Blood and Brine, the first expansion for Tails of Iron 2: Whiskers of Winter, is out now as a free update on PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X|S and Xbox One, the game's developers announced in posts on the PlayStation Blog and Xbox Wire.
The expansion is post-game content: players have to finish the main campaign before they can start it. It takes the rat protagonist Arlo out of the frozen northern wastes of the Ratdom and into Hardshell Brook, a coastal region with its own characters, enemies, quests and secrets.
What Blood and Brine adds
Both posts list the same contents: 11 quests, 10 new bosses, nine armour sets, new original music, and a fishing mechanic covering 32 aquatic creatures. The expansion also introduces ship arena battles, which move combat off the docks and out onto open water, and adds new enemies that appear both on land and beneath the waves.
The framing device is an aquarium. Two shipwrecked sailors, Jaimie and Sam, lose their vessel and decide to fund its repair by filling a new attraction with rare sea life and drawing in visitors, which leaves Arlo to do the catching. The studio says questions about what really happened to the pair at sea start to surface as the collection grows, and warns that plenty of what lives in Hardshell Brook would sooner eat Arlo than sit behind glass.
Crossover armour from other indie games
The expansion's armour includes crossover sets inspired by six other independent games: The Penitent One from Blasphemous, The Lamb from Cult of the Lamb, Dave from Dave the Diver, The Crow from Death's Door and Will from Moonlighter, plus a set drawn from Beyond Galaxyland.
The developers say each set was redrawn and adapted in the game's hand-drawn storybook style rather than dropped in as-is, and credit the teams behind those games for letting them use the designs.
The studio describes Blood and Brine as a larger addition than it first planned, built with publisher United Label as a substantial new story rather than a small collection of extras. The PlayStation Blog post adds that Tails of Iron 2: Whiskers of Winter is 60% off on PS5 and PS4 from August 12 to 26 as part of PlayStation's Ready, Set, Play promotion.
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