In an interview with Vampire Survivors, he itted, was the first game he’d made just for fun. And fun, he surmised, would steer the future of his career from thereon wherever it may take him.
In 2024, fun took Galante to Japan, more specifically, the BitSummit indie game festival in Kyoto. It took him to the showfloor and to a booth manned by Nao Shibata. Shibata san’s game, Berserk or Die, posed an interesting premise that instantly clicked with Galante.
“I just wanted to go [to Japan] to try and relax a little, but apparently my idea of relaxing is
having two business meetings per day with very little time to actually enjoy the show floor,” Galantetells us. “It was nearly the end of the day and I just wanted to go home. We—myself and Poncle producer Matteo Sapio—were just in front of Shibata's stand with Berserk or Die playing on it. The game looked amazing, but I had absolutely no energy to try it, I just wanted to go home.
“Matteo instead pushed me to try it and then I was like, ‘okay, sure, I'll give it a go’. And immediately from the first keyboard press it just made me happy. I just got lost in the game, and wanted to immediately start again as soon as I lost. At that time, I was thinking about trying to publish other developers, but I didn't have a clear plan, I was just waiting for an opportunity to present itself and that looked like one. Not an opportunity to find the next big hit, honestly, just to give something back to the indie community. I feel like I've been very, very lucky with Vampire Survivors and I want to share a bit of that luck.
“That same evening, I told the company: This is the first game we're publishing.”
Sink your teeth
Poncle announced its official involvement with Berserk or Die at the PC Gaming Show 2025, with Galante and Shibata (and Sapio providing Japanese-to-English translation) catching up with us via video call beforehand. During the conversation, Shibata explored the game’s unique selling point: its control system, which makes players mash either side of their keyboard in order to control the protagonist on-screen. Quite simply, you pound the left half to attack left; and slam the right half to do the same on that side.
Berserk or Die marks Shibata’s first solo venture having worked in the games industry for over two decades, with the creator having conceived this idea last year. “I just wanted to make a game where you defeat the enemies, simple as that,” explains Shibata. “But I wanted to do something a little bit different. The thing that I started to elaborate on was the control system, and I wanted the player to somehow interact very, very directly. When we work, everyone has a keyboard in front of them, so I was like, ‘okay, this is something that everyone has’. Everyone owns a keyboard.”
When put like that, it all sounds so simple. But despite Berserk or Die’s unique control system, and its highly-stylised aesthetic, Galante says the overarching concept isn’t an immediately easy sell. By his own ission, Galante fell in love with Berserk or Die instantly, but by throwing his weight behind it in an official professional capacity, he’s now determined to convey that excitement to the masses. “I want to see people discovering that beyond the keyboard controls, there is a game that is absolutely stunning,” says Galante. “There is a lot more than just the keyboard gimmick, basically.”
Discovery, then, is a serendipitous throughline in this story because when Galante invited Shibata to talk more formally following that first BitSummit show floor encounter, he assumed Poncle wanted to pick his brain from a video game artist and graphic designer’s perspective. Shibata had heard of Vampire Survivors—who hadn’t in the games industry by this point?—but he’d never played it. Fast forward less than a year, and Shibata has over 400 hours clocked in the obsessive roguelike shoot 'em up, and is thrilled to have the backing of its creator and his team.
He adds: “I’m very much looking forward to seeing what happens, with Berserk or Die and indeed this relationship with Poncle from here. [After] that, I’ve got a few ideas and would like to continue making games. Some ideas are half-baked ones, but we’ll see how it goes with Berserk or Die first. I could make a sequel, or I could do something completely different. What I really look forward to is continuing to be free and do whatever I want to do.”
Even in the short time we speak over video call, it’s abundantly clear that Shibata’s desire for creative freedom speaks directly to Poncle’s view of publishing at this juncture—promoting cool games made by ionate people.
“I think that Berserk or Die sets the tone of our type of publishing,” says Galante to this end. “We're not doing this to start a publishing business and so, initially, I'm not sure people will understand the trajectory we’re on. I think that is going to become more clear with the second title we publish and the third one and so on, that we're going for some very specific things.
“With Berserk or Die, I liked the game as soon as I played it—but I didn't know Shibata-san yet. And so, I had to know if I liked Shibata-san as well or not. I needed to know what his intentions were, what kind of person he was, because for me, the game is just as important as the person making the game or the whole team. It has to be a work of ion, which is what Berserk or Die is.
“The games that interest us will always be the ones that are genuine ideas and a genuine attempt of making something. It doesn't have to be something new, it doesn't have to be something necessarily innovative, it doesn't have to be something original. It has to be that ion. And so, I hope that in the future, we're going to see more games like Berserk or Die and more games from Shibata-san as well. I really hope this can help him do whatever other crazy or other very plain ideas he's got.”
What Shibata has up his keyboard-mashing sleeves, of course, remains to be seen. In the meantime, Beserk or Die is out now on Steam.
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