Bionicle Fan-Made Game Devs Return with Rustbound, and It Looks Sick

Aug 12, 2026 - 19:24

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Bionicle Fan-Made Game Devs Return with Rustbound, and It Looks Sick

Published Aug 12, 2026, 11:20 AM EDT

Unmasked Games spent eight years working on a Bionicle fan game before Lego pulled the plug

Rustbound trailer screenshot showing a white robot rising out of red sand against an ominous backdrop

For eight years, the volunteer team at Unmasked Games (formerly Team Kanohi) worked on a fan-made Bionicle video game. Called Bionicle: Masks of Power, it brought the assembled action figures to life in a 3D action-adventure game. Bionicle owner Lego was cool with it... until it wasn't. Lego asked the team to cease working on the game last summer.

Unmasked Games wasn't provided a specific reason for why Lego was canning its game, but speculated that their project "was too easy to mistake for an official product." In a statement on the cancelation, Unmasked Games said: "At the time of writing, searching 'Bionicle game' on Google lists the Steam page for BIONICLE: Masks of Power within the first couple of links. An average person seeing our game for the first time could easily think that it was an official game at first glance."

Unmasked Games didn't give up, however, and has now returned with its totally-not-Bionicle game, Rustbound. It's "set in an entirely original world," according to the game's website. And it looks pretty damn cool! Check out Rustbound's cinematic teaser below:

Rustbound is in early development, so Unmasked Games hasn't shared too much information about it beyond the trailer. The team's inspirations are clear in the trailer as a totally-not-a-Bionicle figure appears with a cool white mask. The not-Bionicle rises from brown sand with a pale blue sky above it, before its world warps; now everything is painted in a coat of creepy red. Ominous!

Whether Unmasked Games de-Bionicle-ized the assets it created for Bionicle: Masks of Power or built everything for Rustbound from the ground up, it's clear the experience gained from working on that fan-made project won't be for nothing. If you want to see what the team had been working on previously, you can watch two hours of Masks of Power demo gameplay on YouTube. Unmasked Games noted that the demo needed a few months of polish before it would have been shadow dropped, so keep that in mind.

Fan-made projects exist in a legal grey area. If the project makers don't charge for whatever they make, companies can often be OK with letting them continue on. The long-in-development Skyblivion mod has had Bethesda's approval, and Bethesda even hosted the developers behind it. But even then, things can change on a dime, like with what happened with Lego and Unmasked Games' Bionicle: Masks of Power.