Project Introduction

At the crossroad of several sub-RPG genres, Escape the Mad Empire is based on several gameplay and creative pillars:

Tactical RPG - in the path of classic CRPGs; party-based, classes with exhaustive skills/spells system, tactical depth with terrain/surface effects, barrels, cover, flanking, positioning, etc.

Traditional Roguelike - dungeon crawling/procedural dungeon generation, perma-death, item identification, emergent gameplay through over-the-top magic items and all sorts of interesting mechanics.

Real-time Combat with instant actions on pause - so the player knows exactly which creatures his AOE spells are going to hit and can chain a series of actions on pause through different characters or their bonus action.

Career Mode - manage your teams and upgrade your base between dungeon runs.

Action-RPG vibe - pixel art, high pace and intense experience, compact loot drop curve and character progression that gives a supercharged feeling. The goal is to make the most intense tactical RPG on the market

Empowering the player - by giving the player as many tools as possible to find creative solutions to problems. This is done through instant-actions on pause, shared party inventory accessible during combat, shared party ammo always accessible, powerful consumables and contextual options for them and so on.

Humor and absurdity - this is not completely apparent in the game yet because the game is missing story content, but as fans of Enter the Gungeon, we think that humor and absurdity can add a lot of value.

Story - In their quest for power, control and domination, the empire has brought the apocalypse across multiple dimensions. Through the progression, the player will explore those apocalypses and discover the mad experiments that caused them.

The game could be seen as a sort of mixture of Baldur's Gate II (party-based crpg, real-time with pause), Divinity (deep tactical aspects, surface effects, turn-based feeling), Traditional Roguelikes (procedural dungeons, emergent gameplay), Darkest Dungeon I (manage your teams and your base between dungeon runs), Enter the Gungeon (pixel art, action-rpg vibes, over-the-top magic items, boss fights, absurd humor). Yes we know this is nuts, but it all blends together naturally and it brings the game in a unique market position.

About Developer

Patrick has been hit with the curse of being unable not to make video games for over 20 years (6 years as a hobby, 2 years as a Lead Game Designer in the industry and 12 years for XperimentalZ Games as a mad man).

After working for 4 years as a programmer-analyst, Ghislain was crazy enough to embark himself for 12 years as a programmer for XperimentalZ Games.

XperimentalZ Games was founded in 2010 and the two-man team has reached a couple of millions players on mobile before making a transition to the PC market. Escape the Mad Empire is in development since 2018 and represents their most ambitious project so far.