The Demon Continent Areas

The first area of the Demon Continent shows what used to be a grand city, now worn down to almost nothing by the ravages of time. Nothing here is safe. Even the small green belt by the sea with vanish before long. The only living beings here pick over the rotting pieces of an ancient empire.

This is where the barrenness of the Demon Continent really comes into focus. A vast, empty space covered in dead trees, rivers of lava, and seemingly bottomless cracks in the earth.

The Lava Lake is a much larger, more complex callback to the Deep Swamp; a series of islands connected by wooden bridges. The difference this time (beyond the lava), is that some bridges are broken, and need to be repaired to progress.

Just like the Lava Lake and the Deep Swamp, the Ancient Volcano is a callback to the First Entrance, showing how just a change of tileset can completely alter the flow and feel of an area. It’s the same basic mountain climb, but this time with rivers of lava instead of water, and all the trees are dead. 

The important part about the interior of the Ancient Volcano was to differentiate it from the Impact Crater. Part of that involved changing the tiles used, of course, but more than that, where the Impact Crater was a series of interconnected tunnels, the Ancient Volcano is more of an open area, broken up by rivers of lava.

The First Forest, as its name would imply, is an incredibly lore-important side dungeon. It provides hints at the world’s past, and an ancient evil that sleeps within. It is the only patch of green in the playable area of the Demon Continent; three rings of forests in increasing density as you approach Yggdrasil at it’s center. It exists to provide some much-needed variety to the Demon Continent, and also raise questions of how such a forest still exists in the wasteland of the area.

The final main dungeon of the game, the Demon King’s Castle has the player exploring its halls to place the objects you spent the game collecting throughout the dungeon in order to open the door to the final boss. This is also where how you played the game will determine what ending you get. Outside the normal ending, the three alternate endings require the player to either make specific choices about their build, or complete the postgame. I didn’t want to completely lock the secret endings behind challenge running the game, so I made sure there was an alternate method to unlock them.