Despite (or perhaps because of) the convoluted method in which it was created, Chain of Retribution sports a simple premise:

When two mercenaries accepted an escort job–thought to be a swift and easy– they found themselves involved into a global conspiracy that would shake the very core of the earth.

The devs (Archeia_Nessiah, Ocean, GreatOldOne, Skie Fortress, JIHAUS, marimo, Khos, and mellytan) state that CoR features a few unique mechanics. In particular:

*New twist on the battle system: Each character is divided into 3 categories. Striker, Balance or Passive. Striker types regain MP in battle by attacking only. They’ll gain 20 MP this way, and are usually more for saving up for a big attack.
Balance types regain 10 MP regardless of what command is used. Their skills tend to cost less but are not usually focused on having a big final attack to use.
Passive types regain 30 MP when you defend. They also start with the most MP in a battle and are Mage-types.

*Encounter Gauge which fills up as you fight encounters (which are seen on the map). Once filled, you can open up a special chest in the area.

The game is free–to nab it, simply head here and download away.

Age of Decadence has had a combat demo out for quite some time, but this latest demo release isn’t just battling–this one is the real deal. From my brief time with it, I can confirm that there are elaborate branching quests, dialog choices, a whole slate of skills to choose from, and numerous skill-checks that open up new ways of approaching different situations.

Go ahead and download it, see what you think. (It seems the game is Windows-only, unfortunately, given that it’s running in Torque.) The full game is due for release in Spring 2013. If you’re moved to support the developers in advance of that date, you can pre-order Age of Decadence right here.

Travel by Princess Loren’s side as she searches for her lost mother, the Queen of the Amazons. Guide her choices and act as her valiant defender, meeting many colorful characters along the way. As the journey progresses, everyone will grow and change — character development in games isn’t dead! It’s also impossible to see all the content in just one playthrough, with so many ways to customize the characters.

Loren the Amazon Princess features turn-based combat, 13 recruitable characters, and 12 possible romances “including all possible gender combinations.” So basically, it’s very much in the same vein as Planet Stronghold. (Incidentally, I’m guessing LtAP doesn’t feature targeted attacks–from the looks of it, every single one of your characters would die with one hit to the abdomen.)

LtAP comes in Windows, Mac and Linux flavors; whatever your OS, however, the game can be yours for $24.99. There’s a free demo [ Windows | Mac | Linux ] as well as a trailer, which just so happens to show off some gameplay as well:

Note: the developer wrote up a post-mortem of the game here, in case you’re interested in reading about his trials and travails putting this game together.

• Title: Styrateg
• Developer: Rake in Grass
• Platforms: Windows, Mac
• Price: $9.95

Styrateg, by Rake in Grass, is a bit of a classic. I remember seeing this game on sale under the RPG moniker well before I had even realized there was such a thing as “indie RPGs.” Styrateg was, quite literally, the first indie RPG I was ever exposed to. The funny thing is, until I sat down and did this review, I wasn’t sure that it was actually an RPG.

Styrateg is very much in the vein of the early 90s war simulations I knew as a kid, before real-time gameplay had fully sunk its fangs into the neck of strategy gaming. The combat system in Styrateg is pure turn-based, hex-based strategy of a sort that we just don’t see anymore.

A quick history lesson: many people below a certain age probably won’t know this, but RTSs used to be a novelty. It was turn-based strategy titles that dominated strategy gaming in the early 90s. The Empire series began in 1987, and Civilization was released in 1991. For my part, I remember spending innumerable hours replaying the Battle of Agincourt in Empire II: The Art of War back in middle school. Dune II, the archetypal RTS that set the stage for the genre, first appeared in 1992; Command and Conquer, in 1995. Total Annihilation appeared in 1997. Starcraft, which decisively turned the strategy market toward real-time gameplay for good, wasn’t released until 1998.

Anyway, now that you officially think I’m older than dirt, let’s talk about the combat in Styrateg. Your units come in one of four basic flavors: fighter, horseman, witch and monk. Movement will feel familiar to anyone who has played a Heroes of Might and Magic game; unlike HoMM, however, all of the actual fighting in Styrateg happens on the main map. Characters can be moved in any order. An action point system governs individual character turns, which allows some flexibility during the fighting. Different types of terrain also have dramatically different movement costs, which means that you can protect your flanks with smart positioning. This is important, since you spend most of the game without very many units under your command.

This has all the makings of a strong combat system, but there are a few areas where it falls short. Enemy AI is a weak point. The baddies don’t do a very good job of picking targets for their attacks, and slow-moving enemies can be easily trapped on the far side of a mountain range while you pelt them with fireballs. It is also possible to move back and forth with a mage, sniping enemies with a maximum-range fireball once per turn as they sit there in puzzlement. Maybe the bandits are lazy. Maybe that plague-bearer found a really nice parking spot, and it’s not giving it up for anything. It’s fun to think of reasons why the enemies won’t either advance or retreat out of long-distance attack range; it’s less fun to actually fight against it. Given that spells only cost AP (which regenerates fully every turn), you could use this to essentially break the game if you wanted to.

But that’s only if you wanted to. No one’s making you use the exploit, after all. A bigger problem with Styrateg’s combat system stems not from AI issues, but from matters of design. The combat system, though not based on Dungeons and Dragons, suffers from one of its biggest flaws: it is overly randomized. Attacks frequently miss–but more importantly, when they do hit, the damage they do is hugely unpredictable. Only half a dozen maps into the game, attacks can (and will) deal anywhere from 1 to 17 damage against the exact same target, with no discernible rhyme or reason. Combined with the relatively sparse information you’re provided on enemy unit stats, this renders combat much more of a blind crapshoot than it needs to be.

Developers Rake in Grass say that Styrateg involves “strategy and RPG mixed gameplay.” In a sense, that’s true. You control individual characters, they have equipment, they gain experience and levels, and you can accept and complete quests. However, even with all of that, Styrateg just barely qualifies as an RPG.

"God damn it, Cedric--we're in the middle of a battle. Stop stacking helms on top of each other!"

Styrateg features very minimal exploration, for one thing. The game progresses straight through a linear sequence of timed battle scenarios. You can’t return to earlier areas or pick alternate routes. In fact, unless you turn off the game’s optional time limit, you can’t even stick around the map you’re already on for very long. It’s just one map after another after another.

Although most of the battlefields have one to two optional quests and/or hidden items, the maps are fairly confined. Anything hidden in the maps is hidden purely by virtue of the fog of war–once you see everything, you’ve seen everything.

Even between maps, there is a certain pervading sameness that hurts the game’s sense of progression. With rare exceptions, you’ll be seeing the same items over and over again. Character portraits and graphics are reused as well.

The illusion of progress is also hurt a bit by the fact that equipment can be stacked in strange and nonsensical ways. One of my fighters, Cedric, ended up wearing two helms for his armor. It sounds nit-picky to say, but this sort of thing makes it difficult to pretend that you’re actually equipping your characters with physical objects bearing physical properties. One gets the sense that one is merely swapping out interchangeable bonuses in an array.

I hope you like narration, because this is how the entire game's story is told.

There isn’t much dialog in Styrateg; its rather minimal story is driven almost entirely by exposition. It feels a bit like having to periodically read a story book in the middle of battle. With the exception of your hero, you get little sense that your units are actual characters–not that your hero gets much development, either. You do at least get the opportunity to pick your hero’s name and class at the start of the game, though, so there’s that.

Styrateg features pleasant 2D graphics and some really nice music from Psalteria and Krless. The soundtrack gives me the feeling of being at a Renaissance festival; it’s quite enjoyable, even if it lends the game a much lighter tone than its authors probably intended. Also neat is the game’s map editor, which allows you to create your own campaigns and play those created by others. (I wasn’t able to actually find any custom Styrateg campaigns floating around on the internet, unfortunately.)

I’ve expounded at length before on what I think makes an RPG an RPG, so I won’t recite that whole thing again here. Suffice it to say that there are certain qualities that all RPGs have in common, and this one pulls an Indy Hat Roll to squeeze itself in at the margins. Styrateg has persistent characters and leveling, but the game is so linear, its exploration so threadbare, and its story and characters so bare-bones, that it ends up feeling like a pure fantasy strategy game anyway.

The Verdict: 2.5/5. Styrateg is a lightweight confection, enjoyable in short bursts but lacking in depth and content. The game is recommended for those who want some old school turn-based strategy and the absolute minimum of definitional RPG elements.

• Title: Age of Fear: The Undead King
• Developer: Leszek Sliwko
• Platforms: Windows, Mac, Linux
• Price: $14.99

Age of Fear is much newer than Styrateg. I’d seen it mentioned before, but it wasn’t until developer Leszek Sliwko emailed me with a review code and the promise of “indie fantasy turn-based strategy” that the game really caught my attention. (What can I say: oftentimes the direct approach is the best approach.)

Like Styrateg, Age of Fear: The Undead King is an unapologetically old-school turn-based strategy game, one which plays like one of those turn-based war simulations. However, Age of Fear dispenses with randomized damage, and brings free movement into the mix for good measure. You can think of it is as something like what Myth: The Fallen Lords would have played like had it been 2D and turn-based with a top-down camera.

Age of Fear’s trick is in unshackling all of its characters from the tyranny of grids and hexes. I was a little concerned when I first heard that the game did this (free movement crippled Nippon Ichi’s ill-conceived Phantom Brave), but Leszek has managed to make it work. It’s easy to see the limits of each character’s movement, including enemies’, and the game’s hand-painted battle backgrounds contain enough texture and unique features that you can recall the limits of different characters’ movement range with a little study.

By the standards of turn-based RPG combat, Age of Fear is quite good. Battles are satisfying tactical affairs, requiring patience and planning. Positioning is of paramount importance in Age of Fear. Characters block other characters (including friendly units), and archers cannot move and fire in the same turn. Thus, you’ll need to spend some time planning your formations and deciding how far to advance before engaging enemies. As you might expect, you’ll want to keep your ranged units well out of the enemy’s reach, but even your melee units aren’t the hardiest. The game provides money to replace fallen soldiers in between battles, but it pays to keep as many characters alive as possible.

Although Age of Fear’s combat is solid, it could stand a few more features to spice things up. I would have especially liked to see terrain effects and directional damage. AoF does a good job of continually introducing new unit and enemy types to keep things from stagnating, but the system itself needs just a couple more variables to really make the most of its free movement fundamentals.

On a pure useability level, it would have also been nice to have the option of clicking an enemy to leave its movement range visible on the screen while panning around and mousing over other characters. You can always click one of your own characters to leave up its move range and then mouse over the enemies, of course, but sometimes you just want to know who can move where while staying out of a particular enemy’s way.

"No way am I moving into that tree's shadow. You can forget it, General."

Further, although the character movement system is pretty slick, it’s not perfect. Move your units too close to each other, and suddenly they’ll be prevented from moving them around one another. There is also sometimes a disconnect between the terrain you see onscreen and the areas that the game decides are moveable, with invisible boundaries that are impossible to predict simply from studying the map.

You may have noticed that I’ve only been talking about Age of Fear’s combat so far. Frankly, that’s because combat is most of the game. Age of Fear is a lot like Styrateg in that way. Age of Fear is relentlessly linear, its story entirely scripted. Your actions have no noticeable effect on the game besides advancing you to the next battlefield in better or worse shape. Age of Fear has a reasonably well-written story, but as with Styrateg, you will inevitably feel like you’re reading a book in between battles rather than playing the role yourself.

Age of Fear makes slightly better use of its linear episodic nature than Styrateg, however, allowing you to replay each battle you’ve completed as a quick skirmish (where you can play as the bad guys!)

Despite all of the structural similarities between Age of Fear and Styrateg, Age of Fear falls a little short of clawing its way into the RPG tent. Age of Fear features smaller maps than Styrateg and no fog of war, so there isn’t even a minimalist exploration element to the game. Age of Fear features no items or equipment. There is no leveling of individual characters, and all characters are effectively clones of other characters of the same class. This includes your hero, whose name and class are not customizable.

Despite its lack of leveling mechanics, Age of Fear actually does feature a (very limited) form of character advancement: once a character reaches a certain amount of experience points, it may “evolve” into a more advanced version of its unit type. All units of the same type are still identical, however, and therefore this doesn’t quite achieve the core RPG characteristic of letting you shape your characters over the course of the game.

Now, all of this isn’t to say that Age of Fear is a bad game; far from it. Age of Fear is well-designed and enjoyable. It just isn’t an RPG. In addition to its single player modes, Age of Fear supports both hotseat and computer-to-computer multiplayer games against friends and strangers. If you ever find yourself jonesing for a little turn-based fantasy strategy, you could do far worse.

The Verdict: 3.5/5. Age of Fear is an innovative fantasy tactics game with a unique free-movement system and competent enemy AI. It isn’t an RPG, but people with a penchant for turn-based fantasy combat will certainly find something to enjoy here.

CoC:TWL is a very reasonable $4.99 (or €4.09 or £3.50) on the Intel AppUp store. There’s a catch, though: you’ll have to install the Intel AppUp client in order to purchase it. Whoa, whoa–hang on a second–ha. Okay, all better. Sorry, I had to wait for my eyes to finish rolling.

Anyway, I have a hunch that this game may be worth the inconvenience of cluttering my hard drive with yet another Steam-wannabe. I’ll be writing up my thoughts on this one sometime in the foreseeable future.

This game is actually a remake of the first Avernum, originally released as Exile: Escape From the Pit. The remake runs on the most up-to-date version of the Avernum engine and features dramatically improved graphics.

True to the original, AEFtP features three separate quests that can win you the game, offering a degree of flexibility we seldom see in RPGs of any description. The basic plot premise follows:

You have been banished to the underworld, never to see the light of day again.

The surface is ruled by the cruel Emperor Hawthorne, master of the Empire. All of the known lands are subject to his brutal command. Everyone who speaks out, who misbehaves, who doesn’t fit in is cast into the dark, volcanic pits of Avernum, far below the surface. There, you are expected to die, a victim of starvation, horrible monsters, or simple despair.

But not all of the Avernites have surrendered. With magic and steel, they are forging a new nation deep underground. You can join them and fight for safety. Or freedom. Or even, if you dare, revenge on the surface-worlders who tried to destroy you.

For reasons unknown (perhaps simple bad luck), AEFtP was released on Wednesday, the exact same day as Legend of Grimrock, all but guaranteeing that it would be overshadowed in terms of news coverage. Luckily, a variety of sites have reviews up nonetheless. Most of the reviews are fairly positive, though one reviewer has inexplicably concluded that the graphics in this remake are unchanged from those in the original. (Um, no.)

You can pick up Avernum: Escape From the Pit for $20 from the Spiderweb Software web store if you want it on a Mac or Windows PC. (Worth noting: if you’ve purchased any other Avernum game in the past, you can get a $10 discount.) To get the game on iPad, you can nab it for $9.99 from the app store.

You wake from the peaceful slumber of cryo and stumble out onto the cold metal floor of the Staging Point. Outside the reinforced windows the darkness of deep space can be seen highlighted against the deep red colour of a barren world. Your S.K. suit insulates you against the chill as the ships systems begin to come to life around you, bringing up the lights and activating the myriad of consoles and computer screens around you.

The pair of you have a simple brief, split across three locations. Discover what has happened onboard the Thunderchild. Locate the whereabouts of the crew and deal with whatever the source of the issue could be. This is what you do, and you’re well trained for it. All that remains is to pick where the best place is to begin your mission . . .

You can download Steel Knights for free here.

Now, there’s actually a second game by these same devs. They released another, somewhat less ambitious roguelike in the traditional fantasy vein last year by the name of Golden Age: Endless Dungeon. I was emailed about it at the time, but somehow I forgot to post about it. Well, there’s no shame in making up for lost time, right? Like Steel Knights, it’s free. You can download it or play it on Facebook.

Guest Review by Tof Eklund

Winter Wolves’ Planet Stronghold is a hybrid dating sim and RPG, combining elements of two distinctively Japanese genres (visual novel and old-school jRPG) with high-res graphics and an art style that is more influenced by western comics than by manga. It’s a natural synergy, in many ways, as both genres are “turn based,” use many of the same art assets, and the stat, skill, and equipment management of the RPG side “compensates” for the lack of crunchy system in most visual novels.

"I'm hit! Dupont, lay down some cover fire! Lafleur, aim for its stomach-maw! Rumi, healing, STAT! Oh, and after we wax these BEMs, would you like to go for coffee?"

The obvious question is whether the whole is more than the sum of its parts, both for Planet Stronghold and for this kind of hybrid genre as a whole. Planet Stronghold isn’t the first of its kind, as many RPGs have romantic subplots, and there are other games focused on this very combination (the Cute Knight games come to mind) but it is a high production-value release from an established indie games company.

To answer the other obvious question, no, Planet Stronghold is not sexually explicit. Romance is a large part of the game, and there are some reasonably hot “reward” images, but there’s no nudity or explicit sex.

The bread-and-butter of Celso Riva’s company (Winter Wolves/Tycoon Games) is visual novels, and many of the game’s best moments come out of taking RPG concepts and importing them into visual novel / dating sim genre. One of these is that you can choose your sex and character class. This is commonplace in RPGs but rare in the visual novel genre, where the protagonist’s sex (and personality) are generally predefined to a much greater degree than in any other genre of game. Choice of sex is more than nominal, as Joshua and Lisa Nelson are slightly different in personality, as well as completely different in appearance and in their potential love interests.

You can’t visit the Planet Stronghold forums without running into comparisons to the Mass Effect games, but the development of relationships (friendly and very friendly) is the dominant rather than secondary theme in Planet Stronghold. It’s also more even handed, presenting male as well as female eye candy, rather than following Mass Effect‘s habit of fixating on its female character’s pronounced posteriors while hiding its men in armored spacesuits.

Equal-opportunity jumpsuits: here, Lisa Nelson and Tom Shatz strut their stuff in painted-on costumes.

Planet Stronghold is also more egalitarian when it comes to gay and lesbian pairings. Mass Effect 1 & 2 feature only straight and lesbian pairings, but no gay men (Mass Effect 3 belatedly corrects this “oversight”) but Joshua and Lisa each have three potential partners, one of which is same-sex, and Joshua’s potential gay lover is possibly the prettiest character in a game full of beautiful people (and I’m speaking as someone who is generally more attracted to women).

The roster of potential relationships is completely different depending on whether you play as Joshua or Lisa, which adds to the replay value of the game. The characters represent a diverse, multi-ethnic cast, with a range of backgrounds and opinions. In general, the characterization is good, though it does fall back on existing archetypes (and occasionally cliches, like the strong woman breaking down and weeping).

You have a relationship meter with every major character in the game, whether they’re a potential love interest or not, and the decisions you make as the group’s commander will generally be popular with some of your crew and not with others. That adds an interesting wrinkle to the RPG (where characters in your party generally go along happily with whatever you decide to do), and to the dating sim (where such decisions are generally one-on-one or a choice between two love interests).

The game glosses over the fact that your romantic possibilities are all with your subordinates (or, in one case, your superior), perhaps not wanting to deal with the problems such power differentials present.

The RPG side of the game isn’t skimpy, presenting four character classes, a bevy of skills and equipment, and no “random” combat, just set-piece battles, many of which can be avoided (at the price of skipping out on scarce XP) if the player wants.

In fact, the RPG side of the game may be too developed, with so many things to keep track of that it can be a distraction from the dating sim aspect of the game. Keeping track of healing items feels like an unnecessary chore, as they’re periodically replenished at the base.

If you need someone who can explain quantum mechanics while performing brain surgery, Jacob Miles is your man. But if you want his brainy butt to survive, you're better off putting skill points into Armor use than giving him time to work on his third Doctorate.

The game’s most appealing RPG feature may also be its Achilles heel: there are a lot of skills in the game, and any character can advance in any of them, but with skill points doled out in small quantities at level-up (and a neat but intentionally limited on-base training option), developing weak skills is a waste, and putting points into non-combat skills reaps comparatively small rewards, as most of those skills are only used for rare skill checks.

Combat itself is well thought-out, but hardly flawless. Limiting the amount of combat discourages grinding and makes individual battles more important (there is a half-hidden source of unlimited combat for those determined to power-level and break the game’s balance). One of the nicer bits of the system is that each member of your squad/party has an “aggro” rating. I’ve seen this MMORPG-inspired system in other jRPGs, but it feels right here, where soldiers can auto-fire to attract enemy attention (call it “suppression fire”), leaving your scouts (snipers) free to get in kill shots.

The game’s psionic system is double edged: it does a good job of encouraging you to de-buff enemies by making all psionic powers have a chance of success that is based mostly on the user’s power and skill. The only automatic-success powers are the healing and “resurrection” abilities. The problem this creates is that it makes the most reliable use of psi powers healing, which drags out battles and flattens out the strategic possibilites.

In the end, there are better dating sims and better RPGs out there, but as someone who’d like to see more character development and romance in games, I’m encouraged by this fusion of soft lighting and crunchy system. Planet Stronghold‘s combination of the visual novel and jRPG styles is somewhat uneven, but it strikes me as a worthy endeavor.

Winter Wolves is doubling-down on their bet that the dating sim / RPG has legs, with a somewhat racier expansion, Planet Stronghold: Warzone, in progress. Their second hybrid game, Loren: Amazon Princess (paging Xena fans!) is just out, and a third game, called Undead Lily, is in the works.

The Verdict: 3.5/5. Planet Stronghold is enjoyable in itself, but it is most remarkable as a step toward bringing the visual novel and RPG genres together. It has its rough edges, and its biggest draw (that combination) is also its biggest drawback, as it won’t be sufficiently one or the other for some players. It will be interesting to see what Winter Wolves does with the expansion and other hybrid projects.

Tof Eklund teaches Writing for Games in Full Sail University’s Creative Writing MFA program. This review is part of The Sex and Romance in Games Project.

It’s a pretty standard premise, all in all. What helps Pitman stand out a bit, however, is its unusual board game presentation. Portions of each dungeon are dropped down at certain intervals, enemies are placed down and picked up from the board, and items are represented as cards. Really, all that’s missing from its board game motif are physics-based dice dropping onto the board and friends bickering about the rules with you.

There seem to be some pretty strict limits on the size of your inventory, at least at the start of the game, which should hopefully force some interesting choices as the game gets harder. Beyond that, the developer hasn’t brought any unique mechanics to my attention, and I haven’t had the time to play through this much yet myself.

Luckily, there is currently a free in-browser demo available on Kongregate, which you can check out here. There is also a trailer available for your viewing pleasure–have a look:

The full version of the game is available for $2.99 on Windows, Mac and iOS devices.

The purchase page adds more details:

This is an alpha funding project. The price of the game will be going up as we add more content to it. By purchasing Tomes of Mephistopheles right now, you will be getting at at the lowest price possible and will be granted all future updates for the title for free, including final release of the game.

You can currently buy into the alpha for $10.00. The purchase page makes no mention of Mac support, but Windows and Linux are evidently supported. Kot-in-Action have helpfully provided alpha footage of the game so you can see for yourself where it’s at and decide if this is a train you want to climb aboard (metaphorically speaking–it’s a game, not a train, and I take no responsibility if you actually try to climb on it).