Erosion creative director on Adventure Time's influence and a world that changes every time you die

Erosion, the voxel-based action game from Plot Twist — the studio behind The Last Case of Benedict Fox — was one of the standout reveals at Summer Game Fest. Creative director Bartłomiej Lesiakowski sat down with Game Informer to break down how the game works, what drives its design, and why dying is the whole point.

The core hook: you play a nameless cowboy trying to rescue his kidnapped daughter, but every time you die, ten years pass in the world. Your daughter ages. The world changes. NPCs' storylines branch or conclude. Lesiakowski says the concept grew from two things colliding — the team, many of whom are young fathers, connected immediately with the story, and a parallel experiment with voxels as an art style gave them the technical backbone to build a reactive open world fast. Voxels let the small team generate assets quickly, which in turn made the destructible, ever-shifting world feasible. Deaths aren't just setbacks; they're the engine that drives the world forward. Push it far enough and you may not even be able to meet your daughter at all — Lesiakowski wouldn't elaborate, but confirmed it's possible to miss her entirely.

The structure blends twin-stick shooting, dungeon crawling, and roguelike ability upgrades with an open world that Lesiakowski compares loosely to Breath of the Wild — technically, rescuing your daughter is the goal, but almost everything else is optional. Each location has its own questlines that can resolve in completely different ways depending on how many deaths have stacked up. There's one true ending, but the paths through the world vary dramatically. The game is currently in its second year of development.

Erosion is still early, but the ambition is clear — Plot Twist is betting that voxel tech and a time-skip death loop can carry a game that's equal parts action roguelike and reactive narrative sandbox. No release date has been announced yet.