Worlds Beyond announced

Well, here’s something you don’t see every day: Worlds Beyond is an old school jRPG currently in development by Bridge Unit Orzo, created in an engine the developers built themselves from the ground-up.

The premise:

The universe has collapsed into an endless blue void, solid and featureless. Somewhere, there is a small pocket of existence where things continue normally, where the people wonder if there are others out there like them… Trapped in the lonely, featureless expanse of nothingness.

But genius persists, and a small order known as the Ysk discover a crude way of extracting power from the Edge of the World. With this discovery, however, things quickly spiral out of control… And into new and dangerous territory.

The story follows Cody, an orphan and farmhand, and his childhood friend Kira as they trace a growing conspiracy involving the Ysk, their strange technology, and concepts that may shatter their little world forever.

They have some screenshots already available, so why don’t we check those out?

Worlds Beyond clearly draws some influence from Chrono Trigger, with a world map of similar appearance and the ability to avoid the game’s turn-based battles.

Although Worlds Beyond is still very much in development, Bridge Unit Orzo have provided a free playable demo of WB so you can try the game out. The demo comes in both browser-based and Windows executable flavors; the finished game is set to run on Linux machines as well. (In addition, the developers promise both mouse and full gamepad support, which is pretty neat.)

Oh, and…you know. The K-word. Another one. Here it is. (Some days, I feel a little like a Kickstarter-link dispenser.) Still, Bridge Unit Orzo is a two-person team; in light of that fact, what they’ve accomplished so far is pretty impressive. I think it may well be worth your time to kick them some money and see what they can do with it.