The so-called Ghost Stories are continuing around the Midnight Society-like campfire built by Project Ghost, as this week brought another tale about its procedurally generated blue zones, specifically, the roguelike-adjacent gameplay featured within.

The dev blog talks about how blue zones were originally more like survival sandboxes, with massive areas that would take weeks to explore and several trappings of the sub-genre like gathering, crafting, and base building. However, design shifted away from this direction in order to keep blue zones less time-consuming but still engaging and unique every time.

Instead, gameplay will be a bit more like a roguelike, with an ultimate objective that has to be cleared to leave the zone and a small selection of temporary abilities or powers that must be discovered in order to most effectively complete the goal. Specifics are still being ironed out here, but Fantastic Pixel Castle’s Greg Street writes about how these zones are basically meant to make characters feel really powered up (at least during regular level progression) and get to a point where they master a zone.

“We realized one of the most fun moments was the first time you step foot in a new zone and get to see what it’s all about,” writes Street. “It feels like Christmas morning and seeing what presents are under the tree. So we wanted to maximize the number of times that happens to players and as a result, our Blue Zones take about an hour. (We may still experiment with longer ones down the road.)”

That’s not to suggest that all of the survivalbox elements are culled away, as vestiges of that former blue zone design still live on in the forms of skyships that work as a sort of flying home base and buildable contraptions like towers and bridges that can help players traverse a zone. More details about how these work are promised in later dev blogs, but for now followers of the project can get a basic look at how blue zones play out right now.