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![]() To summarize things simply, the world of Circus Electrique was identical to our own until 1873, when a great innovation revolutionized electricity, sending the timeline in a more steampunk direction. Something more narrative driven-maybe even more influenced by JRPGs. Now we had our basic idea-a steampunk RPG where you fight as circus performers against everyday people gone “barmy.” But how do we make that make sense? That’s where another one of our key differentiators came in: a greater emphasis on story. ![]() So that got us thinking…circus performers have their own unique special abilities, don’t they? What if they used them to fight? What if it were up to these circus folk to save a late-Victorian steampunk London from common citizens gone mad? What if the electrical innovations of the day from the likes of Tesla, Edison and Westinghouse were really amped up (pun absolutely intended)? Not a whole lot of games with a premise like that out there. That was designer Andras “Babar” Klujber’s idea, to which pretty much all of us said, “Steampunk is great! We love steampunk! Why aren’t there more steampunk games? Let’s change that.” Before we knew it, we found ourselves researching the era…which led to finding awesome circus posters like these… High fantasy is cool and all, but what if we took things someplace else? What if we didn’t even have any knights or mages or orcs or elves or dragons? (Not even a single dungeon, poorly lit or otherwise!) What if we…went steampunk? ![]() Let’s make our own.” Steampunk offers a unique aestheticīut what exactly was the best way to make a game like Darkest Dungeon “our own”? We realized early on, the first step was to present a unique aesthetic. And amidst that darkness, a lightbulb went off: “We enjoy this kind of a game. At Zen, it’s important that we make the kinds of games we ourselves want to play…and it just so happened that in recent years, a certain relatively new subgenre of RPGs had particularly enthralled many of us, best exemplified by Darkest Dungeon. The idea for a project first referred to as “Circus Scandal” came about when team members fresh off other Zen Studios RPGs like the first-person dungeon-crawler Operencia: The Stolen Sun, tactical roguelite Dread Nautical, and 4X genre mishmash CastleStorm II all expressed our desire to bring another RPG to life. ![]()
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