Black Salt Games, the New Zealand-based indie studio behind the Lovecraftian horror fishing game Dredge, have revealed the establishment of a third indie game studio, Team Trifold, that have already begun work on their debut title, the generational action-roguelike Nothing Lost.
Check out the Nothing Lost announcement trailer below.
Nothing Lost is a single-player isometric action-roguelike where your past failings strengthen your current run, with no death being in vain. Take your shaman and ascend the randomised floors of the Tower of Souls, battling hordes of monsters in real-time action combat with a mix of melee, ranged, and magic abilities.
The crux of Nothing Lost, and what makes it a “generational” roguelike, is that when you fall in battle, your spirit remains for you to find on your next run. You can equip up to three of these named souls, each with the powers they held when alive, absorbing their power to bolster your own or summoning them to fight beside you in combat. Mix and match to create new loadouts and discover alternative strategies with almost limitless combinations of souls, and between runs, you’ll spend your rewards, meet wacky allies, and prepare for your next attempt at the Threshold.
“What resonates most with me is that Nothing Lost is a game that celebrates the optimism of incremental human progress,” said Jed Uy of Team Trifold. “The story and gameplay mechanics work together to express the notion that in some sense, time is never truly wasted.”
Team Trifold, a three-person indie outfit, joins Black Salt Games and Disc 2 Games under the same roof in Christchurch, along with the newly established Saltworks Entertainment, which brings together shared expertise across production, marketing, QA, localisation, audio, business operations, and publishing. While each team will receive this support, they will all remain creatively independent.
“We really enjoy being a small development team,” said Nadia Thorne, CEO at Black Salt Games. “We find it works well to keep development teams small and creatively focused, while sharing the resources and experience that it doesn’t make sense for the teams to necessarily have on hand across the full development of a game.”
With all of the disheartening news around studio closures, layoffs, and the growing cost of the industry as a whole, it always feels good to report on another successful indie studio taking that success and using it to benefit other developers, helping in any way they can to keep this art form we all love so much healthy and full of creativity.
Nothing Lost is slated to release in 2027 on PC.
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