At PAX East 2025, we had the chance to meet with Aitvar Studio and got an exclusive interview about their upcoming game, LUSTRA: Lachea’s Tale.

For those who have never heard of LUSTRA: Lachea’s Tale, it’s “a story-rich RPG that combines real-time spellcasting, exploration, and settlement building, set in a fractured floating island realm where ancient magic and mystery intertwine.”

Due to strict time constraints and the developers having to leave soon to catch their flights, all we could do is talk to them about the game. Get our interview below:

Matt from Niche Gamer: Hi, it is nice to meet you. Could you please introduce yourselves to our audience? 

Greg: Hi, it’s nice to meet you, too. I am Greg, one of the co-founders from Aitvar Studio.

Pavel: I’m the only programmer here, and I do all, almost all the story animations, cinematics, and game design. So we’re a super small team, just a few people, so…

Greg: The game it all, is the combining a city builder with the RPG with huge storyline. All the story is created from specific purpose. We created and started building this game five years ago with six people, seven people team.

The main reason for this story that we have a PhD psychologist in the team that try to, align, this, this story with the knowledge and gently showing how to work with the emotions and improving on life. 

So this is not an educational game, but this is the game that try to have the very positive impact to the world because many people struggle with how to work with their own emotions and how to be a better person.

Without telling that we teaching, we are trying very gently to show some mechanism to the people by a PhD psychologist that create those mechanics inside this game. And this is my private mission and that is why we’ve founded this project during the last five years to build that.

And, of course,  the main key of this game is to give the huge pleasure to the players to, so we combine it in quite unique way how you are building the city with the RPG story with five hours, four or five hours of actors work, if from the US. Yeah.

Matt: So what else can you tell me about the game? What do you have to add?

Pavel: Sure. There’s a lot of exploring here and lot of adventuring. So, if you like the level design of Elden Ring as much as I like, dig it, because I love it, there’s a lot of stuff, like you see a treasure chest, it’s all just out of reach, and you try to get it.

You have to be really mindful about everything around you, try to find some little hints, try to find a little secret passage sometimes, somewhere, maybe solve a puzzle, together. So there are a lot of puzzles, a lot of exploration, and there’s a lot of hidden stuff everywhere without handholding. Also, plenty of combat and fun stuff.

Matt: Now, you said this was a project multiple years in the making. What kind of led to its original creation, and the development path/kind of like the project’s mind path when developing it?

Pawel: Yeah. We had a lot of ideas that changed over time. So, we basically started with only a city builder with a lot of really realistic graphics. But we changed it. Then we wanted to have, like, more in-depth narrative. And that was hard for us to place in a city builder.

So we kind of moved to the combination of both, and we have a city builder with action RPG. And basically, the city builder in which you know every character in your town by name. There’s a story behind them. They have personalities. You can find them along the way. Bring them to your village. And they have some struggles, their quest for you, that you can help them to solve.

Greg: The things that we spent the most of time is how to create a deep story inside this project, to engage the people, uh, inside every detail. Because, there’s a part of people that love the story that is quite intensive during the whole game.

So, this is quite risky combination of these two styles city builder with RPG, but we try to implement something risky, something a little new. We will see how well we will describe that. But, after 200 players have already played it, we will publish it soon for free for hours of demo, and the game is ready. So, in October it will be published.

Matt: This October, it will be published? Okay. So, I’m guessing you’re gonna have another showing of it at PAX West? The final right before it releases, kind of.

Greg: Exactly, exactly.

Matt: Now, I was watching him do the city building, and it looked like it was very almost seamless to take items off the world/move it around.

It was, like, almost a snap map to be able to add stuff easily to your settlement. Obviously, it’s not easy to immediately do that. Like, the process of doing that and even just, like, coming up with how you wanted to make this city go. 

Pavel: Yeah. So for most of the time, we have a really big problem with those two worlds, two different types of game, like, fighting each other. But we worked really hard to go to the state in which you are happily adventuring. The things that happen in the town are not annoying you right now.

And you fight the monster and you find the item that you needed for your town. You press one button, the camera move to RTS mode in the town, and then you can manage something, change something, build a building there, with that, and then go back to adventuring.

It’s pretty seamless, and there’s a lot of things that town gives you that helps you explore and fight monsters and stuff like that. So they can.. in town, you can create healing potions, upgrade for your characters, ways to actually travel to different parts of the world.

So with the shipyard, you can create a ship that you can fly with to Winter Island. And during exploration, you can find different people that can work for you. And you can find different treasures and items, and resources that you can bring to your town and upgrade with it.

Matt: Okay. And now, with it being an RPG and a city builder, can you kind of tell me more about what route you decided to go with the RPG aspect? Because there are a lot of action RPGs, you know, even Roguelikes or, like, Soulslikes.  Like, your take on the RPG system. 

Pavel: Okay. So, character progression, let’s start with that. Most of it is based on the town itself, so by upgrading different buildings and building different buildings, we can actually add more abilities to our character. So if we want to have better healing potions, we have to upgrade our pharmacy.

With… Our house is giving out buffs for the first hours after sleep, and the better houses we have, the more buffs we have after sleeping. There’s a progression phase for spells. You can buy different spells with things you find during exploration, and some positive talents that you can also…

After leveling up after finishing quests, you get experience points. Also, after fighting and building stuff, you get experience points that you can later use to, uh, operate your talents.

Also, one cool thing is that we try to do a lot of choices. It’s not super choice-heavy game, but there are a lot of choices that matters. Sometimes because of your choices, someone will live or not. Perhaps, maybe someone will die. Maybe, he’s going to join your village and work for you. And maybe, he won’t, but you will see him later in the game. So there’s a lot of choices that actually matter, and a lot of progression. Most of it is based, uh, on the town progression itself.

Matt: So is there anything else you would like, uh, audience to know specifically that we haven’t discussed about the RPG and city-building aspects, or-

Greg: I think that one of the most important part for us is to try to create a game that will have a positive impact for as many people as we can. And this is the core of our mission. So why we have motivation, why we founded this game, and not only to create the great product at all.

The finished game, because it’s extremely important, the small people with a lot of heart inside, but also engage the psychologists to, during the play, have a very gentle way to show different mechanisms how to be a better person with managing their own emotions. Because there are a lot of people struggle with that in Poland, in Europe, in the rest of world also. So, yeah.

Pavel: There’s a lot cool stuff, but you have to check it out in the game yourself, I think. [laughs]

Greg: Yeah. There’s a lot of mechanics that we do not want to spoil it now but hope will be interesting for the people.

Matt: Now, for those who aren’t at PAX East, when will they be able to try out a demo of the game?

Greg: Yeah, It will be visible in Steam.

Pavel: There’s actually more gameplay in the demo because we have, like, over two hours of, gameplay in our demo, and there’s no way we can show that here.

Matt: Thank you for taking the time to talk with me about the game.

Greg: Thank you for meeting with us. Good to talk with you.

LUSTRA: Lachea’s Tale is in development for Windows PC (via Steam). A playable demo is available for the game.