A 2D Dark Souls Game Was Pitched In 2016, And It Looked Badass

Earlier today, artist Thomas Feichtmeir dropped an interesting piece of news on his Twitter feed: back in 2016 he was part of a pitch that wanted to reimagine Dark Souls 3 (or at least its world) as a 2D Metroidvania game.

With an NDA he signed over the project now expired, he was for the first time in six years allowed to talk about — and share a single image — of what the project could have looked like.

A Dark Souls 3 – 2D pixelart metroidvania was pitched to Bandai Namco ~6 years ago.
This is now finally out of NDA, so enjoy the visuals created back then. pic.twitter.com/Dt5BDasWbU

— Thomas Feichtmeir (@cyangmou) November 8, 2022

This looks cool! Before you go screaming at Bandai Namco for not approving it, though, know that this kind of stuff — namely, people and studios pitching projects involving a publisher’s IP — happens all the time. We just rarely get to hear about it, or see the results.

I spoke to Feichtmeir — a pixel artist who has worked on a bunch of games, from Blasphemous to Songs of Conquest — earlier today, who as part of the NDA he signed is able to now show his work and talk a little about it, but not talk a lot about it.

“The art was created around 2016 as everyone wanted to have a cool 2D, Souls-like Metroidvania, as the genre was new and the hunger for a game like this strong”, he says. “Of course someone had to try a pitch to Bandai Namco.”

With his experience as a pixel artist, Souls community member and YouTuber, Feichtmeir can see why he was chosen to help out on the pitch. Sadly it never went anywhere — like I said, pitches come in and get rejected all the time — but you could argue that part of its spirit would eventually find its way to another game.

“A lot of people [on Twitter] pointed out that this looks a lot like Blasphemous, with which they are right and it also makes a lot of sense, as a few years later I actually would work on Blasphemous as an artist”, he says. I wrote about Blasphemous back in 2017, just a year after this pitch, and said it was basically a “2D Dark Souls”, so there you go.

“I hope you enjoy looking at the art as much as I had fun creating it back then”, Feichtmeir tells me. “It’s cool to finally be able to share it after all this time.”