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It’s always heartbreaking when fan projects get axed—but one sorrow from last year was Bionicle: Masks of Power, which was shut down by Lego after it had peacefully co-existed with it for eight whole years. The project, a fully-fledged third-person action game by Team Kanohi, had attempted to thread the needle by playing nice with Lego’s rules on fan-made media.
Unfortunately, eight years is a long time—and as Kanohi said back then, “the Lego Group’s stance on fan-created media has changed.” It was some genuinely impressive work, and you can see a full two-hour gameplay walkthrough of what could have been below.
But there’s still hope for that original vision. Team Kanohi has rebranded to the appropriately-titled “Unmasked Games”, a studio that’s working on something called Rustbound.
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As the site reads: “Rustbound is an upcoming third person action-adventure game from Unmasked Games set in an entirely original world,” in other words, it’s likely that Unmasked Games has hit its eight years of prior work with the legally-distinctification beam, a feat that’s likely taking a ton of work to pull off—but will at least preserve the skeleton of what was there before.
And you know what? Good for them! While my Bionicle-loving inner child is a little sad I’m not getting a modern version of the third-person action games I spent my younger years wrestling with (I was eight, and thus not yet come into my true gamer power), my inner adult is more excited to see what Unmasked Games can cook up on their own.
I’ll even go one step further and say that the current aesthetic from the teaser is more interesting, anyway—the core of Bionicle is still there, in the blending of mysticism with technological aesthetics, and the as-yet-unnamed protagonist’s new design is pleasantly reminiscent of the designs from the Bionicle movie. In a legally distinct way, of course.
