Nyamakop’s jiggly platformer Semblance has been bouncing around the festival circuit, picking up the Excellence in Game Design Award at BitSummit in Japan and several nominations at Brazil’s Independent Games Festival. The South African indie studio teamed up with publisher Good Shepherd Entertainment to launch the game on PC and Nintendo Switch later this month on July 24.
Developers Cukia Kimani and Ben Myres began working on Semblance in 2015, and it’s their debut game. It features a playful aesthetic, with cartoony silhouettes and pops of color. It stars a tiny creature named Squish who must solve puzzles and save their jelly world. It also adds in a twist to the platformer genre: Players will have to reshape their environment and character, flattening Squish to squeeze through tight spaces and distorting the landscape to block off hazards.
Good Shepherd started out as Gambitious, a crowdfunding platform for indie games, before rebranding and shifting to a publishing model. Its cofounder Mike Wilson has a lot of experience with that; he also helped found indie publisher Devolver Digital. Since Good Shepherd switched over to publishing, it’s accumulated a varied portfolio. It has published titles like Arachnid Games’ submarine adventure Diluvion and Vile Monarch’s cheeky insult-hurling Oh…Sir! The Hollywood Roast.