Dlala Studios revealed Murals, an action-adventure game with fairy tale characters, during Gamescom’s Opening Night Live broadcast.
Murals, available on PC in 2027, is a colorful action-adventure loaded with fast-paced, customizable combat set within familiar-ish fairy tales, fables, and other fictional worlds.
As players help twisted reinterpretations of Hansel and Gretel, The Little Mermaid, Rapunzel, and many others, one thing becomes abundantly clear: These aren’t the tales you were told. You can watch the Murals announcement trailer here.
Since 2012, Dlala Studios has built a reputation for delivering lighthearted games that play as well as they look.
Murals is the first title, in over a decade, based on the independent studio’s own IP, building off what they’ve learned from previous award-winning titles including Battletoads (2020) and Disney Illusion Island (2023).
Murals blends beautifully drawn, hand-animated characters and environments with 3D-rendered enemies in an aesthetic that’s simultaneously striking and cohesive.
“It does look really, really nice. Thank you,” said Aj Grand-Scutton, Dlala Studios’ CEO and game director on Murals [as, the company jokes, he takes credit for someone else’s work]. “We’ve been really focused on making sure that the combat feels great and gives players the freedom to experiment and find their own unique setups to battle our baddies.”
Grand-Scutton added, “As cliché as it sounds, we’ve poured our hearts and souls into Murals, and I’m exceptionally proud of what our team has accomplished. I can’t wait to hear what people think as we show it off for the first time at Gamescom. Unless it’s bad. Then I’m just going to stick my fingers in my ears and hum the theme song to ‘Community.'”
“Let’s go back to that bit about it being the first title, in over a decade, we’ve developed based on an original IP,” said Marcus Purvis, Dlala’s Head of Publishing, in a statement. “Not only are we taking advantage of the creative freedom that entails, but we’re also publishing Murals ourselves. It’s all on our shoulders this time around, and we couldn’t be more excited. Especially me, as it literally is the reason I have a job.”
Murals will be launching in 2027 on PC, and it’s available to wishlist here on Steam.
Origins
The studio formed in 2012. Grand-Scutton said he had been a programmer for about four years at that point.
“And for the record, Ben does not let me touch code anymore,” Grand-Scutton said. “And my co-founder Craig Thomas, we worked together at Jagex, then worked together at Bossa, and we kind of realized that we were at a point in our lives where we didn’t feel we could achieve much more where we were, and we didn’t have a lot of risk at the time.
“We didn’t have mortgages, we didn’t have kids, and so we decided to kind of just take the gamble. And we literally quit our jobs. We had no plan. We had about 3.000 pounds between the two of us,” Grand-Scutton said.
“I effectively moved into my mum’s garage. Craig moved into his girlfriend’s mum’s spare bedroom, and we started Dlala, and it then led to this insane first year where like we did our first game in like eight weeks after forming because I signed up for a Windows 8 launch title, not knowing Windows 8 came out like 11 weeks later,” Grand-Scutton said.
He added, “We ended up being on the front cover of Develop magazine, which then got us an incubation deal with Xbox Game Studios. That’s when we brought in Ben and a couple of other people. We then quit that incubation after we got offered an extension and went back to the garages.”
“Over the last 14 years in total, we’ve just had this whirlwind of surviving rather than thriving. We’re very proud of what we’ve been doing, but we have definitely got to our limits a few times as a studio,” Grand-Scutton said.
“But we’ve been really lucky to work with amazing IPs like Mickey Mouse and getting to reboot Battletoads,” he said.
Dlala Studios is the creator of multiple games, including Battletoads (2020) and Disney Illusion Island (2023). They have previously partnered with some of the largest companies in the world, including the Walt Disney Company, Xbox Game Studios and Nintendo. The Essex, United Kingdom-based studio has earned a reputation as an industry leader in 2D animation and for their unique, humorous narrative. Murals is the first game, since 2014, they’ve created based on an original IP.
Grand-Scutton said, “When we started this project and we were looking at how we were going to approach this, the conversation I had with Lucy [Kyriakidou], our art director, was that I really wanted this to be our Roger Rabbit. You know that film to me today, you can still watch it, and at no point do you question the fact that there’s toons and humans just standing next to each other.”
Grand-Scutton said in a press event that from the outset, “We were very much the cliché two guys in my mum’s garage with no money and no clue what we were doing. Fourteen and a half years later, we still don’t have much money or a clue what we’re doing. But there are now about 40-plus of us full-time. So that’s pretty scary in itself. We’re very lucky in the sense that we have a really great retention rate.”
He added, “Obviously, for those with a keen eye, you’ll notice that we did an anthropomorphic toads game. Then we did Disney Illusion Island, which is basically a bunch of anthropomorphic animals. And I didn’t really realize until putting this presentation together that I had a thread going on there. I’d love to tell you I’ve broken that streak, but the new game also includes anthropomorphic animals at times. So I’m going to be talking to my therapist about that.”
The Murals title is the first title that Dlala Studios will publish by itself.
“We are really, really excited to bring you this game,” Grand-Scutton said. “Murals is an isometric action adventure title. It’s a linear story-based game in which you’re going to be fighting your way through twisted versions of fairy tales. The game’s all about expressing yourself through stylized combat as you start taking on weird foes, and you’ll make even weirder friends as you’re going.”
Murals gameplay
As far as the gameplay goes, the team said, “Whatever your choice, you still have to be the hero. You still have to save the day. It’s just about the choices you make as you go through with how you interact with people. Plenty of characters exist just to be sidekicks.”
They’re part of the worlds that Dlala Studios builds. And each world is a Dlala take on old fairy tales. You’ll be able to seamlessly move between characters. The gameplay is heavily inspired by rogue-like style power-ups.
“We’re really excited to see the different combinations that players come up with, and we spend a lot of time internally playing with different builds, and we just know the players are going to find combinations that we haven’t even thought of,” Grand-Scutton said.
He added, “Magic Dave is another big, weird, and wonderful character that pops up throughout the game. You’ll come across Dave in most of the murals that you take through, and then each time you see him, he’ll give you a random shuffle of series to choose from. Alongside this, he comes with a series of tangential quirks and tales to tell you.”
And Grand-Scutton said, “He’ll never outstay his welcome, and we like to think it’s always a highlight to see him. Those with a good ear for British comedy may have recognized the performance of the wonderful Bob Mortimer, who voices Magic Dave in our game. This was an amazing thing for me and for myself and for Kelsy [Abbott], my lead writer. When we wrote Magic Dave, we basically just wrote him in Bob Mortimer’s voice, with no belief that we’d ever have a possibility of offering Bob a role in the game.”
Grand-Scutton said, “When we actually were able to secure Bob and he came in, Kelsy and I were just a wreck for the entire VO session. I’ve got a lovely framed photo of myself and Kelse, where we both look like we’re having a nervous breakdown because we can’t take the fact we’re actually meeting Bob Mortimer, and Bob is just one of our wonderful cast as providing voice to every single cutscene line in the game.”
Alongside the main normal enemies you’re going to face, players can have key confrontations against new interpretations of legendary fairy tale characters, and similarly with some of the worlds and murals themselves, Grand-Scutton said, “We’re hoping to surprise the players with some of the characters they’ll come up against in these boss-style encounters.”
The game will also have these moments of respite from combat that give the player different types of interactions.
“You may have seen the image on screen, similarly in the trailer, which is one of the Gingerbread Gang’s puzzles from our Hanson and Gretel mural. But you also find yourself doing things like waving a magical device to plat Harriet’s braids in the Rapunzel level, and a whole series of other literal interactions that give you a quick breather before you’re thrown back into combat.”
Grand-Scutton was also excited to have “the unstoppable” BAFTA-nominated David Howsden coming back to compose a brand new, completely original, and fully orchestrated score for the game.
“We have worked with Dave since our very first game, Jansy, which we made in eight weeks back in 2012. And Dave was our composer on our games, Battletoads and Disney Illusion Island. Dave is an unbelievable talent who we are very lucky to work with, mainly because he is so creative and he brings something fresh to the experience, but also because he’s really forgiving when I ring him and I ask him for extra minutes that I haven’t paid for yet,” Grand-Scutton said.
He added, “From a stylistic perspective, we really feel that Murals is a combination of an evolution and amalgamation of all the Dlala games that have come before it. When you’re looking at the trailer, what you’re seeing there is a combination of beautiful hand-painted 2D environments built in a real 3D space with dynamic 3D lighting. On top of this, we have fully 3D rendered combat characters, but all of our NPCs are actually traditionally hand-keyed 2D animation. This means we’ve got these wonderful styles all playing together to create a new visual style and approach.”
The company has been thinking about original IP for a long time, and it has built a whole structure at the company to handle this.
There are about 43 people in the studio now. If Murals does well enough, the company plans on making more games based on the IP.
Ben said, “As we’ve moved across from title to title, our processes have become a lot more refined, and you know, as AJ mentioned, starting off with two guys in the garage, and then to where we are now, obviously that’s a massive improvement for us with the processes.”
“I’d say like our processes have gotten stronger, our collaborations between departments have gotten stronger, and it’s like any relationship. The longer the group of us are together, the stronger and stronger we get,” Ben said.
Disclosure: Gamescom paid my way to Germany for the event. The content of this story is solely the responsibility of GamesBeat.