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Press release:
Göteborg, Sweden – May 7, 2025.
The Stockholm-based (Sweden) indie games publisher Burning Planet Digital and Gothenburg-based (Sweden) indie games developer Neckbolt (Niklas Hallin), are today very proud and excited to announce that their pixel-art metroidvania “Alruna and the Necro-Industrialists“, is now available for the Nintendo Switch via the Nintendo Eshop.

In a world torn apart by mechanical greed, forest-nymph Alruna jumps, slides, and dashes through eerie, sprawling subterranean labyrinths. Her mission? To uncover the truth buried beneath it all – the story, the world, and humanity itself.

Dead men yearn for Heaven. But the dead can only dig…

“What is perhaps the most central line of dialogue in Alruna,” says developer Niklas Hallin

, “is hidden away in the very bottom of the Engineer’s Palace. Right before the necro-industrialist boss modeled after the Tarot card The Devil the elder crone talks about the hollowing out of the world and says to Alruna: ‘Sleep now in the fire. Preach now to the choir.’” and continues:

“‘Sleep now in the fire’ is of course a song by Rage Against the Machine. A lot of the game’s writing incorporates song lyrics, actually. The song is about the overwhelming onslaught of conservative propaganda and their insatiable greed.

But I immediately rhyme that line with “preach now to the choir”, because… look, we’ve all heard Rage Against the Machine. We all know these things. Exploitative industrialism, hierarchical ideology, power and oppression – it’s basic shit. You’ve already lived it every day of your life. Progressive politics is just the starting point here, the base-line.”

“And yet!” Niklas stresses:

”Nothing here is about apathy or hopelessness. The struggle is the point. Victory is a luxury. We respond to doom-and-gloom by becoming even more unhinged, ungovernable and enraged. Alruna is most of all an angry game.

ALRUNA and the NECRO-INDUSTRIALISTS.

Rage against the Machine.”

About Burning Planet
ALRUNA’s heavy 8-bit soundtrack is provided by Burning Planet. What began as “Burning Planet Music” in 2015, a music production company for games, has now expanded into an in-your-face, punk driven game publisher – “Burning Planet Digital”. As a publisher, we approach an indie game as if it was a band. www.burningplanet.se