V Rising's Cursed Forest Is A Swampy Mess Inhabited By Witches

The latest dev diary entry for Stunlock Studios' vampire survival game V Rising touches upon progress from a number of development teams. First up are the art and worldbuilding teams, who are hard at work crafting a sufficiently creepy world for your creatures of the night to explore. Today's highlight is the Cursed Forest, a.k.a. "The Swamp Lands," with its foul waters and tentacle-like tree roots. Even worse are its denizens, witches who "shape their nests from the trunks of great trees and decorate them with occult symbols, bones, flowers, and sometimes even the limbs from whatever prey they’ve captured," according to artist Victor.

Albin from the animations team then checked in to show us the progress being made on a burrowing rat, while VFX artist Adrien talked about how the player character's motions should convey "a feeling of elegance along with a strong sense of power so that the player really feels like a noble vampire." Composer Aleksandria Migova then gave us a sampling of the music for V Rising, which is "an ever-changing atmospheric journey that communicates both the claustrophobic feeling of The Cursed Forest and tells the stories of its strange inhabitants."

Roads were the sole gameplay topic, and they're more than just simple dirt paths. They represent how NPC patrols travel, and their interconnected nature make so that creatures can wander far and wide.

If you want to try out V Rising, you might a chance by the end of the year. Stunlock Studios is promising a "very limited" closed beta test by then, followed by paid early access and a full launch in 2022. You can learn more about V Rising via its Steam page.