Mattias Andersen

Programming Maniac, beer enthusiast and lover of all that is retro

Eric Lavesson

Dutchie, composer and jack of all trades with a passion for chaos

Aron Kramer

Tries to be pixel perfect all the time :P

Justin Alexander

A dungeon-master of business with keen eye for quality and talent

Acke Salem

For any inquiries, feel free to send us an email on 

Steam

Nintendo Switch

PlayStation 4

Evercade

Features

Explore a vast world

Plot your route

Defeat the guardians

Solve ancient puzzles

Experience responsive gameplay

Screenshots

Videos

FAQ (new)

Is it possible for video game journalists to get a review copy of the game?

For review or interview requests for PS4 please contact 

To request a Nintendo Switch review code, state your region to 

Awesome! I have received a review key for Cathedral. Can I upload gameplay and/or stream the game?

For what platforms is Cathedral available?

Cathedral is available on Nintendo Switch (digitally and physically) and PC (Windows, OS X and Debian-based Linux systems). It will be available for PS4 starting April 12 2022.

Originally released for PC on Steam and GOG: October 31, 2019.

Cathedral's engine is written completely from scratch, both the rendering engine, physics engine and all tooling. The engine itself is written in C and C++ with scripting in Lua. Rendering is done through OpenGL, and most of our tools are written in either C++, Python or JavaScript. We love talking about our tech! Feel free to contact us if you want to know more!

About

Decemberborn Interactive is an independent game developer, based in Helsingborg in souther Sweden. We love games - both to play and to develop them. Our goal is to create fun and immersive experiences through indie games.

Our first and current project is Cathedral - a NES inspired adventure game where exploration is the main focus. Cathedral is an experience truly built from the ground up, with a completely custom game engine, developed to be molded to the exact needs of the game.

Partners (new)

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We are a passionate team based mainly in Sweden and the Netherlands. We're also employing freelancers from around the globe to help bring our project to life. Take a look at our 

 to see a full list of collaborators for Cathedral.

Eric started developing the game and the engine in 2014 as a pure project of passion - the goal was simply to build something fun completely from scratch.

After a while, Eric realized that he wanted someone else on board to compose music and sound effects. After searching for collaborators for a while, he met Aron. The two immediately hit it off, and continued working on Cathedral together.

Eric and Aron joined forces with Acke Salem and formed the company Decemberborn Interactive in 2015. At this point, Decemberborn went from an idea to being a fully formed company, with Acke Salem as CEO.

In 2016, Mattias Andersen joined the company as the second developer. To date, he has worked on both tooling, game engine internals as well as scripting and level design.

Cathedral

Our newest game! What could this possibly be?

If you liked Cathedral, you will love this one. Stay tuned!

TBA, 2024

Jump, fight and explore your way through a non-linear world. Our hero without a name is stuck in an unknown world with no recollection of how this happened. Defeat enemies and dungeons and explore every nook and cranny to unlock items, skills and memories. Based on a NES-style, Cathedral is our first commercial game and our flagship!

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We are very happy to announce that Cathedral will be coming to GOG

! You will be able to grab the game there from the moment it is released! And as if that weren't enough, we can finally announce that we'll be releasing the game in October 2019!

As we get closer to release, we'll post more info about the exact date. We hope you're as excited as we are about being able to play Cathedral soon!

We got a brand new release trailer that you can watch below, which unveils many new things about our game!

We are really stoked to share a lot of exciting things with you. The game is currently getting its last splashes of paint and we couldn't be more thrilled to release Cathedral upon the world.

Developing Cathedral has been quite the ride and the last four years haven't always been easy. We've had a lot of both good and bad times throughout the years, with everything from having to switch sprite artist mid-project to planning issues since we've been building the game and the company on the side of our regular day jobs.

We also have lots of good memories - such as going to our first game conferences together, to making friends for life (most of us got to know each other through working on Cathedral together) and finally, all of us seeing the project through, and seeing the game being released.

Developing our first game has been incredibly rewarding and the game has continuously exceeded all our expectations. It went from a small indie title, intended to be playable in a few hours of time, to being a fully-fledged title, with over 30 hours of content.

Thank you for being part of this journey, and thank you for your ongoing support! We are looking forward to seeing what all of you think of the game!



Cathedral is coming to GOG and we have a bunch of new content to show like our brand new release trailer!

Release date and GOG announcement!



Hey people,

It's been a while since we've managed to get our last updates to you guys, so we thought an elaborate post to let you guys know what's happening is long due. As always, we're happy with the continuous support we've been having from you guys, lately reaching over a 1000 likes on Facebook and still growing steadily. So without further ado, let's chat a bit about what we've been up to.





We've been keeping busy with adding a lot of new content to our game, and while doing so, polishing and adding new things to previous areas. After more than three years of work, major graphic and sound overhauls, we are happy to say that the world of Cathedral is almost complete.

Work has been started on the last dungeons, and while we still have a bunch of work to do on the end game and stream lining the game experience, we are finally reaching the point where we can say that everything is really coming together.

The developers have played through the game a few times now, and it already took well over 10 hours to get to the end point. Excluding some major quest lines and an end-game, we can safely say we can offer the players a grand adventure. 

We hope you are looking forward to the game!



I will now share a few of our newest screenshots with you. These include work on the newest areas of our game, like the fisherman's town of Blue Haven, our new Armor Augmentation system that allows you to unlock new power-ups for your armor, our newest item the Flint hook and some really nice new aesthetic updates. These include seeing how much gold you're looting from drops!



We hope you've enjoyed the screenshots of our new content, they are just some of the things we've been working on. You can look forward to a lot of unseen areas when the game releases! As some of you may know by now, Cathedral is being developed in our spare time and is built from the ground up. This has led to the release date being pretty unpredictable but we're doing everything in our might to get the game to you guys as soon as we're satisfied with it.

The month July we will all have a month off our work, and hack together on the last stretches for the game. We hope we will have a fully play-able final build by the end of the coming months, so you can really start looking forward to the game releasing soon. We will also be meeting up to discuss the current state of the game, and test it thoroughly to see what else needs to be done.

We're refraining from setting a final release date at this time, but you can expect to hear soon from us again and we'll keep you informed as soon as we have it!

Until next time,



New updates and info!

Current state of the game and closing in on release



In this post, we'd just like to take a chance to write up a simple post chatting a bit about our progress on certain things in the game. For one, we can show you some new moves and for two, we have a new area that will certainly get your Christmas spirit pulsing. How is everyone doing?





We talked about how you can equip certain charms found throughout the world to gain new abilities, and we can now showcase the first one of those abilities for you. While some are active moves, others are passives (like increased damage when health is low) so it's hard to show you those .. nevertheless, we hope you enjoy this screenshot of the dash!

The dash will be used to bypass certain obstacles and blended in with solving puzzles. We already have some nice ideas going for a few of them. As you can see, the area in the screenshot is also new. We'd like to take this chance to introduce you to Icepeak Mountains, a snowy winter wonderland filled with hidden gems and rocks to hit. It will lead up to Tinkerton, a dwarfen village kissed by snow.





Speaking of towns, Ivystone Ridge is starting to fill up quite nicely as well. We now have a local town shop NPC where you can store your money and buy ammo and upgrades, the bank in particular will be key when playing Cathedral as you will lose 10% of all your money when you die .. and you will die .. a lot. Also, have you met our new librarian yet? Books will be another collectible in the game, and they will give you a bit of lore about the place you found it!

Oh, and how about a sneak peek at one of our newest dungeons - Necromancer's Den?

Or maybe you'd like to see a little of our new entrance to Bone Church? Our Graveyard has been updated on graphics, and with a new quest to boot you will have to gain the trust of the dead to enter the Church!



We are currently working very hard towards release, and can't wait to reveal a new trailer for you guy soon. There is so much more we've been working on that we want to show you, but not just yet! We hope you've enjoyed this update and please don't hesitate to ever shoot us a message about anything. Be it beer, something nice you ate or perhaps something Cathedral related!

All for now,



Just a quick write-up with what we have been up to lately!

First charms and new areas!



Hello everyone,

We're back today to share with you what we've been working on for the last months, a lot has happened around our studios and we are very happy to conclude that development is going stronger than ever. Our world is growing at an incredible rate, and along with the new members in our team we will showcase some new areas here for the first time! We want to thank you for your on-going support and enthusiasm and are trying our best to stay in touch with you guys as much as we can. Enjoy!





First of all, we would like to introduce two new members to our team. The first one is 

, who has actually been with us for a little while longer. Mattias used to be a chef but has turned the tides and is now a programmer in Sweden - he has been helping us immensely by doing programming and level design. You can follow him on 

 here, go make him famous.

The second is 

, our new pixel artist and animator. He is bringing our world to live and we have been very fortunate to work with him. You can check out some of his stuff on 



We've already revealed a sliver of Soul, our (sometimes) faithful companion who has some very interesting mechanics to him that create even more depth into the exploration factor of our game. In Cathedral, there will be collectible charms scattered throughout the world - these can be equipped upon your sidekick to unlock new movement and combat abilities. For instance, one charm will allow you to temporarily take control over the side-kick or grant you the ability to shoot magical arrows. We will be doing a new trailer on the mechanics in the near future, so we hope you look forward to seeing it in action!



Poison Pavilion was one of the first areas we envisioned for the game - it was an experimental area that we tried creating backwards. We made the music first, sketched out some keywords and let our imagination loose. It has been on hold for a while since we worked hard on other areas, but are now proud to present some brand new screenshots of the poison and spike filled maze that is Poison Pavilion. On the rare occasion you might best it, you will find your way into one of our themed dungeons and fight the Necromancer. He might or might not have a top-hat too.



Work has also started on another one of our themed dungeons - Bone Church. The dungeon is as unsettling as the name sounds but with just the added quirkiness you might expect from Cathedral. We are proud to showcase a new screenshot of it, as well as showcase the new item (Bone Wand) without revealing what it will do!



As you can see, a lot has happened to our game recently. We will be doing more streams on our Twitch channel from now on, and will be back to share a bunch of new music with you soon. Don't hesitate to let us know what you think about the areas and we are so, so excited to keep working on this game.

Until next time,



Content is being added to Cathedral at an incredible rate, and this summer will be the season where our world is really going to come together.

New area showcase and side-kick system!

Thank you to everyone who voted on our Greenlight campaign! We got greenlit after 13 days. Cathedral is now officially coming to Steam! Our planned release so far is Q4, 2017. We'll be back with more exact info when we know ourselves :)

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=876843423

Thank you for all of your support so far

We are greenlit!

After being in development for two years, we can finally say that Cathedral has started going through its Greenlight process! We hope you will check our page out and vote for us!



From now on, we'll also be streaming from time to time on our Twitch channel to showcase new things in the game. 

Please follow us to stay updated and watch our streams!

After two years, we are finally there!

Cathedral on Steam Greenlight!

Hey everyone,

This is Aron and we're glad to bring you another update to how things are going. We can now truly say we are back to implementing content to the game and we're better than ever. There will be a new theme for the Gargoyle soon and there'll be more music related updates for you soon as I am composing new themes for everything that can be done better. We'll have a brand new character to introduce to you soon too, so we hope you are excited for that!

On another note, we have the new developer Mattias Andersen working on the game along side Eric, which has been greatly beneficial and we would like to take this chance for him to introduce himself!

"This is me the short version! I'm a 36 years old software developer working at Edument AB in Helsingborg. I live with my wife and two daughters. Programming takes up all of my spare time because I love to solve problems and I love to learn new stuff.

How I got involved with Cathedral? I saw Cathedral for the first time short after my teacher told me that a guy from his company was working on a 8 bit game. I grew up with a Nintendo 8-bit and my favorite games were exactly the same games that Cathedral was inspired by, or similar to: Mega man,
Castlevania, Metroid, Faxanadu, and Zelda to name a few.

For approximatley a year ago I started to work at the same company (Edument AB) as Eric and almost every morning we started with looking at new features in Cathedral. I was so thrilled with the game and was later asked to follow along to a big game event in Poland where we demonstrated the game for thousands of people. That's the story how I got involved in Cathedral."

We are also very excited to announce that we'll be holding a Cathedral stream saturday March 4th at 22:30 (CET). In this stream you will be able to see a playthrough of the first dungeon and you'll be able to ask us questions about the game. We hope you'll be joining in and will give you a link to our Twitch account soon over social media!

For now that is all, but we'll be in touch shortly with new updates. We thank you for your ongoing enthusiasm and support and we're thrilled to continue working on the game!

Cheers,



Pushing forward!

New developer and Cathedral stream soon!

Hello everyone,

We first want to thank you for ongoing support for the game and staying patient with the lack of updates lately. We are, however, very happy to announce that we will very soon be back to our normal schedule of producing and updating the game.

We had to handle various matters internally, but now we have the resources to continue developing the game and we will do so with the same passion and motivation.

There will be some updates very soon, whether it's a a piece of new music or something else, but we'll also be streaming our game on Twitch soon and might use this more often during the future to better stay in touch with our fans and showcase how the game is coming along. Once again, we're happy to be back at our precious game and you can expect to hear from us again rather soon.

Cheers,



And so we continue!

Some words from the team and new updates soon!

The Decemberborn team is going to Poznan, Poland in a couple of days, and we've been crazy busy polishing the demo that we'll show in our booth. Sadly, that also means that we have been rather quiet lately, and we apologize for that! We've made a lot of progress lately though, and the time for Steam Greenlight is coming closer all the time. So without further ado, here's our first official trailer, our 

Our first official trailer for Cathedral

Presenting our announcement trailer!

As we've mentioned in previous posts, we're going to Poznan, Poland this October to showcase Cathedral at Poznan Game Arena 2016. This means that we have a lot of work to do in order to get ready. We're putting a lot of hours in right now to make our dream of Cathedral come true, and it's easy to forget sharing progress for prolonged periods of time when you're deep into development.

So, in order to actually DO share something, here's a gameplay video showing two areas - 

Ivystone Ridge is the first town that you encounter in Cathedral. It's pretty much a "hub area" of sorts, where you'll be able to head east to 

. Both of these areas in turn lead to new places as well.

Anyway, more updated are on the horizon as we continue to prep for our trip to Poland, but we really wanted to show everyone this video (we're kind of proud over how the world is growing!)

Yay!

We have some gameplay to show you!

As you can see, we have a heavily updated start menu. Victor has done some retouches on the logo, plus added the nice torchlit walls. Aron has written an entirely new track for it, and I have been hacking away at the code to bind it all together.

There are still minor touches left to do in this one, but it's really close to the way we want it to look.

As with most things in-game, we've stubbed up a "working" version and then iterated both sound/graphics/logic until we've become happy with it. If you've followed us for a while, you might have seen that the game has changed its appearance quite a bit over the last year or so, as we've started polishing things more and more.

Hm. Maybe I should actually write an article about that process sometime too.

Putting the final touches on the menu screens

Start menu updates



Hey guys,

This is Aron Kramer writing to you with another post - it's been a while again since we've written on here but like always, we have been working to bring you some of the brand new updates we've introduced for Cathedral. We hope you enjoy reading through it and hope you enjoy all the new retro goodness.





Real heroes leave no room for vulnerabilities! We have made sure that you as the player have complete control and freedom over handling your foes and monsters! There will be certain items in the game that can be used from the ladder as well for battle, and with that we'd like to show you a short video of how it looks right now!

Title screen and profile selection menu overhaul



Another thing we are currently working on is overhauling the title screen and profile selection menu. While it wasn't bad, we certainly thought we could spice things up a lot more. We have a short video to show you how it's coming along and hope you are looking forward to seeing the final result with two new music tracks, logo re-design and complete new interfaces and graphics



Ah, the good old side-kicks! Our team has been thinking through the story a lot over the past month and have come up with some exciting new twists and turns that will make sure to entice you more to the game. While we can't reveal our plans with it, we can show us how the side-kick is coming along. Here, have some more updates!



As you might have seen, we've been re-designing a lot of our old enemies. One of the newest additions is our old reaper from Shade Forest. Victor has done a great job on re-designing it and we are happy to showcase it here for the first time.



And with that we'll be concluding the update post for now. Make sure to check back with us and follow us as we will have a lot more things coming. For instance, we'll have some amazing new Gargoyle mini-boss art and two new music tracks ready for you soon!

On another note, Cathedral will be showcased at the Game Industry Conference in Poznan, Poland from October 21-23. Come and hang out if you are in the neighborhood and don't be shy!

Until' next time,

Aron Kramer

Ladders, side-kicks and reapers!

New Cathedral updates!

After many ifs, buts and maybes, we've finally replaced our old website with a brand new one! After working together with 

 for some time, we finally have a full fledged website complete with presskits for both 

Keep an eye out on this site in the future for both small and big updates on Cathedral. This site will pretty much be our blog for everything related to our games, both minor works-in-progress as well as major news updates (which we'll of course still keep posting on other pages too)

So let's end this very first news posting with the fact that Decemberborn is going to attend 

 in Poland during 21-23 October! If you're planning on heading there, come by and give Cathedral a try!

Out with the old, in with the new

Finally, a new website!

Decemberborn Interactive is an independent game developer, based in Helsingborg in souther Sweden. We love games - both to play and to develop them.

Our goal is to create fun and immersive experiences through indie games. We have a passionate team based mainly in Sweden and the Netherlands, but we also employ freelancers from around the globe to help bring our project to life.

Eric, having worked as a software developer for many years, started developing the game Cathedral and its engine and tools in 2014 as a pure project of passion - the goal was simply to build something fun completely from scratch.

After a while, he realized that he wanted someone else on board to compose music and sound effects. After searching for collaborators for a while, he met Aron, a composer from The Netherlands. Aron initially worked as a freelancer, making music in Famitracker for Cathedral.

It turned out that Eric and Aron had a lot in common and worked very well together. They started talking about the idea of forming a company together. Development started in december 2014, and hence then name "Decemberborn" was picked

In 2015, Acke Salem joined forces with Aron and Eric. Acke is an entrepreneur that Eric both knew and has worked with for a number of years prior to Decemberborn.

After some discussions and idea exchanges on how to grow Decemberborn as a company, Acke joined Decemberborn as CEO and head of marketing. His inclusion led to a lot of new opportunities and officially forming Decemberborn Interactive as a limited company (Swedish: Aktiebolag, AB).

In 2016, Mattias Andersen joined Decemberborn as a core developer and level designer.

Decemberborn

Cathedral is a game which takes you back to the roots of NES gaming. Its main focus is on exploring an unknown world.

Discover a world with towns, dungeons and hidden areas. Conquer the dungeons and find items that will help you unearth more of this strange world. Avoid both traps as well as the dangerous creatures that inhabit this peculiar place while making your way through this world, one dungeon at a time.

Development on Cathedral started in late 2014. The game was released in 2019 for PC, with a simultaneous release on Windows, Mac OSX and Linux.

During the second half of 2020, it was announced that Cathedral will be coming to Nintendo Switch, with publishing and game development studio 

 as our publisher. After the initial Nintendo Switch release on February the 18th, 2021, we partnered up with 

 to bring Cathedral physically to Nintendo Switch.

In March of 2022, it was unveiled that Elden Pixels would once again publish the digital version of the game, but this time for the PS4. We also chose to partner up with 

 to release a physical version of the game, limited to 1500 copies for PS4.

Finally, during July 2022, together with Blaze Entertainment Ltd., we announced that Cathedral was to be released for Evercade. This also marked the world's first native commercial Evercade game.

Large non-linear world, meant for exploring!

Old school 8 bit action adventure gameplay

Conquer dungeons to unlock new skills and items to help you reach new corners of the world

Many distinct areas, each with it's own unique aesthetics

Several towns to visit and NPCs to interact with

Decemberborn Interactive is an independent game developer, based in Helsingborg in souther Sweden. We love games - both to play and to develop them. Our goal is to create fun and immersive experiences through indie games. We have a passionate team based in Sweden, but we also employ freelancers from around the globe to help bring our projects to life.

To request a PC review code, contact Decemberborn directly at 

Review of Cathedral for Nintendo Switch at NintendoLife.

NintendoLife Review

The original Famitracker soundtrack for Cathedral. Created by Aron Kramer.

Cathedral Original Soundtrack

Review of Cathedral on Nintendo Switch by GameGrin

GameGrin Cathedral Review

Jeff Sunseri

Kyle Harrison

Cathedral (new for PS4)

Development on Cathedral started in late 2014. Early development was focused on building a 2D game engine that ran on multiple platforms.

The larger part of the first 6 months in development was spent prototyping both the game engine and various tools needed for development. Cathedral has since gone from prototype to playable game and is currently in development.

Decemberborn Interactive is an independent game developer, based in Helsingborg in souther Sweden. We love games - both to play and to develop them. Our goal is to create fun and immersive experiences through indie games. We have a passionate team based mainly in Sweden and the Netherlands, but we also employ freelancers from around the globe to help bring our project to life.

 (Americas).

To request a PC review code, contact Decemberborn directly at 

IndieDB

Cathedral got featured on Retro Gaming Mags '5 indie titles prove 2D still lives'

Finally, a new website!

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