Bellwright, the fusion of Mount & Blade and RimWorld, gets April 2024 release date

Donkey Crew / Snail Inc.

It’ll be difficult to find a game that unifies aspects from Mount & Blade, RimWorld, and Valheim all under one banner – aside from Bellwright, that is. Snail Inc. and Donkey Crew have teamed up to deliver an experience you won’t find elsewhere, and the best part is that you won’t have to wait for long until you can start your own medieval adventure: Bellwright will launch into Early Access for PC on April 23, 2024.

Starting as a lone wolf with nothing to their name, your goal is an ambitious one: Incite a rebellion in the realm to liberate the people from the yoke of a tyrannical queen. The start of the game will feel a lot like a survival crafting experience – you’ll harvest resources and begin assembling your humble base, slowly attracting NPCs to your cause. Once these arrive, though, the game sees its first transformation and becomes something of a city-builder or colony sim. From that point, you won’t have to worry about gathering resources yourself – all of that is handled by your NPCs.

All the crafting processes have been animated in detail, just like in city-builders such as Pioneers of Pagonia. Resources are never teleported anywhere – people need to transport them, work on them, and finally store them where they’re needed.

Make sure to defend your peaceful villages against enemy raids. / Donkey Crew / Snail Inc.

You’re responsible for the bigger picture – expanding the town, placing buildings, and planning production chains. Though you can finetune things through micromanagement, the developers stated everything will work automatically and players won’t find themselves trapped in the role of being an overseer, if they do not wish to take it.

Once your first base is running, it’s time to look outwards and assemble your troops – outposts guard strategic locations and new resources you require for further growth, so taking over these areas and building additional settlements across different biomes should always be on your mind. This phase sees the next evolution of the game, adding Mount & Blade style combat and troop command.

Here, too, the developers promise freedom: You can turn engagements through your personal skill at arms, or sit back and let your army handle battles – if you’d rather manage the fields at home to ensure that everyone is fed (a necessity for longer campaigns), you can simply do that.

This is especially true on a co-op server with friends, where you can easily divide everyone into taking up certain roles. Servers for this are hosted privately and PvP support is not planned.

You can equip your warriors to your liking. / Donkey Crew / Snail Inc.

With around 70 buildings included in Early Access, players can already build sizable towns. A large tech tree allows for the specialization of settlements and troops. For example, there are around 100 equipment pieces in the game currently for troops to kit themselves out with.

Being an Early Access game, of course, not everything is finished – advanced formations to give battles more structure, horses and mounted combat, or large-scale sieges won’t be present at the start.

Players who don’t support the use of AI-generated voices in games should note that the Early Access launch will feature AI-generated voices for NPCs – the developers did emphasize that this was temporary and that the game’s full launch down the line will feature real voice actors. 

They said that they found using AI helpful during the development process, as it allowed them to freely change any dialog and experiment with different versions of the story without having to re-record lines or committing to something they were unhappy with.

You can find the game's newest trailer on YouTube.