Tag: rpg

A House of Many Doors
News

Weird fiction continues to invade videogames with A House of Many Doors

It was going fine until the Gangleman came. He arrived in the total darkness that my crew and I had been plunged into after the Heartlight had gone out. As Captain, I had made the decision to not sacrifice my own heart nor that of any of my crew to restore the light, and so we made haste towards the City of Keys, the closest refuge to our desperate position. That’s when he came, to the tune of “Gangleman, Gangleman,” a portentous poem written across the ages about his infamous acts of terror. And with that he stole one of my men…
OMORI
News

Surreal horror game OMORI won’t be a recluse forever

OMORI isn’t dead but it has been delayed again. The team behind the upcoming “surreal psychological horror RPGmaker game” has released a new trailer and explained why the game isn’t out yet. To make a long story short: the team admits it “underestimated the amount of time to create a video game.” The original estimate for the game’s release date when it was funded on Kickstarter was May 2015. That means that prediction is drawing close to being two years early. But there’s more to it than mere naivete. One of the major setbacks for the OMORI team has been…
Acre 6
News

Brendon Chung’s latest game makes a mockery of RPGs

I missed the latest game by Brendon Chung (creator of Thirty Flights of Loving, Quadrilateral Cowboy) when he released it last month, but it’s certainly worth highlighting. Called Acre 6, it’s a deconstruction of the classic RPG, full of jest, made for the Procedural Generation Jam. It starts you out with a map marked only with icons for areas of forest and landmarks like temples, ruins, and villages. The only interaction available is to move the mouse to guide a circle, representing you as the player character, who journeys across this map leaving a dashed line behind them. open-world games rarely…
News

New teaser for 2017’s strangest RPG features Sikth vocalist

That gruff throat noise is unmistakable. If you’re familiar with Sikth, the British progressive metal band, you should recognize the distinctive low tones of vocalist Mikee Goodman‘s voice in the new teaser trailer for No Truce With the Furies. Goodman is an unexpected choice to contribute a voiceover for a videogame trailer, but it makes a lot of sense. His chilling delivery in tracks like “Mermaid Slur” and “Tokyo Lights” is equal parts enchanting and terrifying. Which seems to be close to the mixture of emotions that the Estonian studio ZA/UM (previously Fortress Occident) is aiming for with its “fantastic realism”…
News

Check out the animations on this upcoming ASCII adventure

Thanks to the events of 2016, a lot of us are starting to get used to the concept of living in a society filled with evil. Stone Story is way ahead of you. The game is set in “a dark and vile world,” populated with haunted trees, reanimated skeletons, giant snails, and antagonistic bats. The protagonist is on a quest to change it all. carefully animating the game for over two years Stone Story features four boss fights, six unique locations, and multiple cutscenes, all animated in plain text ASCII style, with characters and weapons built from recognizable keyboard symbols…
Tyranny
News

Tyranny is an RPG about being properly evil

Sign up to receive each week’s Playlist e-mail here! Also check out our full, interactive Playlist section. Tyranny (Windows, Mac) BY OBSIDIAN ENTERTAINMENT The alternative title for Tyranny is, presumably, “50 Shades of Evil.” It’s an isometric RPG in the traditional style that takes place in a world where evil has won. It doesn’t want you to quell this evil, instead, it wants you to enforce its rule, and asks you to indulge in your sadism. Mostly, it does this through the choices it asks you to make: Will you smother a baby? Commit the mass murder of innocents? Throw a prisoner…
News

Here it is, the latest nostalgia ploy for the Tsum Tsum generation

One of my favorite things to see compared are Funko POP! figures (of the United States) with Good Smile’s Nendoroids (of Japan). The two are at once comparable—both being a popular series of uniformly designed figures—but also incomparable. POP!s are chibi (small), cheap, and most of all: ugly. While Nendoroids are also chibi, a bit more pricey, and most of all: actually really cute. When put side by side, the cuter figure is always clear. I’ve always taken it as a sign that my fellow Americans don’t know what cute means. But with World of Final Fantasy, the latest JRPG clout…
Kingsway
News

Fantasy RPGs always felt like a desk job anyway

There’s a lot to manage in a role-playing game. It can almost feeling like having a desk job—managing inventory, grinding work, looming bosses. Add with crafting, foraging, and upgrading gear on top of that it’s no wonder I keep asking myself why I repeatedly subject myself to RPG work. Not everyone loves crafting, after all. Andrew Morrish’s upcoming Kingsway is a fantasy RPG that riffs on the idea that the game is like a desk job, “pointing out the similarities between managing an RPG and daily tasks on a computer,” Morrish said. Players will have to rifle through a Windows 95–inspired operating system to navigate a…
Review

Masquerada is about as enjoyable as a dictionary

Delivered in the middle of Big Game season, Masquerada looks at first like a welcome relief from war, VR, and Watch Dogs 2’s emoji mask. The masks in its world are a different kind of grotesque. They separate the haves and the have-nots in a rigidly stratified sorta-Venetian society, granting elemental powers to elites who dress like every day is carnival. The conceit feels fresh, and the city of Ombre is boldly drawn, with heavy black borders around tents and troops to set off freehand suggestions of grass blades and thin ruled lines of stone. The protagonist, Cicero Gavar, dashes…