Chatting nostalgia, ’90s RPGs and more with Eclipse Breaker writer Mike Sennott

Eclipse Breaker is an ambitious upcoming roguelike adventure developed by Lunar Workshop and Jorge Rodriguez, where you control a JRPG heroine who returns to her game after a 25-year gap. Now, her adventure is no longer the turn-based affair she once was directed through by the player. It’s instead a roguelike with a Final Fantasy-esque ATB (Active Time Battle) inspired combat system. With all that time that’s passed since, Ember must make sense of the world, working through many a patch update and reconnecting with her allies and foes. It’s a quirky story with a lot of moving parts; many fourth wall breaks and meta narrative moments. Of course, then, you need to get someone with the writing chops to pull it off. Enter Mike Sennott, a writer and designer on the nostalgic tactics game Wintermoor Tactics Club, who has honed his character writing and witty storytelling skills for many a year in the industry at this point.

With him now being officially unveiled as the narrative designer for Eclipse Breaker, we thought it vital to pick his brain about what to expect in the game, what inspires him, and frankly, how bloody good some of those classic JRPGs are.

I’ve already done a lot of waxing poetic about just what Eclipse Breaker is, though it’s often best told from the people who made the thing themselves. When I asked Mike Sennott to best surmise what his exact contributions were, he said the following:

“At first, I joined to write a single opening cutscene, which was the entirety of the story Jorge [lead designer Jorge Rodriguez] planned to include. But after talking with him, we ended up agreeing that narrative was an important part of evoking those classic JRPG references, and even though it’s a combat-focused game without the scope for any sweeping RPG journey, there was still room to tell a great story. When I joined the project, it already had much of its art and gameplay, built around a simple story: the paladin Ember fighting to reach the goddess Solara, who had stolen the sun from humanity. There wasn’t scope to change the art or substitute a different premise, so my goal was to work with that existing story and build it out into something unique. The reality of the crowded indie game landscape is that it’s a struggle to find any attention from players, so you have to be thinking about how to communicate (i.e. market) what’s special about your game from the start. So I tried to craft a narrative that would serve that purpose, highlighting what’s special about the gameplay and aesthetics and framing it in a way that’s easy for players to grasp.”

“You know, my original treatment for the story was heavy on meta gimmicks. I wanted the player to be a character – for you to learn more about why they abandoned this RPG for 25 years, and why they’re returning now to play a childhood RPG. I even had a draft where the player was the antagonist, where they were stalling and didn’t want to finish the game so they wouldn’t let Ember defeat the last boss,” he explains. This isn’t what we see today, and what we instead get is these ideas dialled back to instead laser focus on the character story. It’s better for it.

“Ultimately, I think it’s most important to tell an honest character-based story. Ember’s dilemma as a hero out of time has a lot of pathos and resonance, so I want to do right by it and give enough time and space to examine her issues. All the meta stuff undercut that, making it so Ember wasn’t the “real” main character, or necessitating that the ending resolve other meta mysteries instead of her arc. So I pulled back on the amount of meta to keep a tighter focus on Ember and her efforts to adjust after losing her world,” says Mike.

Killing your darlings is never easy, though, and Sennott revels in the fact that he got to keep little flourishes that he found best suited the story. Namely, the game’s in-universe fictional updates that occur and patch changes. “One cute meta flourish that survived was having the game’s updates be antagonistic, changing the world out from under Ember. For example, as she’s about to open the last door to confront Solara, the game applies a roguelike-trend-chasing ‘randomised dungeons’ update, so she ends up in a completely different realm,” he finishes. In short, expect less of a likeness to Inscryption and There is No Game, where you’re fighting against the game breaking down around you, but more of a path to empathise with Ember. As much as I love these comparisons, nothing makes me bounce off a game more than when its scope reaches too high and tries too many things at once. It’s a relief that’s not the case here.

This focus on Ember and the supporting cast makes for a very headstrong character-focused writing that is also player-driven, which is what Mike is known for in Wintermoor Tactics Club. The throughline between both Eclipse Breaker and Wintermoor Tactics Club is an emphasis on nostalgia. He speaks on how nostalgia can often be a powerful storytelling device, but also a double-edged sword. “I tend to be wary of nostalgia – I think of it not just as a feeling, but as a conflict in itself. Nostalgia has a gravitational pull, which makes it dangerous – if you indulge it, you can become addicted to the warmth of the familiar, calcify and reject change, or become trapped in the past. So, since both Wintermoor and Eclipse Breaker have such strong nostalgic vibes, even though it mostly cashes out into a fun and cozy atmosphere, their narratives reflect that struggle to keep nostalgia from becoming overwhelming.”

Meanwhile, the connective tissue between Eclipse Breaker and Sennott’s Astronaut: The Best is that both are roguelikes, offering a less common approach to storytelling and writing. “Writing for a roguelike experience is absolutely a challenge, but one not without opportunities. It’s more difficult to tell a standard linear story: you can’t take for granted the order in which players will experience content, or the pacing, or even which characters and environments will be around for a given gameplay scene,” he elaborates. “So, Eclipse Breaker is more focused on telling smaller stories rather than a single thread with lots of beats. In particular, due to the gameplay, most of the content is centered on characters. You choose from a party of ghosts to spend time with each run, getting to know them and getting to know Ember through them. There is a central overarching story that evolves when you face the traitor goddess Solara at the end of runs, building up to a big climax, but the bulk of the writing you’ll encounter is non-linear, with a lot of context-responsive bits where you discover details about characters or the world.” 

With such a focus on the JRPG-inspired flourishes in combat, storytelling and worldbuilding, I had to know where the roots of Eclipse Breaker originated from. While, of course, Mike didn’t form the whole story and its inspirations from the get-go, he emphatically elaborated that his favourites included all the big ’90s RPGs, including Final Fantasy VI and VII, Chrono Trigger, and Earthbound. He also cited Legend of Dragoon and Legend of Legaia, Grandia and Lunar, Chrono Cross and Saga Frontier. He pictures Eclipse Break as “a 1999 fantasy RPG with slight dieselpunk and pseudoreligious edges from following in Final Fantasy’s wake.”

I’ve only played a small handful of hours of Eclipse Breaker so far, but it’s already clear as day and charmingly clear the team (including Mike’s) love for this era of games. They’ve cleverly found a way to implement an ATB (Active Turn-Based) system where you’re waiting for a meter to fill before you can attack, but you also can’t do so if an enemy’s mid attack. One of my personal crucial things that is required for a JRPG to be considered ‘good’ or successful is strong character writing and a sense of camaraderie. I queried Mike on this, to which he said: “Eclipse Breaker only had enough scope for a single playable character! So I had to get creative. The compromise we eventually reached is: Ember was part of a legendary party of heroes, but all the others died during the time skip. So you can’t play as them, but you can summon their ghosts. By channelling a spirit, Ember can use their abilities, and also talk to them. The upshot is that every run, you pick a different party member to banter with, which also determines your job class.”

Some of that character writing goodness I can’t wait to see in full force is what to make of Ember’s dynamic with her prior fellow party members, specifically Yarrow. “One of my favourites is Yarrow, who Ember knew as a frail and shy teenage healer. After Ember froze and Solara triumphed, Yarrow had to fend for herself in a wasteland of monsters. So she went hard and became kind of a punk Mad Max monster hunter, adapting her healing powers into vampiric blood magic. Ember is shook to see the girl she once protected grown so bitter and violent, whereas Yarrow thinks Ember is hopelessly naive with all her antiquated hero talk,” says Mike. You’re rebuilding relationships with all these prior party members, and the road to reconciliation with Yarrow seems joyously dripping with edge and snark.

Eclipse Breaker doesn’t yet have a release date, but it is certainly on my radar for the future. It plays well with JRPG inspirations, combat is satisfying and equally challenging, and the character writing is excellent. As one last question, I had to ask Mike if he had any last things he wanted to communicate about the game. He mentions being excited for players to see lines and narrative moments he’s confident they haven’t seen yet. He talks about the later ’emotional crux’ moments of the story, but mostly, you can tell how damned keen he is to keep working on this game. “Selfishly, I hope players pick up Eclipse Breaker and we’re able to build out some of our post-launch plans, because we’ve got some awesome ideas sketched out that I’d love an excuse to write!” When all that’s said and done, that’s the true mark of a good game, where writers and devs alike are allowed to indulgently throw in as much of themselves as they can into the project.

Eclipse Breaker is due for release in 2025. There’s a demo on Steam that you can currently play to give you an ample test of the project so far, and it’s one I can’t recommend enough.