We're always on the lookout for cool, retro-inspired indie games to feature here on the website, and Kidbash: Super Legend is a title that fits that description to a tee.
Developed by the Indonesian "visual-based storytellers" Authentic Remixes and the video game developer Fat Raccoon, it is an upcoming roguelite action platformer for Xbox and PC that features a gorgeous toy-like aesthetic, and borrows inspiration from a range of classic titles, as well as more modern indie titles. It sees players take control of a small amnesiac hero named Kidbash, who sets out to recover his memories across the world of O.D.D — a mysterious location filled with various single-player stages and additional challenges such as platforming tests and battles against enemies that move around the map.
Players will have access to a blaster cannon, sword, and bombs as their primary weapons of choice, with the ability to combine these different items together to create exciting new combinations, or unlock powerful mods that will further enhance their skills.
"We're going for a cross between Mega Man X, Gunstar Heroes, and Kirby 64," Irfansyah "Bima" Aryabima, the co-founder of Authentic Remixes, told Time Extension. "[We're basically going for] X's movement with weapon mixing like Kirby and Gunstar. Then for the gameplay loop, it is a modern roguelike so we look to the best like Hades and Dead Cells."
According to the Steam page, in the addition to the side scrolling adventuring, there is also a village-building mechanic present in the final title — something we originally noted sounded a lot like a 2D version of Dark Cloud. Bima, however, clarified was actually inspired by the Digimon game Digimon World for the PS1, which featured a mechanic whereby players could grow and expand aspects of a city by collecting certain Digimon out in the world.
As Bima notes, this won't be as expansive in Kidbash: Super Legend as it was in that game, but will offer players something interesting to do when revisiting the destroyed village that serves as the game's hub.
Interestingly, though, it isn't just old games that inspired the look and feel of the title, with the project also owing a lot of its inspiration to old Japanese video game magazine art (including this cover for MSX Fan Magazine) and vinyl toys. In fact, the character Kidbash itself started as a toy, with Bima creating the character alongside his friend and Authentic Remixes co-founder Achmad Ezra Garnida in 2019.
"Me and Ezra had been avid toy collectors and Nintendo fans and I'd always wanted to make my own toys," Bima told us. "What we did was essentially try to find the next step in the what I'd call the family tree of character design, like how it went from Popeye to Mario, Astro Boy to Mega Man, Mickey to Felix to Sonic. We were kind of trying to do something similar by mixing and matching our favourite video game characters, which explains the name. Kidbash came from the word Kitbashing, which means to mix and match figures to create a whole new one.
"Eventually, it made sense for us to eventually make a video game. So we partnered up with Fat Raccoon Games to develop Kidbash Super Legend. We handle all the art & story, they handle all the programming, and we collaborate on the game design. The pipeline is almost exactly like what you see in those old Donkey Kong Country behind the scenes stuff. We model and animate it in Blender, render each frame of animation, and then turn it in to a sprite sheet that Unity can play as a 2D animation in-game. The only difference from Donkey Kong Country is that we thankfully don't have to downscale it!"
The developers are currently hoping for a 2026 release, with PC & Xbox being the only platforms confirmed so far, despite a desire to bring the game to "all [modern] consoles."