Backed by Among Us developer Outersloth, the South African studio’s kinetic metroidvania arrives on Steam with a novel “dash and slash” controller that makes movement and combat one and the same.

Cape Town-based studio Clockwork Acorn has unveiled Feather’s Edge, their kinetic metroidvania built around a combat system that lives inside the character controller itself which had its worldwide premiere at Indie Live Expo.

Founded in 2014, Clockwork Acorn is a remote South African studio whose work is defined by what they call “chunky design” games filled with interesting choices that linger in the mind until sudden inspiration has the player trying something new. The studio is best known for Jetstream and for their work on Terra Nil: Vita Nova, the acclaimed ecological restoration game.

The announcement comes with the weight of a notable backer behind it. Feather’s Edge is funded by Outersloth, the indie funding initiative spun out of the developers of Among Us, who supported Clockwork Acorn when the project was, as the studio puts it, still a fledgling.

The central design premise of Feather’s Edge is deceptively elegant: combat and movement are not two separate systems layered on top of each other, as is conventional in the genre. Instead, the act of navigating the world is the act of fighting. Players control Upu, a Hoopoe warrior. The hoopoe being a bird long regarded across African and Middle Eastern cultures as a symbol of wisdom and determination, that must climb the Tower of Time before time itself collapses.

“Combat isn’t a separate system, it’s built into how you move. Kill three birds with one stone when you aim, jump, and slice through enemies in one decisive motion.”

The dash-and-slash controller works by collapsing the aim, jump, and attack into a single fluid input. Once a player has committed to their optimal jump arc, the blade is already out slicing through enemies in what the studio describes as one satisfying stroke. It is a design philosophy borrowed more from action games and fighting games than from the slower, more deliberate pacing of traditional metroidvanias, and it gives Feather’s Edge a tempo distinctly its own.

The world Upu inhabits is a hand-crafted, non-linear tower fractured by time-rifts, tears in the fabric of time that have aged different regions at wildly different rates. Eons-old jungles sit alongside ancient lava flows; freezing winds whip through areas frozen at a near-standstill while others have aged by millennia. The visual design leans into this environmental storytelling, with each region of the Tower given a distinct living palette that communicates its temporal state without exposition.

Time-rifts function as the game’s primary challenge nodes: discrete combat arenas that can be revisited after the fact, with player skills and scores tracked across attempts. The loop of explore, encounter a rift, conquer it, revisit it to improve is designed to push players toward mastery rather than completion, encouraging the pursuit of perfection as a pleasure in itself.