Whenever it comes out, Eldest Souls already feels like the definition of an old-school passion project. It's not only because of its intentionally retro third-person, pixelated aesthetic featuring a lone hero, a giant citadel and impossible odds. It's that it feels like it was pieced together, by hand, over long hours by people already stealing time away from their "normal" lives to create something cool. To listen to the fellas from Fallen Flag Studio (with help from United Label) tell it, this game has grown as they have.

The bones of Eldest Souls experience came from skeletons of other games the designers liked when they were in university: the Dark Souls series, boss-rush titles and traditional role-playing experiences. The story itself is a classic one-versus-all tale: a lone warrior who travels to a dark citadel to face down the "Old Gods," who have vengefully plunged the world into darkness and desolation after being imprisoned for an unfathomable amount of time within the citadel.

What I got to sample from Eldest Souls reminded me of summers as a kid, and I mean that in the best possible way. I controlled my pixel-art warrior and explored a vibrant and well-conceived landscape that, in true boss-rush fashion, wasn't filled with enemies to kill en route to running into the boss as much as it was exploratory tone-setting, meant for the player to visually absorb the world before your fatal encounter.

The boss battles are the "soul" of the Eldest Souls experience, with each Old God meticulously crafted from head to toe (or hoof, or tentacle, or whatever these guys cooked up) with their own fleshed-out methods of attack, demanding reflexive excellence from the player. This is the kind of game where you're probably not going to whip the first Old God you see; rather, each boss encounter will be a "rep" where you can grow as a player and eventually prevail over the foe in question. Then it's on to the next one, where you can both gleefully and painfully repeat the process as pieces of the story begin to fit together around you.

There's no definite release date for Eldest Souls, as the designers for it are still trying to fit in their education and, according to them, improve and tweak the game as their skills (and resources) blossom. When it does, I think I'll still want to have some long talks with the Old Gods.