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A game like No Man's Sky for mobile? This could be it

By Milen Yanachkov

Published: Aug 08, 2016, 9:20 AM

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Concept art for Morphite

Crescent Moon Games is a mobile developer with a sizable and surprisingly diverse portfolio of games, ranging from ambitious open world RPGs, to puzzle and strategy games, to simple 2D platformers. The studio has always striven to bring epic console and PC gaming experiences to mobile devices, while keeping intact as much of their initial grandeur as possible. Crescent Moon has now partnered up with indie developer We're Five Games (of recent Hammer Bomb fame) to bring what looks like a space adventure of grand proportions to the palm of your hand.

Morphie is set in a vast world that generates around you on the fly

Called Mortphite, the developers describe the upcoming game as a “3D procedural metroidvania” that promises to take players on an epic space journey around 8 planets with “possibly millions” more to explore. What we glean from this rather vague description, and from the handful screenshots available, is that Morphite will likely try to bring an adventure in the vein No Man's Sky to mobile.

Metroidvania is a video game sub-gеnre, most commonly associated with 2D side-scrolling games with large, interconnected world maps, parts of which are inaccessible until certain items are obtained. And there is backtracking involved. A lot of backtracking. We are not entirely sure how this gameplay style will fit in the grand picture, but we are intrigued nonetheless.

Concept art for Morphite

As for the “procedural” part, it basically means that the game world – or rather worlds – will be generated as you go. Since the developers are promising “possibly millions of planets to explore”, complete with their own exotic faunas and floras, the programmers will neither be able to create each and every one by hand, nor will they be able to fit them all in the physical storage of your smartphone or tablet. Instead, all those explorable worlds will be likely generated on the fly – as you explore – and disappear when you leave, while players will be able to “save enough data for around 500 planets” on their devices. Crescent Moon and We're Five Games are also promising boss battles, as well as various pickups and weapons which will be upgradeable with a resource, at this point simply referred to as minerals.

Morphite promises players "millions" of strange and beautiful alien worlds to explore

Not much else is known about Morphite at this point, but the developers are constantly posting new screenshots and short clips from the project that reveal new bits of information about the game's universe. Morphite's worlds are styled in a beautiful low-poly aesthetic – most likely due to hardware limitations – that nonetheless brings a lot of charm to the mysterious alien environments that players will venture into. Even in stills and not that far in development, the game already looks beautiful, in our opinion.

Although quite a few parallels can be drawn between No Man's Sky and Morphite, at first sight, we believe that as development continues, Crescent Moon and We're Five's joint venture will shape up into its own unique thing. If executed correctly, this project has the potential to turn into one of the most novel mobile gaming experiences we've seen in recent times.

There is no release date for Morphite yet, but it's a safe bet that it will be a while.

sources: Crescent Moon (Twitter), We're Five Games (Twitter), Touch Arcade Forums