Retronator

Only a few days left till the shmup Hyper Echelon, formerly known as Thyrian Defenders (which has nothing to do with the shmup Tyrian, hence the name change to avoid confusion), launches its Titan star fighter onto an unsuspecting alien horde of the Cyan Galaxy.

The artist on the game is none other than Raymond ‘Slynyrd’ Schlitter whose excellent pixel art tutorials I’ve been meaning to tout since forever, but haven’t gotten around to yet. As a long-time supporter of his Patreon it’s been nice to follow his journey, both with the learning resources as well as the ramping production of Hyper Echelon assets, which are an embodiment of the art style and approach from his tutorials.

In his latest Patreon post we finally also received the release trailer in the anticipation of the November 11 launch on Steam (macOS, Windows). I’ll let it speak about the gameplay for itself.

I often say that to play text adventures, you need to be in the mood for reading a book—skipping through text to get to the gameplay will do you no favors. In The Longest Road on Earth there is no text, but there are no goals either. If you were to sit down on a train during the morning commute, you’d need to be in the mood for putting on a melancholic album and staring out the window, contemplating life, instead of mindlessly scrolling on your phone. Rushing to the end will do you no favors, much like in life.

You could think of The Longest Road on Earth as a long playable cutscene, somewhere between a 4-part music video and a walking simulator. In fact, it often made me question if it’s a game with a really good soundtrack, or a music album with a really good interactive pixel art animation. The melancholic vocals of Beícoli match perfectly with the black-and-white pixels by Mohammed Bakir and Edu Verz, capturing so many small moments of everyday life, the routine, the solitude, the service, the disconnect, the expected and unexpected joy. It’s music and fine art more than gameplay, but that makes the intersection of the three that much more special as it’s unlike anything I’ve experienced before.

The Longest Road on Earth released already in May and it also took me a while to be in the mood for it. When you’re ready yourself to let emotions take you over, you can get it on Steam ($10, Windows), iOS ($4), or Android ($4).

Time flies fast and it’s hard to believe it’s been 4 years since Flynn: Son of Crimson by @thunderhorseco debuted on Kickstarter. I’m sure the devs (as all of us with crowdfunded games) wished time passed slower so we could make our estimated delivery dates, and Flynn—originally planned to release in February 2019—confirms my theory that Kickstarted games on average take 3–4 times as long to complete than predicted. It also speaks to my other theory, that the end result is most often well worth the wait! (Indie) game development is just hard and takes time.

I already put Flynn on my top 10 list of favorite upcoming pixel art games at the end of 2017 and the art holds up and even overdelivers in its release variety of environments and smooth animations. I’ll let the trailer do the speaking, and if you like a good action platformer, you can pick the game up on Steam ($18 during launch) or consoles.

If you haven’t heard yet, Apogee is back! They announced their return to publishing back in April with a combination of new titles and remasters of their classics. They already released Crystal Caves HD back in October last year and I was very happy about it since a good buddy of mine, Primož from Emberheart Games (Courier of the Crypts), made the conversion.

This week another Apogee remaster was released, Secret Agent HD! The classic title from 1992 was drawn by George Broussard and now comes with spruced up colors thanks to Primož.

That’s what I love about Emberheart Games’ remakes, they’re remasters with a wider palette, but otherwise stick to the original pixel art. Just like Crystal Caves HD, the new Secret Agent also comes with a bunch of other goodies like smooth scrolling and movement, a level editor, a completely new episode with more enemies …

If this brings out a tear of nostalgia, you can relive your childhood memories on Steam or GOG ($8).

As for Primož, he’s already working on the next remaster, Monster Bash HD! Check out the Emberheart Games Discord to stay in touch.

It’s a good time for Sonic The Hedgehog fans as we celebrate the 30th anniversary of the platformer series, which launched on the Sega Genesis (a.k.a. Mega Drive) on June 23, 1991.

On Wednesday we were delighted with an orchestra performance that kept on giving, as the Prague Philharmonic Orchestra switched (and joined) airtime with Tomoya Ohtani Band (Sonic’s sound director) and Crush 40 (contributors of many rock/metal songs to Sonic’s soundtracks over the years).

And if this wasn’t enough, Epic put Sonic Mania on their store for free for the next two weeks! It’s a must have since it’s the only modern pixel art Sonic game released in the last decade. A bunch of artists from the scene worked on the title, including @superpietepiet and @midio. Go grab it while it’s hot (again)!

I’m a game developer, but you don’t get many finished games from me. Pixel Art Academy is the longest project I ever embarked on and while I regularly release alpha updates, it will probably take another decade to wrap the game up (check out my video I made a text adventure in 5 years (with 10 more to come)).

There is, however, a game jam happening every now and then when I take the opportunity to work on something small and bring it to completion. This past weekend I took part of the 48h-long GMTK Game Jam. After not much sleep, our team of three submitted a build of RetroCop, an FPS where you have to survive an onslaught of ghosts in a maze that is constructed and destroyed as you play.

The theme of the jam was “joined together”, so the rooms procedurally join and break apart. The game is also pretty much Doom+Tetris+PAC-MAN joined together (with Tron+RoboCop on top for the art style). I was happily surprised how entertaining the game is and the short, unforgiving play sessions make you want to try again and again.

The programmer put a bit of a crazy mouse sensitivity into the submitted game jam version (which you can try in the browser), so I made a new build yesterday with some more fixes and goodies squeezed in (menu music, dynamic mini-map location, better ghost hitbox). If you want to give the new version a try, you can download it for macOS, Windows, or Linux.

Pixel Art Academy 5-year anniversary happened last week and to commemorate the occasion I created a video retrospective of the development so far. It offers insights into solo game development and why it takes so long to make a game on your own, especially an ambitious one.

Together with it, a trailer for Pixel Art Academy: Admission Week was released, showing the main gameplay features of the game in its current alpha version.

A longer, 10-minute version that shows all of the features can also be found on my Patreon page.

The final piece of news is that Pixel Art Academy’s art curriculum will be making its way into a real-life school for indie game development called The Indie Quest. It’s offered to students here in Sweden, but also to everyone who joins Spelkollektivet, the biggest coliving space for game developers where the school is taking place (and where I live). So yeah, exciting things ahead for Pixel Art Academy and me (and maybe you too if you join :)).

I’ve been playing Yes, Your Grace in short, rich gameplay sessions over the last couple of months. I previously wrote a bigger story on the game’s (troubled) Kickstarter/publisher history, and the developer Brave at Night kindly provided a review code for me to try the final game. I played it on Windows, but no better time to write a mini review now since the game just released on Switch, Xbox One, and macOS as well.

So how is it? Deliciously good. If narrative games with choices that matter are your thing, Yes, Your Grace will be right down your alley. If you like the personal and political drama of Game of Thrones, the game gracefully delivers. And if you miss the times when Cinemaware delighted the world with illustrated strategy adventures (Defender of the Crown), you’ll get the same feels of colorful immersion as you did at the end of the 90s.

You can sense the love that went into the production with all aspects of the game, from exciting story events and relatable characters, to an immersive presentation and a memorable soundtrack. The art direction crafted by the main developer Rafal Bryks (design, code, art, writing) is straightforward and incredibly rich at the same time. Most of the gameplay areas are drawn in 1-point perspective (the exceptions being the 2-point title and map screens) and it’s the lighting that brings the environments to a whole new level. The shading is one of the best pulled off examples of modern pixel art with lavish use of gradients and translucent reflections, while never losing the handcrafted feeling so associated with the medium. A sprinkle of parallax and dynamic zooming round up the effects, all together painting a world you simply want to return to, a desire I haven’t felt so strongly for a pixel art world since Kingdom and Thimbleweed Park.

Yes, Your Grace is an aesthetic experience not to be missed. If you haven’t had the delight of playing it yet, now is the time to get it on Steam ($16 on sale, Windows, macOS), Switch ($17) or Xbox One ($17). 

VirtuaVerse is out! I played through the first couple of hours last night and it’s as cyberpunky as we’ve hoped. @valenberg’s artworks have always excelled at the neon-purple aesthetic, so it’s no surprise the world feels like stepping into one of his paintings, or better yet, music videos. Just look at the launch trailer (a.k.a. the opening credits) and you’ll know what I mean:

The game opens cold before you see the titles though, throwing you into the protagonist’s apartment, straight into a series of classic point-and-click puzzles (look at surroundings, pick up objects, use objects with surroundings). Some of them got me chasing pixels for quite some time, but eventually I pushed through. The gameplay is as 90s as the aesthetic is the 80s.

In the first two hours I’ve only reached the first bigger area (Pill Street) and despite the lack of huge crowds or real-time reflections (khm, The Last Night, khm) the world feels surprisingly alive. The terminals, the vending machines, your character reading all kinds of sushi off a restaurant’s menu—everything gives off the vibe you’re part of a wider, (dys)functional world.

I’ll need to play more to speak about the wider narrative (so far the game has me repairing my VR headset while chasing after my disappearing girlfriend), but if nothing else, VirtuaVerse shows that you can make a completely immersive adventure without technical bells and whistles. What the barebones graphics engine can’t do in code, Valenberg’s mastery of looping GIFs does in art, while Master Boot Record pleases your eardrums with excellent audio.

VirtuaVerse is available for your puzzle solving sci-fi pleasure on Steam ($15, macOS, Linux, Windows).

YES, I finally got my hands on a game with @kirokazepixel’s art in it!

For The Warp (@forthewarp) is a spin-off from another project Kirokaze is doing art for, Massive Galaxy (@massgalaxy). The core crew is in fact the same: Gerardo Quiroz on pixels, Martyn Stonehouse on audio, and Gonçalo Monteiro as the main coder/designer/mastermind behind both ideas. During development of Massive Galaxy (a space exploration/trading point-and-click adventure, still in development), the space combat mechanic grew into a life of its own and broke off as a standalone roguelike deck-building game. Gonçalo sent me a copy of the alpha last week when it released into Early Access and boy did I have some fun with it! Granted, I haven’t built any decks since my middle-school years of Magic the Gathering fandom, but my deprivation for card mechanics was equally matched by the coziness of the colorful-yet-dangerous universe that keeps pulling you back in for more dueling.

The goal in the current alpha is to make your way across 5 levels full of fighting encounters (and other less lethal ones). Unless you pick up some hull-repairing drones on the way, the runs generally end up very fast and you’ll be replaying the game often (with pleasure, that is). After 3 hours in the game I explored barely half of the possibilities and the play style did feel quite different based on the cards that I had. The variability still has some rough edges though—once I lucked into some very rare cards, I was able to defeat all stages in one go. But that’s why it’s in Early Access, so things can get balanced as more cards and ships make it into the game. It’s a perfect title to start playing in alpha as it’ll be exciting to see how things change with each update.

If you’re into cards, strategy, space, pixel art, weird sci-fi tech … head over to Steam or Itch to get your spacefaring runs started ($15, Windows only).

I missed Ministry of Broadcast’s release window (it came out on Steam a month ago), but I finally had some time to play it. For someone who hasn’t enjoyed many platformers since the original Prince of Persia, Ministry kept me pretty captivated—not entirely surprisingly since it’s pretty much pitched as an Orwellian PoP. Similarly to how Celeste’s theme of overcoming depression pulled me through a precision platformer, Ministry of Broadcast delivers on the promise of a cinematic one with a plot that is both thoughtful and comical at the same time.

The game puts you in the shoes of a contestant in a reality TV show organized by a totalitarian regime—minus the shoes, since they get stolen from you right at the start. Seeing your character navigate through snow and industrial complexes barefoot is funny enough to make the awkward walk cycle fitting rather than sloppy. The whole of the art underscores the bizarreness of an Eastern European avant-garde reality TV show, from Brutalist architecture and oversized (crocodile) statues, to hardly distinguishable characters that we only care about as much as they help us advance in the game (except Joe … you will remember poor Joe).

The controls are surprisingly precise for the quirky animations and forgiving enough to make me curse at the keyboard only a handful of times. Gameplay often requires puzzle-like interaction with the environment in correct order, with platforming action mostly serving as execution rather than a challenge in itself (although there is a pleasant amount of stunt sections as well). Dialogue is fresh, HUD pleasantly non-existent, hints helpfully embedded into level art … 

Ministry of Broadcast does a lot things right and is a welcome entry into the wider genre of action adventures that tackle a bit more serious stories than your usual fantasy hack-n-slash (something to play in between The Long Reach and waiting for The Last Night). I’m looking forward to see what the team of four Czech developers (Sanja and Dušan Čežek a.k.a. Fuchs+Dachs being responsible for the art) comes up with next. Till then, you can get Ministry of Broadcast on Steam ($15, macOS/Windows) or wait for the Switch release later in April.

I have a backlog of beautiful games I wanted to post about, some of them already achieving release since the time I added them to my to-do list. Children of Morta is definitely one of them.

The art direction takes some cues from Hyper Light Drifter, including epic overhang scenes—a welcome trick to add depth and perspective to an otherwise orthogonal top-down viewpoint. The mood and colors have so much of their own personality though, they make Children of Morta really a thing of its own. The story and character treatment are also the game’s strength and with the very positive reception it received since its September 2019 launch, it seems the 5 years of development following the 2015 Kickstarter were all worth it.

You can get the game for PC (macOs, Windows), Xbox, Playstation, and Switch by following the links from the game’s website (currently costs around $22).

You’ve heard about Courier of the Crypts often on this blog but I wouldn’t hold it against you if you don’t remember it—my posts have been spread out sparsely throughout its epic, 8-years-long development cycle. Funny enough, I never got to write about its release in April this year though, so I’m celebrating the return from my daily-writing hiatus with the well deserved news that yes, young courier has finally reached his final destination.

In a true labor of love, my good friend Primož Vovk took on designing, coding, and drawing the whole game, all the way back in 2011, after he came up with the idea for the 48-hour game development competition Ludum Dare 20 (we’re at LD 45 by now).

The initial premise was simple enough: become a courier who needs to deliver a letter deep into the crypts and do it before your magical torch runs out of its protecting flame. 

What happened in the 8 years following was an expansion into a grand puzzle/action adventure full of creepy underground levels, deadly enemies, obstacles, an intriguing storyline, and plenty of (secret) reasons to replay individual stages. I can’t really do it justice with words so I’ll let the trailer speak for itself:

Along the development path, Primož was joined by Zdravko Djordjević on sound and music, and I provided a tiny contribution of mine by drawing the portraits for in-game dialogues.

I still have the last 20% of the story to play through, so I can’t speak of the full experience (despite doing the portraits, the game was as much a mystery to me as anyone else), but what I’ve experienced so far was a very delightful jump back into 80s/90s-era challenging, top-down adventuring.

The game got its v1.1 update recently, which brings difficulty selection if you’re not old-school enough (or too much) for the normal mode, and leaderboards to additionally reward your skills for finding the game’s many secrets and collectibles.

If you’re reading this article on the day of writing, you’re even more in luck. The game is still on its Black Friday sale and will cost you just $13 (Windows only from Steam, Humble, or Itch). Now is the time to get it, but later just as much as your money supports 8 years of dedication to get this wonderful, mostly-solo project into your hands.

I love turn based games. In fact, the reason you’re not reading this mini-review sooner is because after playing Pathway for 40 hours, I was pulled into a Civ 5 multiplayer frenzy (it’s a long story) and I haven’t had a free evening since. I deleted Civ yesterday (because that shit is heroin) and so here we are, finally talking about the game with the most advanced pixel art graphics engine so far.

I mean look at the screenshots. It’s gorgeous. Ever since the game was announced, I meticulously analyzed every screenshot that the german developer Robotality put out. I touched upon the behind-the-scenes stuff in my pre-release post and suffice it to say this is some advanced black pixel magic (much like the game’s supernatural nazi-cultist setting). 

The art is joined in perfect unison with the incredible music score, immersing you into your very-own Indiana Jones turn-based strategy adventure. The game is a casual entry into the tactical genre with fast-paced, easy-to-comprehend combat. Fighting is very predictable with shots always landing when there is a clear line of sight (hit percentages are also always right there in the HUD to indicate otherwise). With good strategy you can often get in and out of a fight in 2 or 3 turns. Great for short, relaxing evening sessions, rather than hardcore strategizing.

The glue that holds the numerous randomized battles together is a board-game-like map of Africa and the Middle East, the home of scorching-hot sand dunes, palm tree-filled oases, brick-built villages, and mysterious underground temples. Each of the five campaigns has an enveloping story that tries to give purpose to your team’s expedition, but due to the procedurally generated nature of adventures, you’ll find the random situations you get yourself into more interesting on their own, rather than supporting a progression of the overall arch.

The lush story vignettes are beautifully illustrated and offer a chance for your characters to lead to extra riches and equipment, the latter of which is the key to progression in the game. The 16 available recruits have unique skillsets and combining them into expedition parties offers plenty of varied playstyles. You’ll replay the campaigns often, but that’s by design as you get to try different team compositions and embark on a whole new set of shenanigans, some of which are available only with specific character perks.

Overall the experience does plateau, especially with as many hours as I put into it. It shines best in short, chill sessions for when you feel like immersing yourself into its pulp pre-world-war-II archeologist setting that the graphical wizardry so perfectly captures. A new campaign and improved story events are still on the way, so there’re plenty of reasons to stay excited for the future. If you live for advanced pixel art like I do, Pathway is an absolute must in your library. Get it from Steam, GOG, and Humble (mac, linux, windows, $16).

Epic news guys, Kingdom: New Lands is free for a week! Pun is of course intended as Raw Fury’s publishing debut becomes the infinitely-discounted title in the Epic Games Store until June 13. Get your copy here.

The trick is that New Lands is the 2nd installment in the Kingdom franchise and not the latest Two Crowns that brought local and online multiplayer to my favorite series of recent years. However, this works in your favor if you’re new to Kingdom’s greed-filled world. New Lands is arguably the best of the sequels as it introduced the much favored campaign gameplay without compromising the acclaimed minimalism of the original. Two Crowns was just not as elegant at adding new features (but still a great action strategy title overall).

In related recent news, Raw Fury bought the game’s intellectual property from the original creator Thomas van den Berg a.k.a. Noio. I met with Thomas in Berlin during my March Indie Eurotrip and this decision makes sense since he was already developing new, unrelated ideas, with much joy in his eyes. Getting an (undisclosed) lump of money as a parting gift from his creation extends his freedom to do so. I’m excited to see what he comes up with.

In the mean time, go play New Lands if you haven’t done so yet, while the rest of us celebrate a continued stream of content updates for Two Crowns and future sequels from the furious rawness.