Title: Rain World Developer: Videocult Platforms: PC, Mac, Linux, PS4, PS Vita Releasing 2016 ---
When I last wrote about Rain World, the atmospheric alien survival platformer was being shown at PAX 2015. Now over a year later, the game made substantial progress in every aspect and is steadily creeping towards release this year.
Perhaps the greatest progress made is in the overall sense. Each of the game's 12 regions are compete, totaling over 1,400 rooms across Rain World's sprawling world. The UI and in-game map has been overhauled and polished, new creatures have been added, music and audio now adds a rich soundscape to the environments, and the developers are now focusing on polishing each region, add set-pieces, more secret species, and other late-stage features.
One particular region is so massive that it's estimated to be six-times the size of a typical area in the game. This Superstructure will be a late-game region that will test all your skills and knowledge honed over your journey through Rain World's other diverse locations.
But no addition is as impressive as the scavenger. The developers had a goal with this species, designing one as effective and intelligent as your own slugcat. These creatures are expert climbers, are able to wield spears and debris with deadly accuracy, but most importantly, they're social animals. Packs are lead by alphas, they spread information amongst themselves, and share tools. Working together, they can take down predators like the fearsome vultures. Interestingly, scavengers have personalities and memories, so saving a long scavenger could help you earn a pack's trust; they may even let you travel alongside their group. But act aggressively, and they'll welcome you with a spear to the gut.
Rain World is slated to release this year, and is currently at the IndieMix showcase at GDC. You can learn more about the game in its TIGSource devlog and Twitter page.
Way of the Red is a 2d action platformer with a focus on fun combat. Splatter blood across the land through four massive zones, each with their own unique environments, characters, and secrets. Use satisfying and versatile sword techniques to shred enemies to pieces. Mutate your character with the mysterious red seeds, and learn new abilities from hidden characters.
"Mira" is an adventure game inspired by Slavonic myths. It emphasizes primarily the exploration of the presented world and the story of the title heroine, a nanny in an orphanage existing after World War II. The player, by moving along hand-painted boards and, owing to his interaction with that world, will become acquainted with new parts of the story. But not only: by his own decisions he will impact its end.
Tides of War: Letters of Marque is Heart-pounding naval combat with wooden ships and Iron men! Take command of your ship and crew to set sail into battle with iconic ships from the golden age of sail. Balance your offence and defense to outlast, dismast, sink, board, and plunder your enemies. Become a Pirate Lord in the Brethren of the Coast or hunt down your nations enemies as the Captain of a Ship of the Line.
Title: HyperRogue Developer: Zeno Rogue Platforms: PC, Mac, Linux, Android Price: $2.99, Free ---
Roguelikes have taken us from the ASCII depths to sci-fi battlefields and all manner of worlds and time in between. HyperRogue drops you into a new land, a non-Euclidean space where the rules are always changing and one wrong move can be your last.
HyperRogue is more puzzle game than pure roguelike; it's actually quite reminiscent of chess. Much like how in chess, you carefully move pieces across the board and must always be cognizant of the dreaded check, HyperRogue is a game of carefully planned steps as you avoid being cornered with no way to escape. You're a fragile being, only able to take a single hit, and you enemies are equally thin-skinned. Instead success and survival revolves around not getting surrounded and trapped by encroaching beasts. You can't even make a move if that move places you in immediate danger, so movement and exploration becomes a puzzle of positioning.
But while HyperRogue's combat may be simple but surprisingly tactical, its world is anything but simple. The landscape spreads out in a circular plane of interlocking tiles, extending outwards from the red-brick crossroads. But this is no normal space; it's a place of distorted distances and looping paths that extend into infinity and straight lines that somehow never intersect, a non-Euclidean world of adjacent biomes where retracing your steps is a trying task
Undying sand worms roam the parched desert, forcing you to flee rather than fight. Walls shift with each step in the living caves. Each step erases the floor behind you in the land of eternal motion. Enter the mirror world, and you'll be accompanied by clones of yourself. Each new land you discover has its own unique quirks and inhabitants, from one where safe crossing relies on avoiding dangerous tiles through minesweeper-style rules, to the oceans where pirates and sharks lurk.
Exploring and understanding each of HyperRogue's biomes is a satisfying and challenging task, forcing you to adapt, observe, plan each step to avoid or flank enemies or maneuver around some hazard or element in a level. While your driving goal is to collect treasure and locate the fabled Orb of Yendor, your immediate task is always to plan each move, study the world, learn its intricacies.
HyperRogue is available as both a freeware download and paid game; the paid version is the definite version, gets the latest updates first, as well as additional worlds not found in the free version. You can buy HyperRogue on Steam, itch.io, and on Android. The free version can be downloaded here.
After years of relatively quiet, space shooters are pretty common nowadays. From the realistic sim combat of Elite to the arcade-y action of Zigfrak or the upcoming Everspace, a lot of games have you blasting away at enemy fighters in the endless abyss. But how many let you take down foes with ship-mounted battle axes? Fabular blends the tropes of medieval fantasy with top-down sci-fi action.
As a space knight with a armored and heavily-armed mount, you traverse Fabular's unusual sci-fi medieval world, engaging in a mix of text adventure-style encounters and direct real-time battles. Traveling the game's starmap is a test of resource management, with fuel always a concern, while text encounters will offer tough and intriguing choices inspired by storybook tales like The Goose That Laid the Golden Eggs.
But while Fabular's medieval world is certainly quite fascinating, its combat is equally interesting. The classic fantasy RPG archetypes are all avaible through customizing your loadout with different ships, skills, upgrades, and weapons. Warriors can wield fierce axes and shield plating, or draw enemies in range of blades with a grappling hook. Unleashing automaton tech transforms you into a sci-fi mage, bending enemy shots around you with repulse field or swarming enemies with homing mines. Lasers, rockets, energy projects can destroy enemies from a distance, but be careful, as the factions you encounter can just as well-equipped and formidable as your own space knight.
Title: UnDungeon Developer: Laughing Machines UnDungeon introduces a unique mix of action, roguelike, and old school RPG under a pixel skin. It combines the exploration of the world, communication with its dwellers, and battles with dangerous foes. You will crush your enemies in a realtime, dynamic, and fleeting bloodshed.
Title: Lost Sea Developer: Eastasiasoft Lost Sea is a 3D action game that takes place inside a procedurally generated archipelago. It's up to you to form a ragtag crew of survivors and explore the surrounding islands to hunt for the resources you'll need to upgrade your ship and make your escape.
Title: Racers: Dirt Developer: 21c.Ducks An intense top down rally-cross game Control the car through dirt roads to win races. Show off your drifts, use nitro, and make takedowns! 4 race modes through the circuits with various themes, career mode, plus multiplayer
Title: Jarvis Developer: Christian Yngvesson Jarvis is a colorful action-packed Metroidvania game set in a far away land where an evil force has awakened. Amidst the chaos an unlikely hero is summoned forth. In order to save the lands from the evil that plagues it, you must venture through haunted forests, dark caves, ancient ruins, demonic castles and defeat the dark entities that stands in your way
Title: Nome Developer: Outlandish Games NOME is a 2D survival rogue-like-like adventure game where you play as Nome, a curious space faring salvager who journeys to distant planets to discover new elements, treasures and sometimes more than you bargain for. Awoken by a mysterious voice echoing in his mind, Nome is compelled to gear up and search for the voices origin
Information is power. It can fuel new discoveries and breakthroughs, promote change, change the tide of a battle. Need To Know takes that central conceit, along with the themes and ideas brought to the forefront by games like Papers Please and The Westport Independent, and places them in the very relevant context of modern-day surveillance.
Need To Know put in the shoes of a young talented analyst in the employ of the Department of Liberty, an NSA-style agency fighting a digital war against terrorism. This means your job is to go through your daily allotment of profiles and decide if these people are valid threats. That decision rests on your research into each person's life, digging through text messages and financial records and browser histories and other means to determine guilt.
With each successful job, your reputation improves, security clearances open up, more advanced tools and more complex operations becomes available. Operations to locate fugitives and expose cults, operations where your the options are "assault" and "neutralize",
But with those more advanced tools come more power. The world is your oyster, so to speak. The information-gathering means used to spy on suspected terrorists can just as easily let you learn more about the woman you're in a relationship with. Or to blackmail and sabotage a co-worker. Or to make a fortune on the stock market. Or manipulate an election. If you can cover your tracks, you can use information and skills for your own personal gain and perhaps for other more corrupt agendas.
If the immoral path isn't your goal, Need To Know also lets you take other road and expose the illicit actions of the Department to the world. Act as a whistle blower, leak information to secret partners, and you'll be able to undermine the agency from within.
Need To Know will follow a relative linear narrative, with hefty amount of side jobs and the means to use your powers to pry how you see fit. The choices you make will affect the story, and while some suspects will be the same every time, other missions have new suspects to track and investigate. Post-launch, the developers will also be adding an Arcade mode, which will test your skills with increasingly challenging missions and randomly-generated suspects.
Need To Know is currently on Kickstarter, and is already 380% funded with all stretch goals achieved. The campaign has seven days left; you can support it here, and learn more about the game on its site.
Title: Blackbox Developer: Ryan McLeod Platforms: iPhone Price: Free ---
While a lot of games on mobile try to replicate more control schemes with digital d-pads and buttons and virtual steering wheels and so on, others go the opposite route, using the tactile nature and portability of mobile devices to great effect. The Room, Shadowmatic, and Monument Valley let you play with, push, twist objects. Zombies, Run! tracks you location through GPS. Device 6 had you rotating your device to follow the twists and turns of its word-corridors. And now, the enigmatic puzzler Blackbox presents you with conundrums that could only be done on a mobile device.
At first glance, Blackbox is quite unassuming, with a sparse black background and minimal assortment of colored squares acting as its main menu. But delve into the game's array of puzzles and Blackbox blossoms into something special. None of its 50+ puzzles are solved by interacting with the screen; instead you must use every other sensor and utility on the device to figure out solultions.
What that means is that your phone is quite literally transformed into a puzzle box. Solving a puzzle is an exercise in experimentation, rotating and turning your device, interacting with exterior various switches and buttons, using specific features like the camera, or even making noise into the microphone. Some puzzles may take multiple sessions to fully complete, or require you to return to the game at different times, or when your phone is in a certain state.
Like the best puzzlers, Blackbox is rife with those wonderful a-ha moments, as you realize what each challenge is asking of you and how you need to use that knowledge. It's challenging, unorthodox, and might be the best mobile game since Device 6 to blend the unique capabilities of the mobile device with gameplay.
Blackbox is free to download, with an optional $1.99 hard level pack available, and more levels to come in the future. If you're interested in learning more about Blackbox, the developer wrote an informative Medium post regarding the game's creation and future.
