“We were just two friends in university,” Fallen Flag Studio co-founder Jonathan Costantini tells me. “We wanted to come up with an ideal game to work on as a hobby without having to worry about resonating with players, exposure, or competition.”
You likely have an image in your head when you think of a start-up game dev team – the talented friends in their garage whirring away at walls of code to create a compelling new adventure rooted in their own passions. They made an entire game about as much. In this case, it was Italian duo Costantini and Franceso Barsotti paying homage to – unsurprisingly – Dark Souls.
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Costantini and Barsotti care about game development and were eager to get stuck in. When they finally unveiled their game to the world, it went viral in the Souls community. Players were itching to check out this difficult indie pitched as a tough-as-nails Souls-like. It had an edge to it that so many find appealing while also bearing its own extra dose of charisma thanks to its personable, tight-knit nature. Just three devs were behind it, after all.
“Back when we had the original idea for Eldest Souls, we didn’t really have any responsibilities or restrictions,” Costantini tells me. “I think we just got really lucky that our ideal game to work on turned out to strike the right chord with players who enjoyed the same games we did.
“We started as two university students with a bunch of ideas but no experience whatsoever. We learned a bunch, met and worked with an incredible amount of talented and driven people, and in the end, realized our vision of the best game we could work on. I guess we have a lot of responsibility in our lives now compared to when we started, but also a lot of meaningful work and excitement. We’re still shell-shocked from the release day – there was such a massive amount of positive feedback and player support. Even our all-time favorite streamers were playing the game. We needed some time to process it all.”
Modern gaming is filled to the brim with Souls-likes, although far too often they are paradoxically soulless. Fallen Flag Studio’s debut takes care to avoid that, using FromSoft’s formula and applying it to the boss rush genre, condensing its high-octane thrills into a much more streamlined experience.
“The competition has never been fiercer,” Costantini says. “At least we can be happy that we released before Elden Ring. I think it turned out well for us. Eldest Souls really focuses on the hard, challenging boss fights, and I think we carved our own niche out within the market.
“I was personally terrified when I heard about Death’s Door releasing just a week before us. I’m a massive fan of Titan Souls [from the same developer], but I was pleasantly surprised when I noticed that they had moved away from their boss-rush roots, creating a great Zelda-like experience, but at the same time, quite different than our boss-centric Eldest Souls. The Souls saga was a huge inspiration but so was Furi and Titan Souls – they gave us the confidence to go all-in for the boss-only concept. We also played a ton of RPGs and MMOs such as Final Fantasy 14 and we even ended up introducing MMO-like mechanics to our boss fights.”
“We’d love to expand on Eldest Souls, whether it's with DLC or sequels if the game keeps doing well and maintains a following. However, we’d also be super stoked to start fresh with all the lessons we learned along the way to begin a new project.”
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