Winter’s Heart is a new game from darthlupi, the developer behind Mage Craft, Legend of Shadow, and other prominent Game Maker games. In this game, made for YoYo Games’s wintry game contest, you play a spellcaster who must save the world from freezing over. It’s a simple story that mostly serves the gameplay, but hey, it works!
The game’s mechanics are simple, but quite interesting. To get to the next level, you have to open the portal. To open the portal, you have to defeat all the enemies in the level, by first bashing them with a snowball and then bashing them with your club. Along the way, you will have opportunities to extend your freezing bar (which acts as both a health/magic bar), and gain new spells that let you do a variety of things, like summon snowballs from the sky.
As you progress further, the scarcity of snow patches (on which snowballs can be rolled), and the appearance of new monsters and “monster portals” that must be closed off, make life much more difficult for our intrepid hero. I swear, I curse out every single one of those “ghosts” that can walk through the walls! But the unique game design works so well that you can’t help but keep playing (and dying)! I definitely recommend it.
Unfortunately, the game is hosted on YoYo Games, which is such a piece of crap that I refuse to link them. (More like “NoMo Games,” amirite?) In the meantime, just download it here (4 Mb), from TIGSource.
(Source: Paul Eres, via Indygamer)