The developer behind Mega Man-inspired indie games Berserk Boy and Berserk B.I.T.S has unveiled its latest game, and it's giving us some serious Game Boy Advance vibes, based on the initial trailer.

Waveling Island is described as "a Creature-Collecting Sim that takes place on a beautiful, hand-drawn pixel art island." Players step into the sea-soaked sandals of a castaway who washes up on a not-so-deserted island with nothing but the clothes on their back and the backpack on their shoulders, who is then tasked with making the best of their situation and uncovering the secrets of their tropical home.

To pull this off, they will need to turn to a mysterious group of creatures (called Wavelings) who are part of the local wildlife to survive, using these animals' unique abilities to collect resources and explore the island's different biomes.

According to the announcement, there is a main campaign to complete (which changes based on the decisions you make), but you can just as easily get caught up in building the perfect beach home for yourself, getting into random battles, or solving problems for the other islanders you encounter to unlock special items.

Understandably, given the focus on collecting and battling creatures, more than a few responses to the game's trailer so far have brought up the Pokémon games as the most immediate comparison, but the premise instead reminds me personally of a mixture between Konami's Survival Kids series and the Pikmin games. Not only is there a lot of crafting involved à la Survival Kids, but players can also dictate their party of creatures around the map with an on-screen cursor, similar to how Olimar commands the different coloured Pikmin, and battles are real-time, as opposed to turn-based.

As for the graphics, you could have potentially fooled me into thinking that some of the detailed character sprites were ripped straight out of some forgotten Game Boy Advance RPG, capturing the spirit of that era perfectly.

"I basically played nothing but Pokemon ZA / Legends Arceus and Pikmin in rotation," Zu Ehtisham, the lead developer, told me over email, when I asked about the game's influences. "I was mostly fascinated by how different Pikmin acted to different situations. And because I was playing both at the same time, I kept feeling that telling Pikmin what to do and telling your Pokémon what to do in the new Legends series did have overlap.

"At the time, I was actually in the middle of prototyping an RPG AutoBattler that basically only really had 'click on this enemy to start the fight,' but after a while it started to feel a little boring… I think just levelling up a party of 3 felt a bit too samey after a while. I hadn’t really stopped thinking or playing Pokemon either, so I used my prototype as a base to start working on what became Waveling Island! … Its battle system is built on the old prototype! And as this is in the same universe of Berserk B.I.T.S where we had over 100 creatures already, it all sort of fit into place!"

"The crafting elements and island vibe came after," he continued. "We were thinking about making something chilled and super relaxing for a while (different project). The original idea was something like A Short Hike or Animal Crossing originally. And actually started prototyping it too. But after a while, that also wasn’t feeling “right”. Eventually, all of these ideas sort of just mashed up into one, so there’s definitely a lot of different inspirations going on!"

No release date has been unveiled just yet, but the game is said to be coming to PC (here's the Steam Page) & Xbox Series X|S "soon."