Splinterlands has released gameplay footage of its new tower defense game and revealed the game’s name will be Soul Keep.
Splinterlands is a blockchain-enabled collection card game that has been around since 2018. Soul Keep is a new addition to the Splinterlands’ ecosystem. It’s in closed beta right now, but is expected to launch in the next few months.
In Soul Keep, players must defend buildings against attacks from “many different types of bad guys”, David Fox, from game development agency Double Coconut, told a recent Splinterlands’ town hall.
“For folks who know games like Warcraft II and Command & Conquer, real-time strategy games, the tower defense game came out of that genre of game, where you are basically just focused on buildings,” Fox said.
“Your job in a very hard, tactical fun way is to place towers and traps, perhaps, around a play-field and make sure you defend with those towers.”
Here come the undead
But players are not just defending a castle from soldiers, Fox said, they are also protecting a soul gate from an undead army. According the game’s backstory, a woman in mourning for her dead sister must, in her culture, cover her eyes and ears for 40 days.
“When she is in this state of mourning, she has a vision of what is happening to her sister’s soul, which is really, really horrible,” Fox said.
Soul Keep’s undead army wants to steal these souls of dead loved ones and draft them into their own armies so they can take over the nightmare realm. Players must protect the soul gate, seen in the top left of the image below, to stop the undead.
Players also have a use for souls. They collect them from those they defeat and can use them to level up their cards, Fox said.
To play Soul Keep at a level where you can earn, players need to own a pack of NFTs.
“In [these packs], there are what’s called defenses – they’re not cards, they’re more like game pieces. And these defenses are either going to be towers or spells, and you’re going to be then utilizing these towers or spells to kick some enemy butt.”
As with other Splinterland NFTs, players can combine lower level towers and spells to create higher level ones which will give them much stronger stats and many more upgrade paths.
