Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden Pays Tribute to an 80's RPG With a Talking, Moth-Winged Duck

The Bearded Ladies’ Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden is an XCOM-like tactical combat game where you control a mutant duck and a mutant boar (both anthropomorphic) as they traverse a post-apocalyptic Sweden. You can equip them with mutations like moth wings or helpful accessories like top hats. It’s also all based on a Swedish tabletop RPG from the ‘80s. Sound enticing? While this game comes out later this year, you can get a 10% discount and three-day early access with the code “EARLYDUCK” here. If you pre-order the Deluxe Edition, you’ll also get a demo build one month before launch.

It’s also worth mentioning that the game was made by a star-studded team that includes developers who previously worked on IO Interactive’s Hitman, a senior writer from Rockstar Games (Grand Theft Auto, Red Dead, Max Payne), and the co-creator of OVERKILL’s Payday. All of this expertise comes together to make an inventive, turn-based tactical adventure game with a few special twists up its sleeve.

So how did Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden come into being? According to The Bearded Ladies’ Circus Director and CEO Haraldur Thormundsson, many people on The Bearded Ladies’ team revere the original series of Mutant tabletop games as formative and highly influential to their careers as game developers. “I think one of the main reasons that gaming is so big in Sweden is how popular tabletops were in the ‘80s and ‘90s,” Thormundsson said. “For my Swedish friends [on the team], this had been their childhood dream: To take Mutant and turn it into a video game.”

It’s clear that Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden is a love letter to a childhood spent playing tabletop games. The original Mutant encouraged players to use their immediate surroundings as inspiration for the backdrop of their game; to honor that directive, Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden contains many references to Sweden. “The game actually plays out in the area where most of the devs grew up back in the days,” Thormundsson noted.

Paying a proper homage to the original game, however, also meant understanding the limitations of recreating such a special experience. “When it comes to tabletops...you have your imagination as your limit,” Thormundsson said. “It's really hard to create a video game that has to measure up to those kinds of standards.”

The team decided to develop it as a turn-based strategy game with a catch: Players can freely navigate the game’s world between combat phases to position their characters ahead of an ambush. Thormundsson explained that this was a way of replicating the freedom of the original tabletop game without giving players complete control. “Instead of giving the players the opportunity to create the world themselves, we gave the opportunity to explore it in a different way,” Thormundsson said.

Alternating between exploring levels and battling foes gives players the chance to explore Mutant Zero’s world while still utilizing turn-based combat. “We feel that it is extremely important that the players find the levels worth exploring, and find them beautiful, and rich, and challenging,” Thormundsson said. “That's one of the main reasons that we wanted to break the game into those different segments.”

In many ways, Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden is a loving tribute to the tabletop RPGs that captured the imaginations of Swedish would-be gamers all throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s. It’s a creative way for the dev team to allow a new generation of gamers to have the same gameplay experiences that they held so dear in their youth.

Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden will be available for the PC on December 4, 2018. Use code “EARLYDUCK” to get a 10% discount and three-day early access.