Avadon: The Black Fortress Available for Windows

By: Derek Yu

On: May 4th, 2011

Spiderweb Software’s latest RPG has just been released for Windows. Demos for both the Mac and PC versions are available for download here.

Avadon: The Black Fortress

By: Derek Yu

On: March 7th, 2011

Avadon: The Black Fortress marks the inception of not only a new series of isometric CRPGs for Spiderweb Software (the previous two, Geneforge and Avernum, spanned 5 and 6 games, respectively), but also a new engine and artist. In Avadon, you play as a servant of the black keep, trying to unravel a conspiracy to destroy your people. The game features four character classes and multiple endings.

Like all Spiderweb games, Avadon has been released for Mac first, with a Windows version to follow in the next few months. The full version is $25, but there’s a demo of the game available to try out.

TIGdb: Entry for Avadon: The Black Fortress

Driftmoon Available For Pre-Order

By: Derek Yu

On: November 2nd, 2010

Ville Mönkkönen, the creator of the cult-hit survival game Notrium, has announced that his latest game, Driftmoon, is available for pre-order at €11.99 (20% off the final price). People who pre-order will get access to the alpha version of the RPG, the game’s editor for making mods, and all the updates thereafter. The latest build adds a new adventure to the playable preview that was released nearly a year ago (since taken down).

According to the announcement, Driftmoon is still some months away from release.

Rainblood: Town of Death

By: Derek Yu

On: June 14th, 2010

It’s a rare treat to be able to play an original indie game from China, especially one that is as unique as Rainblood: Town of Death. The first episode in an ongoing RPG series, Town of Death takes place in a dark fantasy world inspired by Chinese mythology and Gu Long martial arts novels, among other things. And when I say dark, I mean dark – the game doesn’t shy away from violence and some pretty fucked up imagery. It was originally released in Chinese in 2007 to some acclaim and has since gone through a few English translations. The latest (version 1.15+, by Steve Gibbon, aka Drunken Paladin) was released this year and is considered the definitive translation.

Town of Death was created in RPGMaker, which is notorious for its widely-used default tilesets, but Rainblood’s creator, Soulframe, chose to create his own graphics using distinctive pen-and-ink linework. The drawings are quite good and convey the desolation of Central Land, where Rainblood takes place. Pretty much every area in the game is different, too. My favorite artwork, though, belongs to the monsters, who are relatively few but have pretty inspired designs. Similarly, the sound effects and music, while also fairly sparse, are nonetheless unsettling.

Read the rest of this entry »

Indie CRPG Bumper Crop

By: Derek Yu

On: May 26th, 2010

Today, Basilisk games released the Macintosh and Linux versions of Eschalon: Book II, following the Windows version which came out earlier this month. Book II is the second game in a planned trilogy of RPGs, and continues the story where Book I left off. According to an interview with one of the creators, Book II also improves on the first game in a number of ways:

Eschalon: Book II can be purchased for $24.95 and Book I, which was released in 2007, now costs $19.95. Demos are available for both games.

TIGdb: Entry for Eschalon: Book II

Also, I noticed that Spiderweb Software’s long-running RPG series, Avernum, has finally reached its conclusion this year, with Avernum 6. Like Eschalon, the last game in the series came out three years ago, in 2007. The game is available for both Windows and Macintosh.

So yeah, so far it’s been a good year for fans of old-school, story-driven indie fantasy CRPGs! For more indie RPG love, you should check out Craig Stern’s IndieRPGs.com. Craig is a developer of RPGs himself, having created a number of games under the label Sinister Design.

TIGdb: Entry for Avernum 6

Phenomenon 32

By: Derek Yu

On: May 24th, 2010

[This is a guest review by Gregory Weir. If you’re interested in writing an article for TIGSource, please go here.]

Phenomenon 32 is a bleak game by Jonas Kyratzes, creator of the previously-featured House at Desert Bridge. Earth is gone, destroyed in the 50s by a Reality Bomb based on the elusive Phenomenon 32. The only surviving humans are on the Moon Colony, and they’re running out of resources. Your team must explore the distorted remains of Earth to find a solution, but the Reality Bomb has turned it into an alien mishmash of old buildings, twisted plants, and dangerous anomalies.

Phenomenon 32 is an exploration platformer in the vein of Zelda II. Each area is represented by a spot on the overworld map, and contains resources as well as bits of technology that allow you to research enhancements to your initially fragile ship. Reaching the exit of an area unlocks new areas, and many areas have multiple exits.

The game starts off quite hard; your ship has precious few hit points, your weapon is weak, and your movement is clumsy. However, with a bit of exploration and expenditure of resources, your ship quickly becomes quite capable, although the threats in later areas will still prove challenging. This is a huge game, with a broad array of new tools and enhancements for your ship and upwards of 35 levels.

The graphics and sound here are great. The art is black-and-white, with the shapes of things just indistinct enough to look alien and uncanny. The music ranges from atmospheric to downright nightmarish. There’s also full voice acting, which helps excuse the large download size.

The game has a pair of opening sequences that may drag on a bit longer than you’d like, but they can be skipped with the ENTER key and don’t contain any essential gameplay information. The game’s also a little rough around the edges, in part due to outgrowing its development environment; Kyratzes claims it’s the largest game ever made in Construct, and I’m inclined to believe him. There’s occasional slowdown and even rarer crashes, but nothing that should erase your progress or make the game unplayable.

This is a massive, creepy, challenging RPG platformer, and I highly recommend it.

Transcendence v1.0

By: Derek Yu

On: March 25th, 2010

Version 1.0 of George Moromisato’s Transcendence was released recently. Transcendence is a real-time space exploration game that draws inspiration from roguelikes and has randomly-generated star systems and items, among other things (there is no permadeath, however – you get a single save slot that can be reloaded after death). It plays similarly to the Escape Velocity series.

The game’s first public release (v0.7) came out nearly 7 years ago, and the game has been in development since 1995!

(Thanks, BellosTheMighty, for the heads-up.)

TIGdb: Entry for Transcendence

The Spirit Engine 2 Released as Freeware

By: Derek Yu

On: February 17th, 2010

Mark Pay has decided to release his RPG The Spirit Engine 2 for free, citing poor sales as one of the primary reasons. Which is a shame, really, since it’s a lovely game and was a steal for $10, I thought (initially $18). You can read Mark’s announcement here.

Telepath Psy Arena 2

By: Paul Eres

On: February 11th, 2010

Telepath Psy Arena 2 is a basic strategy RPG by Craig Stern / Sinister Design. The genre is kind of underrepresented among indie games (although perhaps it appears more than we’d expect), and as it’s one of my favorite genres I’m just happy to play a new one, even if it doesn’t do anything particularly special and felt a bit unpolished for its price to me.

The way it works is you buy a party from the slave market (there’s a variety of classes), and fight a series of coliseum battles. You gain more money, which you can use to train your characters to make them stronger, or buy orbs to make your hero stronger, or buy new characters. If you lose a character in battle, they’re usually gone for good (like Fire Emblem). There isn’t very much story (although there’s a little), most of the game is just battle after battle. There’s no equipment or class changing or other bells and whistles, it’s just a bare essentials strategy RPG, although occasionally there are alternate win conditions to add some variety (such as capture a square, or protect one). I’d guess the game will probably last about 6-8 hours for a single playthrough.

By unpolished earlier, I mean things like many actions (such as GUI actions or walking) not having associated sound effects, a GUI made largely of round rectangles and text which often gets in the way and has to be moved around manually, very few pieces of music, difficulty in telling your team and the enemy team apart (they don’t even have separate colors), the inability to place your characters where you want at the start of a battle, and so on.

And of course the graphics. I know that Craig wrote an article called The Obsession With Aesthetics in the Indie Scene, but I kind of think there’s a difference between being put off by bad graphics and being obsessed by good graphics. To be fair though, the flip animation of the assassin was top notch, I loved watching it every time it happened. And of course it’s hard to make pretty graphics in a completely top-down perspective, regardless of how skilled you are.

But as I said, I’m just happy to see more strategy RPGs, and while it’s not excellent, it’s at least a solid entry to that genre that got me addicted to it for a small time (which is also how I feel about the latest Vandal Hearts game).

Driftmoon Preview

By: Derek Yu

On: November 26th, 2009

Driftmoon is a new top-down RPG project by Ville Mönkkönen, the creator of the survival game Notrium. Although it’s early in development, there is a playable preview (35 MB) of the game available from the game’s website. Driftmoon is in the final round of the second 2BeeGames competition.

There are some neat things about the preview. For one thing, the graphics are nice. I also like the way you can push and drag objects around and the Notrium-inspired survival elements are cool, too. The dialogue, leveling system, and puzzles feel a bit tacked-on, but hey, it’s just a preview! And it’s fun, besides.