Black Sigil began development under the name 'Project Exile,' conceived entirely for Game Boy Advance by the Canadian (Montreal) studio Studio Archcraft. By the time the game was nearly finished, the GBA market had already died out, and the team made the difficult decision to move it to Nintendo DS, further extending a development that had already taken years. The final result, published by Graffiti Entertainment in 2009, is an RPG with classic aesthetics and structure -open world, turn-based combat, an exiled protagonist seeking revenge- with visuals that clearly betray its GBA origins.
It arrived with notorious technical bugs (crashes, a monster gauge that didn't work, an inaccessible combo here and there) that tarnished its reception, but also with an uncommon craftsman's honesty: it is, above all, the story of a small studio that refused to abandon a project despite every obstacle the industry threw at it, something that today makes it a cherished curiosity among collectors of independent RPGs from the DS era.
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