Torchlight rip-off developer denies everything despite overwhelming evidence

Remember when you were, like, five years old and you broke the kitchen window when you threw a ball too hard and you knew you weren’t supposed to be throwing that ball around the yard anyway and your mom saw you do it and you knew you were going to be in loads of trouble so you told her you didn’t do it and blamed the cat instead?

Most of us grow up and realise that tactic doesn’t actually work, but apparently the people who work at EGLS Technology skipped that life lesson.

After some controversy over the weekend, the Armed Heroes Online developer has denied stealing art assets from Runic Games’ Torchlight, when it’s totally obvious to everybody that they did.

The overwhelming evidence.

Undaunted by the petty inconvenience of, you know, reality, the developer has posted a lengthy rebuttal over on the Touch Arcade forums, claiming they never, and the cat did it. Okay, they didn’t blame the cat but perhaps that was a missed opportunity – it certainly couldn’t have hurt the credibility of the developers statement any more than the statement itself.

“We can hardly agree with Mr. Travis Baldree who judged that EGLS ‘wholesale stole most of the assets from Torchlight!’ only based on the similarity between several small monsters. The judgment is simply untenable,” wrote company rep, Serena Zhang. She supported this claim with images comparing the main characters from the two games who do not resemble each other, because that cancels out the ones who do (or something).

She went on to argue that, basically, all RPGs are, basically, exactly the same anyway.

She doesn’t explain why the game’s sound files are exactly the same as Torchlight’s, including the misspellings, though.

The game is reportedly still available to purchase on the Canadian iTunes Store, although Runic Games is working to get it removed.