Tarae: The Unbound Is Putting Its Own Spin On Action RPGs

Tarae: The Unbound Wants To Offer “A More Expansive Experience” Published Sep 11, 2026, 9:00 AM EDT Meg is an Executive Editor and Technical Lead for TheGamer, and has been working within the gaming industry since 2014. She was shortlisted as a finalist for the GameHers Journalist of the Year award in 2022 and was a juror for the BAFTA Games Awards 2026. Some of the games and genres that Meg is an expert in include RPGs, point-and-clicks, puzzle games, and life sims. She has a particular fondness for Yakuza/Like a Dragon and Final Fantasy, especially Final Fantasy 14 (for which she used to run a weekly community column). There’s no shortage of action RPGs competing for attention, so having a strong identity matters. Tarae: The Unbound certainly has that visually, blending a colourful fantasy world with distinctly Korean influences and a cast of striking characters. At Gamescom, I spoke with the CEO of Boundary, Inyoung Koo, art director Byung Ho Park and creative director Myung Sang Ryu about where those ideas came from, the inspirations behind Tarae’s world and characters, and how the team is hoping to carve out its own space in an increasingly crowded genre. Tarae Wants To Stand Out In A Crowded Genre Tarae: The Unbound is a top-down action RPG where you play as one of six Seekers exploring Taegwido, an island created after the boundaries between the Six Realms were broken, with the story focusing on trying to restore the cycle of reincarnation. Combat is fast-paced; there are plenty of enemies thrown at you all at once, alongside bigger boss fights where you’ll need to pay a bit more attention to attack patterns and mechanics. There are six playable classes, as well as different skills, traits, and equipment to mess around with as you figure out what works best for you. It’s very Diablo-esque thanks to the isometric perspective, fast-paced combat, swarms of enemies to carve through, and plenty of skills and gear, but it swaps the familiar Western dark fantasy setting for a dark fantasy world heavily inspired by East Asian mythology and folklore. The team promises that it’s “an action RPG that provides a more expansive experience than existing action RPGs”. “There are professions from different countries reinterpreted,” Boundary tells me. “We've looked at what we can use and what we can take from the classes, and that’s how we altered the six characters.” The classes offer a range of damage types so that they “don’t conflict”, with the team explaining, “All different classes have different types of dealing [damage]. We took Samurai from Japan, so we didn't take anything of that sort from Korea.” The team tells me they knew from the beginning that they wanted a hack-and-slash game, “We wanted to use more action. We wanted to maximise action. Then, we were looking for differentiating factors, and we realised that there aren't many games that deal with Asian cultures or themes. So that's how we decided to add the artistic vision of Asian cultures and themes.” Even Tarae’s Developers Struggled With Its Bosses Sitting in a room with the Boundary team and taking Tarae for a spin, I was very conscious of not utterly failing in a spectacularly embarrassing manner, so I asked them which class was best for beginners, and they kindly steered me towards Samurai. Though it might seem like an overwhelming amount of different abilities to begin with, falling into rhythm with Tarae’s combat came rather naturally, and I found myself enjoying it quite a lot, and did well enough for the team to comment, “You said you don't have experience in this genre, but you're very skilful.” I confess to them that I just didn’t want to look bad with a laugh. It wasn’t until the first big boss, Goro, a toad that spews out little worms, that I finally met my match, and though I managed to whittle its health down quite a bit, it ultimately got the better of me. I asked the team to show me how it’s done, and they immediately offered a warning that they also might die to him. And they did indeed die as well. “See how difficult that is? You've done a good job,” Boundary tells me, making me feel a lot better about my own defeat. Tarae features monsters based on the six realms and mythology and then “reinterpreted in Tarae’s way”, with Goro being an example from Japanese mythology. The team tells me that the gameplay system gives the basic structure to the game, but they “added a lot of Tarae content and style” as they “wanted to keep our values of Tarae and the other styles that we developed, and we used Buddhist cosmology, so we used Buddhist cosmology because it's common to East Asia.” Boundary tells me that one of the biggest challenges was creating the boss battles because of the sheer number of them and how each one needs its own unique attack and defence patterns that they tie into the folklore origin of the being it’s based on. “They have their origin, and matching their origin and their story is a way of fighting the patterns. That took a lot of time to develop.” Tarae: The Unbound has plenty that will feel familiar if you’ve played Diablo or other action RPGs, but its East Asian influences help give it an identity of its own. I especially like that Boundary isn’t just drawing on mythology for how things look, but using it to influence its monsters and how its boss fights actually work. There’s certainly no shortage of action RPGs out there, but Tarae feels like it has a clear idea of what it wants to do differently. Developer(s) Boundary Publisher(s) Krafton Multiplayer Online Co-Op Number of Players Single-player Steam Deck Compatibility Unknown