Interview with Nathan Jerpe on RPGWatch

RPGWatch has posted an interview with Nathan Jerpe, creator of the freeware quasi-roguelike Legerdemain. For those of you not familiar with the game, Jerpe spends most of the interview describing it. For instance, he has this to say about it:

There are some detractors out there who dismiss Legerdemain because it lacks certain roguelike features – the world is not randomly generated, for instance, and instead of permadeath the game has a hybrid system that relies on the use of inns.

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The story in Legerdemain is pretty non-linear. You are often free to choose where you’d like to go next, and many of the game’s obstacles can be tackled in different order. There’s also a bit of sandbox play depending on how you want your character to develop, so that one player may spend stretches of time hunting or gathering mushrooms while another focuses on studying spells. That being said, the game does have a definite ending, and even though the plot spends plenty of time bifurcating and forking around it all gets drawn up into a single conclusion. There aren’t too many side quests, per se, everything in there is designed to fit in such a way that it all makes sense by the time you reach the ending.

Here is a video showing some gameplay:

According to Jerpe, the game features 200 hours(!) of play time. The unicode version is free to download; however, there is also a modestly priced version with both tiles (i.e. graphics that aren’t just text) and a clue book.