Discord server at https://discord.gg/8tDbuU

So, if you are eager to already give a try to Iron Danger in it's alpha state, that is where you should head to.

To celebrate the alpha, we have also released a new trailer for the game. Enjoy!

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OnlySP interviewed the developers of Iron Danger. Part 1 looks at the studios iterative approach while Part 2 looks at the world creation process.

When asked what inspired the creation of this world, Noronen offers that “Sami Timonen, who is [the] original father of the Iron Danger world, has described Iron Danger early on with phrase ‘Lord of the Rings meets Transformers’.” An ambitious combination of ideas to be sure, but one that becomes more apparent as Noronen continues. Kalevala is an allusion to the national epic of Finland, a compilation of epic poetry with deep roots in Finnish folklore and mythology, and he says that though the team brings an eclectic mix of inspirations, the common thread is this folklore with deep roots in the identity of the team. As Noronen explains, “there is connection with lots of myths of which we bravely steal, change, and rewrite for our own purposes. Most of the team is from Finland and the tales and the world they stem from are running very much in our veins.” He also cites the nature of Finland as a big inspiration, “especially on the visual looks and overall atmosphere of the game.”

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A new pre-alpha combat video from Iron Danger.

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The gameplay footage takes a look at Iron Danger’s unique time manipulation based combat mechanics.

Iron Danger now has a Steam page which lists a 2019 release date.

About This Game

Iron Danger is a story-driven, turn-based, tactical RPG with simultaneous turns and time manipulation mechanics. A never before seen combination, which brings new level of depth into tactical combat.

It is a streamlined, action-packed single-player game in which repetitive grinding is kept to a minimum and every moment advances the story.

In this fresh fantasy world of warrior shamans and machine fumes, you take on the role of Kipuna, a simple village girl, who becomes imbued with a cosmic power that grants dominion over time and death. The player controls Kipuna and one of two individual companion characters in tactically challenging battles against a variety of different threats. At center stage in combat is the unique time shifting mechanic that represents Kipuna’s magical influence over the flow of time. It gives the player the ability to rewind at any point with fraction-of-a-second precision, pinpointing strikes to enemies’ unguarded moments, deflecting and dodging attacks exactly when they happen, synchronizing magical and physical attacks to overwhelm difficult enemies, and overcoming impossible odds through trial and error.

Iron Danger challenges you to think of combat and puzzles from a different perspective: you may be an experienced gamer, who knows all the tricks, but you’ve never played a game like this.

FEATURES

• Use unique time-rewind mechanics and experience totally new take on tactical combat and puzzles
• Enter into deep tactical combat with simultaneous turns and take advantage of highly interactive environment to succeed
• Adventure in a world of steampunk fantasy and meet it’s unique inhabitants inspired by Finnish folklore
• Fight epic boss monsters on the path to fulfill your destiny
• No grinding. Character development is tied to actions that player characters will take.

WORLD OF IRON DANGER

Iron Danger is set in a world of lofty fells, primeval forest, and placid lakes... as well as living gods, monsters of steel and smoke, and supernatural doom dwelling beneath the earth. The city of Kalevala, home of the humans who rebelled against the gods and forsook their protection, shines in the middle of this world, surrounded by towns, sea lanes and and woodlands under its protection. But from the frozen north, a witch queen is leading her army on a quest for vengeance against the lords of Kalevala. Ancient ruins from the days when gods dwelled on the earth are opening to unleash forgotten powers, tempting humans and striving to overtake the world.

Eurogamer checked out the tactical RPG Iron Danger:

What happens when Superhot meets XCOM?

Meet Iron Danger, a new take on a Finnish legend. 

Finland has provided its fair share of classics over the years - from Resogun to Trials through Alan Wake and Angry Birds - but here's one of a different vintage; a game that draws upon a Finnish classic from the 19th century. Kalevala is an epic that's informed much of Finland's national identity, drawing upon Finnish folklore (and proving influential to Tolkien as he built his own mythology) - and all this without a voxel in sight.

It's ripe for returning to, really, which is exactly what upstart Helsinki developer Action Squad - a team who draws experience from seemingly every studio in the area, with Remedy, Rovio, Supercell and RedLynx all making appearances on the various CVs - is doing with Iron Danger, a tactical turn-based adventure with a few neat twists of its own. You're Kipuna, an everyday villager who is granted superpowers that place her in the middle of an epic battle for the city of Kalevala.

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There is a mockup of some potential UI for Iron Danger on their Twitter account.

Hey there #indiedevhour ! Everyone having a good week?

We wanted to share bit of UI stuff with you.
We are lvl upping our UI and here are some initial designs for where we might be heading to.

Any opinions?#IronDanger #indiedev #gamedev #madewithunity #indiegame #UI pic.twitter.com/vlMhwT3eDf

— Iron Danger (@IronDangerWorld) June 6, 2018

Iron Danger has now been officially announced with a new pre-alpha gameplay trailer.

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PRESS RELEASE

Helsinki, Finland - 9th of May, 2018
Finnish developer Action Squad Studios announces their new game, Iron Danger, with release of the pre-alpha gameplay trailer. Iron Danger is a genre-blending tactical RPG with simultaneous turns and time rewinding mechanics, providing an uniquely experimental take on combat and puzzles. It is also a game that focuses heavily on story and aims to minimize grinding as a part of the character progress.

The world of Iron Danger draws its inspiration from Nordic mythos, and especially from Kalevala and Finnish folklore. It tells a story of Kipuna, a simple village girl, who becomes imbued with a cosmic power that grants dominion over time and death. The group of unsung heroes, led by Kipuna, must use their wits and power over the time as they’re drawn into the midst of a war between the city of Kalevala, ruled by an immortal, who has renounced the gods, and the armies of the Northlanders driven by their Witch Queen.

Iron Danger will be released for PC, PS4 and Xbox One.

Iron Danger is a story driven tactical RPG with simultaneous turns currently under development. There are some screenshots here and the developer has a twitter account for the game.

We've been asked a lot what engine we are using. This is the best day to tell that we are using @unity3d as it is #madewithunity Friday!

To make it even better, here is our fresh teaser trailer for you to watch & share.#IronDanger #indiedev #rpg #indiegame #gamedev #pcgaming pic.twitter.com/wxXMgFu2Ds

— Iron Danger (@IronDangerWorld) April 6, 2018

Story

Epic Scale, Personal Stakes

Iron Danger is a fully story-driven game, in which the action flows from the choices of the heroes and the events that surround them. The fate of an entire world is in your hands, and you will grapple with cosmic magic, terrifying monsters, and colossal war machines to save it. But you're not a conquering warrior or master of sorcery by birth: you have to grow into your destiny step by step, and you can't do it alone. Along your journey, you're joined by companions with their own goals, backgrounds, abilities and personalities. They will guide and protect you, but also bring challenges of their own, and their lives are ultimately also in your hands. Together, you engage in epic struggles and make magical discoveries, but just as important are the relationships you form along the way.

Along the way, if you survive, Kipuna's magic grows stronger and more versatile, bringing new options and opportunities to combat. Of course, your other fighting abilities improve as well, and you have control over which of Kipuna's and the companion characters' stats you wish to upgrade. Instead of repetitively accumulating piles of experience points, however, character development is based on distinctive, level-specific challenges that each provide unique new skill upgrades. These challenges respond to your play style, with trade-offs between different approaches such as offense vs. defense and magic vs. stealth, so that your characters gain new abilities that reflect the way you choose to approach the game.

Gameplay

Fight - Die - Adapt

Iron Danger is a story driven tactical RPG with simultaneous turns. It is a streamlined, action-packed single-player game in which repetitive grinding is kept to a minimum and every moment advances the story. The player controls Kipuna and one of two individual companion characters in tactically challenging battles against a variety of different threats. At center stage in combat is the unique time shifting mechanic that represents Kipuna's magical influence over the flow of time. It gives the player the ability to rewind at any point with fraction-of-a-second precision, pinpointing strikes to enemies' unguarded moments, deflecting and dodging attacks exactly when they happen, synchronizing magical and physical attacks to overwhelm difficult enemies, and overcoming impossible odds through trial and error. Iron Danger challenges you to think of combat and puzzles from a different perspective: you may be an experienced gamer who knows all the tricks, but you've never played a game like this.