Cal Rehnqvist, Co-Founder of Brimstone, Talks ‘Overthrown’ and How Chaos and Cozy Paired So Well Together (Interview)

I’m a simple man. I love cozy games, and I love games that have plenty of chaos. So, when I saw Overthrown for the first time, I was immediately in love. This combination of cozy gameplay, wicked swordplay, and faster-than-light movement has had me in its clutches since its release into Early Access. That’s why I was so excited to get the chance to chat with Cal Rehnqvist, the co-founder of Brimstone, about what helps make Ovethrown work as well as it does, plans for the future, and so much more.

Before anything, I need to find out: what inspired the idea for ‘Overthrown!’ in the first place? It’s such a wonderfully goofy concept, and I can’t get enough of this game. 

Overthrown is so much of a mishmash of ideas that it’s a little tough to remember just exactly how we got started with it. I think we had been goofing off in the office (back before we were fully remote) and just throwing little objects at one another and playing around with a Nerf gun. At some point, the idea just came to us of “Hey, why don’t we make a game about lifting and throwing?”. There were a few ideas that revolved around this, but eventually we landed on a city builder since we generally just really love the genre.

From there, it just kind of evolved into this funky little game as we took inspiration from our favorites like Don’t Starve, Kingdom, and Little King’s Story, and tossed in our love for Nintendo titles.

The combination of “cozy game” and “city builder” is done extremely well here. How did you find a good balance between the two of them?

Oh, that’s a tough question! While I would say the art style and the soft, royal music lends itself to the cozy factor – I think what it ends up accomplishing is sort of an introduction into the city-building genre. We try not to make things too overwhelming for the players, and we even added a peaceful mode where things won’t attack you. If you’re more experienced with games of this genre, you can turn up the danger, get tons of citizens, and start becoming organized. But you can also just limit your population, so you don’t have to deal with citizens, build a city or some castles and cathedrals, and just zone out. 

Our players have been extremely helpful for this as well. I think just listening to folks and also just watching how they play and interact and making changes based off this allows us to continue to see the game in a new light and figure out where to balance things for all players – those who are new to the genre and want a cozy experience, players who are new to the genre but really want to have a nice challenge, or veterans.

‘Overthrown’ is currently in Early Access. Do you have a rough timeline as to when the game will be available outside of EA?

We’re currently working on launching into 1.0 sometime later this year. But we also still have plans for tons of updates after that. And will be launching a new roadmap afterwards to showcase all the upcoming content!

I’ve been watching ‘Overthrown!’ grow for quite some time on X. What has been your biggest accomplishment thus far during development?

Honestly, I think shipping the game into Early Access is our biggest accomplishment. It’s getting harder and harder for companies to get their product out there. Funding is getting more difficult for folks to acquire. So, just being able to ship the game at all has been such an accomplishment and just such an honor.

Multiplayer in ‘Overthrown!’ gets incredibly chaotic, but I know that I want more. What other features can we expect to see added to the game during its development? 

Airships. Airships and Boats. The airships, I am very excited about, especially the outlaw factions. We’re also working on a major boss. But mostly I just want to see if I can set an airship on fire and then explode another airship by throwing my burning airship at it.

There will be a few different types of boats in the game! Boats for you, boats for the enemies. Your fishing boat will get a neat little weapon attached to it to be able to hunt down Snappers that wish to attack and eat everything.

‘Overthrown’ is already available on Xbox and PC. Do you ever plan on bringing it to Switch 2, PlayStation, or even mobile?

Currently, the game is only out on PC and Xbox. But we’ll be getting the PlayStation port up sometime later this year! I think Switch 2 would be super cool to develop for. But we currently have no plans for it at the moment. We also do not plan on bringing it to mobile devices.

‘Overthrown’ has, by far, one of my favorite “resource gathering” systems of all time. Why did you decide to go the full-on “CHAOS” route for every facet of the game?

Chaos is definitely a good descriptor, but the way we went about things was a lot of player curiosity. We’re the type of folk who generally want to see what does what in a game. I probably spend about half an hour just trying to interact with different things and forcing each thing to interact in different ways, or just mashing all the buttons and button combinations when I start a game. And we really wanted to embrace that sort of mentality when creating Overthrown. ‘What happens if you do this?’ is the general design question we ask all the time. 

I absolutely love that sort of thing – just making everything as interactive as possible and seeing the goofy outcome. Sometimes it’s silly and makes no sense, but sometimes it’s like ‘ohhhh yeah ok that’s actually really helpful’. Like with Tuskars – if they get knocked down, you can pick them up and just toss them immediately into a Butchery to be absorbed. Or just pick up the Butchery and aim it at a Tuskar and they just SHOOP straight into it. It’s goofy and chaotic. But it makes a bit of sense in a weird video-game-logic sort of way since the Butchery uses carcasses.

Tell me more about yourselves: what inspired you to get into the world of game development? Any games in particular that have served as massive inspirations to you? 

Oh gosh, I think it’s quite a different story for everyone on the team. For me personally, my Dad had worked on a bunch of games for PC and PlayStation back when I was a kid. It wasn’t really anything I thought I could do until much later in life. I told one of my friends, “Wow, it must be cool to make games, wish I could do that.” And they just replied, “Well, why don’t you just make games?” I think my Dad would have been really proud of me if he could see that the game was coming out on PlayStation – like I think he would have thought that was just the coolest thing that I was able to do, what he did when he was younger.

For inspiration – I’ve definitely taken a lot from Keita Takahashi’s games! Katamari and Wattam are just the absolute silliest things I’ve ever played. They’re just playful down to the very core, which is something we want to always focus on. Just extremely playful experiences.

One thing that I can think of on my small list of requests is: CROSSPLAY. Does ‘Overthrown’ have plans to implement crossplay so I can hang out with my PlayStation and Steam homies?

Currently, we have no plans for crossplay, but it would be really cool to be able to add that sometime in the future!

Do you have any additional plans to add more landmass? I love being able to zip across water, and I know I’m already itching for more to explore. 

We definitely have more changes to the maps coming! About every update, we go in and adjust them, usually making them a bit bigger every time.

We have a coastal update coming this Summer that will bring fishing and underwater plants – making sea exploration much more fun! It would be cool to start adding more islands around in the ocean as well. I’ve seen some players just level the entire map to nothing but water and start terraforming little island kingdoms. It’s been so cool to see, and I always think, “Oh, dang, I want that too!”

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I would like to thank Cal Rehnqvist, Co-Founder of Brimstone, for taking the time out of his busy schedule to chat with me about Overthrown. Overthrown is available now on Xbox Series X|S and PC, with a PlayStation 5 port scheduled for later this year.