F.I.S.T. could be the gritty 3D Metroidvania game you didn’t know you wanted

PlayStation 4 game stars a robot-fighting rabbit in a dieselpunk world inspired by 1920s China

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F.I.S.T. could be the gritty 3D Metroidvania game you didn’t know you wanted

Josh Ye

Published: 11:41pm, 13 Aug 2019Updated: 9:11am, 20 Sep 2019

This article originally appeared on ABACUS

Imagine Old Man Logan but with a rabbit. Instead of lacerating gunmen with adamantium claws, a grizzled bunny faces off against an army of robots by wielding a mechanical fist almost twice the size of its small frame.

That is what the upcoming Chinese Metroidvania game F.I.S.T. is about. The game, developed by Shanghai-based TiGames, is a title backed by Sony’s China Hero Project, an incubator in China for game developers. TiGames recently showed an almost 20-minute gameplay demo at ChinaJoy, and it looks promising.

This is one bad rabbit. (Picture: TiGames)

The demo lets you traverse a seedy, dieselpunk metropolis gripped by a totalitarian robot government (this is no Zootopia). You are then asked to infiltrate the enemy base and maneuver through a variety of mechanical structures.

While the demo doesn’t fully explain the story, the developers said that it’s one about defiance, drawing on the theme of humanity versus tyranny. The adorable, fluffy rabbit race is shown as weak but kind while the cold, metallic robots represent the obsession of control.

F.I.S.T. appears to be like other Metroidvania games; as in, it’s a nonlinear action-adventure game with large interconnected maps. Games in the genre typically allow players to gain items and abilities over the course of the game, which in turn provide access to previously locked areas. The word Metroidvania is a portmanteau of Metroid and Castlevania, two early and influential games in the genre.