Blood Spear

Blood Spear started life as a student project at ISART Digital Montréal and won the school's first prize from the jury in 2021. The protagonist is unusual even by indie standards: you don't play a hero wielding a weapon — you play the weapon itself, a cursed demonic spear that has woken from a long slumber, thirsty for blood and capable of possessing the bodies of dead ghosts to move through the world.

Combat is built around precise throws. Aim, throw, impale enemies against the environment, and either retrieve the spear or shatter it to release a burst of demonic power. Charged throws hit harder. Planted spears can be detonated as area weapons. Absorbing the blood of dead enemies heals you — which folds resource recovery and aggression into the same action.

The world is medieval dark fantasy, played out across grandiose environments in a sky-shrine setting above the clouds. A strange cult has taken up residence in the sanctuary you're moving through, carrying out occult rituals under the direction of a superior entity that feeds on the corruption rotting the place from within. The cult doesn't want to be disturbed; you have other plans.

The runtime is appropriate for a student-prize project — short, focused, and designed to demonstrate a clean mechanical hook rather than to fill a hundred hours. What's here is a polished proof of concept for an unusual movement-and-combat verb, set in environments built with more ambition than most studio projects of similar length.