New release: Serpent in the Staglands
The premise:
Featuring a chosen party of five, you role-play Necholai, a minor god of a celestial body who descends to the Staglands for a moonlit festival only to find the way home blocked and immortality slipping away. Seeking answers and aid, you take on a mortal body and the guise of a traveling Spicer. This isn’t a story of good and evil, saving the world or being a hero, it’s about intrigue and your adventure of survival in a harsh land.
Whalenought seems to have brought their trademark style of pixel art to bear in this one, albeit with much more of a gothic setting than their last title (and palettes to match)–what they refer to as “inspired by the late bronze age in an eerie Transylvanian landscape”:
Serpent in the Staglands features party-based play, characters built with skills rather than classes, and real-time-with-pause combat. In a decidedly old-school move, the world map is left unmarked–you are tasked with filling it in yourself by hand as you play, along with your own journal notes.
You can get the game for $19.99 on Steam for Windows or Mac, or on GOG for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Serpent in the Staglands also has a free downloadable demo if you want to try before you buy; you can nab that for Windows, Mac, or Linux.
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The archaic, difficult to read font, and the brown-on-black look may just be killers, here. Whatever virtues the game may have.
Indeed. I love many old RPGs from the late 80ies/early 90ies, including Darklands (one of their main inspirations) so I certainly don’t need fancy nextgen graphics at all. I don’t like the aesthetics of Staglands however. I’m not even sure what it is exactly, probably it tries too hard to be, feel and look “retroesque” for my taste.
Yeah, the visuals are definitely stopping me from buying the game too. I get that it tries to look exactly like really old PC WRPGs, but this particular style just didn’t age well imo.
Might get it later once it has a good discount, if I end up liking it, then I might reconsider for the future.