Indie game development made much easier nowadays and becoming more and more popular day by day. Tools to develop games became free, sources became open and gamers are turning their backs to big brands in the industry. I cannot imagine where this is going. Almost everyday finding out another super fine looking game developed by indie developers. I already mentioned Kickstarter in previous posts. Thanks to the sites like it, developers do not even need someone to back their project, they directly ask to their gamer audience for the money. Well, one would think that if there are so many games, the quality would drop then. But no, it actually increases because gamers are really selective and indie developers do whatever they can to put some product which looks good and carries original features in the end. As gamers, we are happy. As adventure gamers, we are happier. 'Cause these developers love our genre.
One thing always bothered me in games, especially in adventure games, if you find an item, you know it will be useful somewhere in the future. Dropsy is an adventure game that will break this rule, as Jay Tholen promises. You will find lots and lots of items you might never use, you will explore many lands which do not touch the story at any point. Tholen says that he wants to provide rich content in an open world. I just hope that we will not use hundreds of items on the same spot to find the right one.
Original features are not limited with open world. Dropsy will have another world called 'dreamworld' that you can enter while you're sleping in the game for a limited amount of time. Another thing is that there is no dialogue text in the game, dialogues consist of symbols since main character cannot speak normally. Lastly, Jay Tholen is a musician himself and plans to put a changing music system which I found very innovative. This we do not know much and will find out about in the future.
A game with these many interesting innovations has also something special about its story. We will be playing ex-clown Dropsy who is traumatically lost his family and left the circus and his dog Eughh will be always with us. The special thing about Dropsy is he is purely kind and good hearted however the world we will be exploring with him will not be that good. Sounds like a real deep game to me.
Tholen did not open an individual website for Dropsy so you can check out successfully funded Kickstarter project here. The page explains what is done and to be done very well. The only thing makes me sad about this game is that we have to wait till the end of 2014.
After a deep surreal title, here comes another psychological one playing with nightmares this time. Neverending Nightmares is made out of developer Matt Gilgenbach's psychological traumatic past. Gilgenbach had a really problematic mental illness as he wrote on game's Kickstarter page here and he wants to inspire people that these kind of problems can be overcame. This might mean that this horror adventure will have some non-terrifying good in it.
The game carries a real original art style, everything in the game looks inked by hand. Interactive objects and blood are the only coloured things you will see on the screen. It also plays with the light and shadow to give player the chills. From what you can see in demo here, game has some bugs and missing spots still but let us not forget that we have time till summer to have our hands on this game.
The style of this horror adventure is great as I mentioned but it is not enough by itself. The gameplay looks really simple for everyone to be able to play it without any problem however story looks really harsh. Plus, there are great jump scares and paranormal events happening while you walk through rooms and corridors. I cannot wait to see the full version of the game but do not know if I will be able to play it since the demo was enough for a chicken like me to get frozen in front of screen.
Here is my personal favourite, Statis, since I am also an RPG player and love isometric camera views. Statis is created by Chris Bischoff alone. The amazing amount of detail and fine texturing you can see on game's screenshots are all done by this one man. This fact only makes the game stand out. Bischoff states that everything is drawn 2D from an isometric view point but it is really hard to believe when you see animations and lighting. My guess is that 3D and 2D were used together.
This game looks dark. This is because its world is inspired by classics like Alien, Event Horizon and Sunshine. You are John Maracheck, waking up on a mining spaceship on the orbit, you feel a great pain and your family is lost. This is how story of Statis starts. You explore the ship and as we always do in adventure games, you find objects to combine and use on each other, solve puzzles and interact with computers around. In my opinion Statis looks like Fallout and a little bit like Dead Space by its atmosphere. This beautifully made horror adventure has also mechanics similar to the masters of genre like Monkey Island, Space Quest and Day of the Tentacle.
Statis has a demo out already which you can download from here and is planned to be released at the end of this year. Till that time, follow the game on its official site here and get ready to suffocate in detail.
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