Welcome to GTOGG’s August 2021 edition of Promising Indie Game Releases, where we highlight indie and non-mainstream titles that we believe deserve your attention – in other words, “look at all this potentially cool stuff you might’ve missed otherwise”. That would’ve been too long for a title, though.
Set in a mysterious, magical world, the game stars Lucios, a humble lumberjack who gains the ability to manipulate the forces of gravity and rotate the world around him – which, as you would expect, lends itself quite nicely to all sorts of creatively designed puzzles where you’ll have to shift, turn and rotate your way to victory.
The game, which takes heavy inspiration from Slavic legends and folklore, stars a young sorceress by the name of Vasilisa on a supernatural quest to resurrect her beloved by tapping into the forbidden power of the titular Black Book.
Taking place across various locations on the East Coast of the US, players will have to face a literal army from hell as they try to close off the Gates of Death in order to put an end to an encroaching nightmare.
Controlling a young woman called Cassidy, players will have to traverse the various dreamscapes of her subconscious every night and fight off her inner demons using a host of reality-bending lucid powers.
“Soulslike” and “Metroidvania” are probably among some of the most commonly used terms in the game industry these days, and that’s no coincidence, as both the Dark Souls and Castlevania/Metroid franchises have established templates and patterns that numerous other titles have come to incorporate into their DNAs with varying levels of success.
The Hand of Merlin’s narrative takes place in medieval times, in the corrupted lands of Albion, and your mission is to guide a party of three adventurers all the way to Jerusalem in order to prevent the coming apocalypse. Alas, I stubbornly insisted on sticking to the rather challenging Normal difficulty mode, which resulted in more deaths and failures than I care to admit.
The Magnificent Trufflepigs, a narrative adventure game from developer Thunkd, starts off with an innocent enough premise – a friend asks you to help find a buried earring of great sentimental value, so you travel down to the English countryside with metal detector in hand, and get to… well, metal-detecting.
When the idea of a 2-hour-long metal album being presented as a semi-interactive video game was first brought up to me, I found it somewhat intriguing. I mean, on a conceptual level, it sounded great.
Strangeland is the latest point & click adventure game from Wormwood Studios, the creators of 2012’s Primordia – starring a disturbed man forced to perpetually witness the death of a woman she loves, the game sends players to the twisted, otherworldly carnival of the titular Strangeland, where they must find some much-needed answers to all the big WH questions you can imagine.