• Title: Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land
• Developer: Red Wasp Entertainment
• Platforms: Windows, iPhone, iPad
• Price: $4.99

Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land is a turn-based tactical RPG by Red Wasp Entertainment based upon Chaosium’s pen-and-paper role-playing game Call of Cthulhu RPG. Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land was initially released on mobile devices and later ported to PC via Intel’s AppUp program. Set in the trenches of World War I, CoC:TWL offers a focused tactical experience, solid writing, and good production values. But the question remains: is it any good as a game?

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I met the developers from new indie dev studio Cosmosaur a few months ago at a student show. At that time, they showed me a game they were working on, a side-scrolling action RPG named Moon Intern.

Well, that game is now a thing! Based on what I remember from talking to them, you play the brand-new whipping-boy of earth’s (now colonized) moon. As the intern for the entire moon, literally anyone can boss you around–which, conveniently, justifies the old “anyone and everyone can give you a quest” trope RPG players are so familiar with. There’s even a bit of subtle commentary on the way interns are abused in the modern American economy, as you’ll frequently have to perform tasks gratis that any sane person would want wages to compensate. (Some of this may have changed since I last spoke to them, however).

Moon Intern is currently planned as a serial, meaning that it will come out in episodes. Cosmosaur have put together a nice little video explaining how the game is going to work, including some legitimately intriguing stuff about the extent to which the world will change based on your choices:

http://youtu.be/YgvYpLYXVpc

Now, you may have noticed that MoonIntern.com currently links directly to a Kickstarter page; that is because Cosmosaur are fundraising to help them develop the game. I am assured, however, that the game will be getting made even if they don’t succeed–it will just be harder and take them longer to do it.

Moon Intern is scheduled for release on PC, Mac and Linux in 2013 (depending, presumably, on how their fundraising efforts go).

There’s a new indie strategy RPG in the southern sky, folks. By “the southern sky,” I of course mean “the Android app store”; and by “new,” I mean “new to me.” (It was released in March.)

Courtesy of questionably named indie developer Mangobile comes Kingturn RPG, a turn-based strategy RPG with a distinctly political plot:

The young mage and scholar Nicolette becomes the new ruler of the earldom of Montbelliard after her lord-father has passed away peacefully.
Having not come of age, yet, Nicolette finds herself unprepared for the games of power played by the other noble houses.
Surrounded by enemies and with the prospect of marrying an unknown noble for political reasons only, her fate takes its course …

Kingturn RPG involves both strategy (moving armies across the world map) and turn-based tactical battles you control with each of your armies. The game takes place across 65 scenarios, and features 30 character classes, more than 700 items, and a persistent army of characters you can level up and teach various new skills.

You can have a look at this trailer to get a sense of how the game plays:

Kingturn RPG costs $4.89, and is available through Google Play.

Psydra Games writes in to tell us about Dark Scavenger, an unusual hybrid of point-and-click adventure game and RPG.

The game’s premise is a bit odd:

Filling the role of a powerful space traveler, you find yourself stranded on a mysterious planet in the company of three eccentric, yet resourceful aliens. As you desperately seek a way to repair your ship, a massive conflict unfolds around you involving warring factions and a sinister force that threatens to destroy them all.

Will you adopt the problems of this world as your own or will you just save yourself?

Dark Scavenger has a trailer, but it shows very little of the exploration and dialog aspects of the game, and even less of the game’s agreeably goofy tone. This video is probably better for purposes of introducing you:

Psydra Games sells Dark Scavenger for both Mac and Windows at a $4.99 price point; grab it direct from the developer here. (You can also find the game on Indievania and Gamersgate.) There is also a free demo to try out if you’re not convinced–grab that here.

Word has reached me that I-Game-Art (a.k.a Chris Legasse) is working on a game called “MiniFlake” (amazingly, not under contract from Kelloggs or General Mills).

Despite its title, MiniFlake is not about cereal, nor is it about a dwarf who fails to follow through on social engagements. MiniFlake is a roguelike with 1-bit pixel graphics (although it uses an overlay effect that means it technically employs more than two colors).

The developer describes MiniFlake thusly:

miniFlake is a roguelike rpg with a simplified interface and a minimal use of keyboard button use, arrow keys and space bar, and the escape key is all you need to play. The game features amazingly retro 1bit graphics, chiptune music and retro sound effects. The dungeons as well as the overworld map and the names of locations and npc’s are generated at random using complex generation algorithms.

The story is fairly simple, the player has joined the Crawlers Guild and goes from town to town dungeon crawling for loot and fame. Each new town’s dungeon gets progressively deeper and harder to pillage.

The developer states that MiniFlake is “slated for release on the Android, Ios, PC, Mac, and possible browser platforms.” When? Only time will tell. In the meantime, here are some screenshots for you to look at:

Are we tired yet of RPGs where the twist is that you play the bad guy? No? Good. In that case, you’ll be glad to hear that there is an indie jRPG series called Chronicles of a Dark Lord in that vein, created in RPG Maker by Kisareth Studios.

Actually, that’s not true: there isn’t just one jRPG called Chronicles of a Dark Lord; there are a ton of them. Or there will be, at any rate. There is a first episode out, a second episode due for release sometime next year, a prequel in the works for sometime this year, and a third episode due to be released…well, all they say is “TBA.” (Check out this podcast for more details straight from the mouth of John Sierra, Kisareth’s Director of Graphics Design.) In short: only one episode is out so far, but these guys seem awfully determined to turn this into a series.

There is a review of the first episode up on Indie Game Reviewer; if you’re curious, you can nag a free demo from the game’s page. There is also a trailer, but I’d suggest watching this much more informative video instead:

Nab the first episode for $4.99 here.; Windows-only for now, though I understand that Kisareth are working on bringing it to XBLIG in the not-too-distant future.

Jay Barnson has an opinion piece up at the Rampant Coyote blog exploring the possibility that RPGs are just too long. A snippet:

The real problem isn’t so much that the games are too long as a whole. But eventually any games (or stories of any other medium) will begin to drag in the middle. The beginning may be great, the ending may be fantastic, but at some point the middle will have simply gone on too long. This happens with RPGs more often than not, in my opinion.

But that’s just the story side of things. Some novels and movies have the same problem. The power of games is that they are much more than a storytelling medium.  Solid, compelling gameplay will keep people (like me) playing with only the barest hint of an end-goal in sight, let alone an actual quality plot. Hey, some of my most recent indie favorites – like Din’s Curse, Legend of Grimrock, and Knights of the Chalice – are exactly like that. Story-wise, there’s really not a whole lot there in any of them. But there’s enough interesting things to do and challenges to face that I keep playing. Whether it’s the Diablo-style feeder bar of constant leveling and items that increase my power, or the need to constantly revise my tactics to react to interesting puzzles or tactical challenges, I can go for hours with the most threadbare of narratives.

My own feeling is that there are two issues being addressed here that aren’t entirely related.

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Word has reached my ear of

Eldgame, a single-player sandbox roguelike in development for Windows. I quote from the developer, Eld:

The game is going to be a procedural sandbox singleplayer experience focused on exploring, gathering, crafting/building and npc interaction. Exploration will be achieved by hopping between different worlds by finding portals, different worlds contain different floras, different temperatures and new exciting monsters.

Any plant that grows should be harvestable and regrown as long as the environment is correct, everything is persistent in the way that things keep on happening in other worlds while you’re not there, every piece of terrain is breakable and rebuildable as long as you have the tools to do it.

Intriguingly, there is also this:

As for challenge, I intend to have some kind of permanent death if so chosen, with some inheritance system where you’ll get or adopt children/pupils to be your successor when you eventually die or grow old, where skills and belongings could be transfered in some matter, be that via training or something else.

This is far from the only game of this sort being developed in the indie scene right now, but it is the most overtly RPG-like one I’ve seen lately. The inclusion of permadeath and multiple generations of characters is just icing on the cake. The developer has been good enough to post a video showing off some gameplay–take a look:

Although Eld is writing Eldgame for Windows to start, he states that he’s using libraries that should make Mac and Linux ports easy to do when the time comes. No word yet on a release date, but I’ll be keeping at least one of my eyes on this.

Hey folks! I’m going to tell you about a little game called Dreams Chapter One. This isn’t a new release; in fact, it’s pretty damn old. And I don’t have a “new to me” excuse to offer here, since I’ve known about this game since the day it released, way back in 2006. But you know what? This title is pretty neat and not that well-known, so I’m going to tell you about it anyway.

Dreams features a surreal art style with some noticeable influence from Salvador Dali. It’s rare to see an RPG with a setting so deliberately odd, so it stands out. The combat system is really interesting as well. In battle, you switch between two characters with drastically different ways of fighting: one shoots in first-person with a rifle, while the second runs across the battlefield in side view, smashing enemies with a hammer. Every turn is timed, so you have to parcel out those precious seconds wisely.

It’s a little hard to describe, so I took the liberty of recording a video of Dreams gameplay (so far as I know, this is the only video of the game currently in existence). I don’t claim to be particularly great at playing Dreams, but this should give you the idea:

Dreams has that optimistic “Chapter One” appellation, which might lead you to believe that there is a Chapter Two. There isn’t–or at least, there isn’t one yet. The developer, Leo Dasso, has been working (sporadically) on a follow-up for years, but he appears to have taken a shootery, side-scrolling detour with the successful funding of his Kickstarter project College-Ruled Universe. Here’s hoping he revisits the Dreams universe afterwards. In the meantime, you can play Dreams Chapter One for free right here.

The name is so absurd that it almost sounds like a parody, but indie developer MiniBoss seems quite serious about its upcoming three-button action RPG Deepest Dungeons of Doom.

DDD features three classes: the crusader, the witch and the shadowblade. Each dungeon is linear and partially randomly generated, with combat primarily a matter of timing attacks and blocks against a single opponent.

They’ve been making good progress on the game, as you can see from the gameplay video below:

MiniBoss have yet to announce an estimated release date for this game, but given the interface, it seems clear that this game is going to get a mobile release sooner or later.

MiniBoss write in to let me know that this game is estimated for release on Windows, Mac and Linux within the next few months, to be followed by a port to Android, iOS and Blackberry.