Souls of Blades (JianPo)

Souls of Blades

Souls of Blades (剑魄, JianPo) is a Souls-like action RPG released on Steam by Liu Qiwei (离忧先生), who later founded CangMo Game Entertainment and began development on A Whisper of Fall: Jinyiwei.

Details

Gameplay

Souls of Blades was set in a spiritual sword realm. It featured Souls-like boss fights, vertical level design, and a swordsman collection system. The game was developed independently by Liu Qiwei after he quit his job at a casual games company, inspired by seeing the Lost Soul Aside trailer.

Connection to a Whisper of Fall

The posture-break system, parry emphasis, and melee-focused design in A Whisper of Fall can be traced directly from JianPo. Souls of Blades served as Liu Qiwei's proving ground for the combat concepts that later evolved into the True Qi and Inner Breath systems. The vertical level design in JianPo also foreshadowed the box garden approach used in the current game.

Combat Lineage to the Current Game

Several of the gameplay ideas in A Whisper of Fall: Jinyiwei began as experiments in JianPo. The 2019 Steam title leaned on posture-break duels, parry-driven exchanges, and vertically stacked stage layouts, all of which reappear in the current project in more elaborate form. Press coverage at the time of the China Hero Project induction explicitly connected the two designs.

The True Qi and Inner Breath resources that govern offence and recovery in the current Combat System descend from the stamina and spirit gauges that drove JianPo's boss duels. The four-verb framework of block, rebound, execution, and dodge was first prototyped in the earlier title at a simpler scale, before being extended to the broader sandbox of the current project.

Verticality and Box-Garden Design

JianPo's spiritual sword realm was built as a stack of vertical arenas, with bosses guarding choke points between tiers. The same instinct for vertical staging carries into the Ming-dynasty cityscape of Main Street, where rooftops, walkways, and ground-level streets share a single playable volume. The Sandbox-Style Levels of the current game generalize that approach: each playspace is a contained box garden with multiple legible paths through it, where Rooftop Traversal and Wall Running are first-class navigation tools rather than scripted set pieces.

Development Track Record

JianPo was released into Early Access on September 30, 2019 and reached version 1.0 on September 22, 2021, accumulating a Mostly Positive rating on Steam (roughly 70 percent positive across about 536 reviews at the time the studio's later projects entered the press cycle). The independent commercial proof of that release is what made the studio's pitch to PlayStation China Hero Project credible at incubation. The current project's larger scope, action-investigation hybrid framing, and Unreal Engine 5 production base reflect the next step in that trajectory rather than a clean break from it.