As time passed on, each of the four Elementals used their unique powers of fire, water, earth and wind to maintain peace throughout the land. But one day without warning, the Elementals began to vanish one by one. It is said that Gyron, king of the Guardians of Darkness, captured each Elemental and imprisoned them in separate locations throughout the world, preventing them from using their combined powers for escape.

Now Gyron has begun moving his forces of darkness into the land of light. The only hope for the Guardians of Light is to choose from within the ranks of mankind a champion. This champion of light must find a way to unite The Elementals and stop the spread of darkness before all creatures of light have been destroyed.

You are this champion. You have been chosen to restore the balance of power and your journey begins within Earth And Legend.

Earth and Legend supports cooperative multiplayer, in-game pets, weather, a day and night cycle, and (apparently) fishing. Have a look at this trailer!

Earth and Legend goes for $6.99 on Google Play and on Amazon, and is available in English, French and German. This one is Android-only.

Today is a holiday in the United States. Originally known as Decoration Day back when it was established in the 1800s, Memorial Day has come to serve as an annual reminder of the many thousands of American soldiers who have died in various wars throughout America’s history.

It’s sobering to think of the tens of thousands of people who have died in these conflicts, but that really just barely scratches the surface. At various times over the past century, rates of crippling injury among those soldiers who did not die in combat have ranged from 1 in 5 to nearly 1 in 2. And those are just the American soldiers. What about the soldiers from other nations? What about civilians?

This ties into one of those things that troubles me about the current state of RPGs.

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The central idea behind this game intrigues me: “This is strategy role playing game with a strong focus on managing a small community of minions while exploring a dungeon in the first person perspective.” In short, it sounds a lot like playing Dungeon Keeper with the Possess spell permanently on.

Have a look at the list of features (most of which are evidently disabled in the playable pre-alpha):

• Explore as warrior unknown dungeons and fight dangerous dungeon dwellers.
• Craft your own items to help you to survive in a hostile environment (disabled).
• Get your pet to help you on your journey (disabled).
• Hire and manage a small group of minions (disabled).
• Build your own dungeon for you and your minions (disabled).
• Utilize the dungeon generator to explore ever changing challenges (disabled).
• Sound (disabled).

Developer Michael Stachorski says that creating this game is a hobby, but as you can see from the video above, it’s looking awfully slick–particularly so given that it’s still in pre-alpha. You can try out the open pre-alpha for free right here. Be warned, however: it’s Windows-only, and carries some hefty system requirements. No word yet on a prospective release date.

This just in: a bunch of indie RPGs are being sold at really steep discounts from today until June 1st! Honestly, I generally avoid posting about sales on this site–I consider it my goal to inform people about indie RPGs, not to promote the practice of buying them at a discount.

However, there is a sort of big, collective, opt-in mega-sale going on right now called Because We May, with a lot of indie RPGs participating. A single indie RPG going on sale may not be news, but a whole bunch of them doing it at once in a unique, one-time event? That seems a little news-y to me.

Here are the RPG participants, for your edification:

• 3 Stars of Destiny — $5.00 (normally $19.99)
• Avadon: The Black Fortress — $4.99 (normally $20.00)
• Cardinal Quest — $2.00 (normally $5.00)
• Cthulu Saves the World and Breath of Death VII — $1.49 (normally $2.99)
• Dark Scavenger — $3.99 (normally $4.99)
• Defender’s Quest: Valley of the Forgotten — $2.99 (normally $6.99)
• Dungeons of Dredmor — $2.49 (normally $4.99)
• Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon — $9.95 (normally $24.95)
• Laxius Force — $5.00 (normally $15.00)
• Monster RPG 2 — $0.99 (normally $1.99)
• Penny Arcade’s On The Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness Ep. 1-2 — $3.99 (normally $11.99)
• Pitman — $0.98 (normally $4.49)
• Serious Sam: The Random Encounter — $0.99 (normally $4.99)
• Shepherd Slaughter — $3.00 (normally $9.00)
• Squids — $3.99 (normally $6.99)
• Telepath RPG: Servants of God — $14.95 (normally $24.95)

Update 5/25: new games added to the list!

Saturday Morning RPG is a jRPG that banks on the nostalgia of gamers who grew up in the 80s, riffing on such perennial favorites as G.I. Joe, Care Bears and He-Man.

The game follows the story of Martin “Marty” Hall, an average high school student who has been gifted a powerful ability to channel magic through everyday objects. With his newfound powers Marty has inadvertently attracted the ire of the world’s most heinous villain – the evil Commander Hood. This leads Marty into a series of dangerous plans that he must unravel to save the world (several times!).

Saturday Morning RPG is a Japanese style RPG that allows players to build Marty’s power up throughout multiple stand alone episodes. Players can carry over stats, inventory, and even story decisions between these episodes (sometimes your actions in one episode will ripple into previous or future episodes!)

As for actual gameplay, it doesn’t seem like there’s too much to say beyond the fact that the combat system makes use of quicktime events and minigames to help determine the effect of various attacks, Dubloon-style. Impressively, the developers managed to snag Vince DiCola (the man behind the music to the 1986 Transformers animated movie) and his longtime collaborator Kenny Meriedeth to do the tunes on this. You can get a sense of what that means by listening to the game’s official trailer:

In short, these guys know exactly what they’re doing.

You can grab the first episode free-of-charge from the Apple app store, then nab the second episode for $1.99. (More episodes are forthcoming in the near future.) Alternately, you can buy the deluxe version for $5.99, which makes every current and future episode of the series available to you with no additional purchase necessary.

An old king’s greed has unleashed a plague of evil upon the land, and destiny has chosen you to banish the monsters. The time has come to take up arms and deliver your people from darkness! But beware! As you grow stronger, so will your foes. You’ll need every skill and weapon in your arsenal to prevail. Do you have what it takes?

Destiny chose me, huh? Sweet. Maybe destiny can also give me some interesting abilities to do this with? What’s that? No? Oh…well, okay.

I’m not going to bother with the feature list–DevilDark is basically a straightforward hack-and-slasher with some very attractive stylized 3D graphics. This trailer should give you the gist:

DevilDark is of the increasingly common breed of game that sells for $0, then gives you the option to continuously drop ridiculous sums of money on in-app purchases. I’m not a fan of that model myself, but readers may feel differently. One way or another, you can grab the game right here at no cost to you.

I have absolutely no idea what the game’s actual storyline is–it doesn’t seem to be mentioned anywhere–so I’m going to proceed on the (relatively safe) assumption that a hero has to vanquish an ancient evil, or possibly recover a magic MacGuffin. In lieu of any story hooks to draw you in, please enjoy this video from GameBoom showing roughly 8-9 minutes of gameplay:

There is a fairly interesting interview with the developer over on Hookshot, Inc. in case you’re curious for more details about how Andor’s Trail is being developed. You can get Andor’s Trail for free right here, right now on Google Play. It’s technically not complete, but then again, no open source roguelike ever is.

If you’ve played a collectible card game such as Magic: The Gathering you’ll probably have a pretty good idea of how the game works, but the core gameplay concepts are simple enough that newcomers to the game shouldn’t be lost for too long. Each round Minion Master is separated into a “Play” phase, and an “Action” phase. During the “Play” phase, you are provided with a random hand of five cards which can include the titular minions, which can be summoned to the battlefield to fight for your honor.  Also included are modifier cards that can augment minions already in play.

Each turn you choose to play or discard the cards in your hand. Discarded cards provide Mana, a resource that is used as the cost to play the more powerful cards available to you.  This simple resource system keeps things refreshingly uncomplicated, and also leads to some interesting decisions each round. Should I discard a couple of strong cards and overwhelm my opponent with footmen, or do I sacrifice my whole hand in order to summon that powerful Troll card?

After making your choice as to which cards to play, the “Action” phase begins. During this phase, minions are summoned, and then move about the board seeking out opposing minions to do battle with. Currently, you don’t have much choice as to how minions move on the game board, or who they decide to attack. This somewhat diminishes the war game aspect of Minion Master, making it feel more like a straight collectible card game with a more interesting visual component.

Although this feels like a bit of a letdown at first, the AI is generally pretty good and will move and attack in ways that make sense. Additionally, each minion has slightly different tactics in how they move and who they attack. For example, the easy to summon but weak Kobolds will move towards and attack whichever opposing minion is weakest, while Knights and Dragons will seek out targets who are grouped together in order to maximize their respective “Trample”, and “Fire Breath” abilities.

Throughout my play time, the highlight was in summoning lots and lots of the titular minions and then watching them race across the map to lay waste to my enemies. During these moments Minion Master can feel a little like a match of DOTA, but with a tighter focus and more relaxed pace. Minion Master is still quite early in development, but the core of the game feels solid. It’s easy to pick up and play. Matches are fast-paced, but made interesting with lots of strategic decision points. Minions, even this early, feel pretty well-balanced and offer players a variety of strategic options. Here’s hoping that the gang over at BitFlip keep up the good work,  continue to tighten up the gameplay, and add even more minions.

Minion Master is currently planned for release sometime in late 2012, and will be available for $20.00. Should you choose to pre-order Minion Master, you’ll get five dollars off, and you’ll be able to play it right now and throughout it’s development, so, that’s pretty cool!

…just kidding! Star Traders RPG isn’t about stock brokers–it’s a turn-based, outer space role-playing game where you “trade, battle, pirate & bounty for galactic riches.” Inspired by titles such as Master of Orion and Sid Meier’s Pirates!, Star Traders RPG has a straightforward premise: you captain a starship, and need to make money by trading and performing contracts for various in-game factions.

Your command of the ship is under constant threat, both internal and external. Can you manage your resources, crew, officers well to enough to turn a profit on your contracts and trades? Those that do will be among the Faction’s elite Star Heroes — and those that fail will be branded bandits and Crimelords.

Fail to turn a profit and you become a crimelord? Man, Space Capitalism is even harsher than the regular kind!

Luckily, Space Capitalism doesn’t govern sales of the game itself: you can get Star Traders from either Google Play or Amazon for free. As with Cyber Knights RPG, however, there is also an Elite version available for $1.99. This one adds “2,000 new Sectors, 200 additional Zones…more than 150 exclusive art files…100 ships, 100 planets, more rumors, officers, awards and content.” If that sounds like it’s worth a couple of bucks to you, you can grab the paid version on Google Play or on Amazon.

The premise of Cyber Knights RPG should be familiar to anyone with even a passing familiarity with the conceits of cyberpunk:

The year is 2217 and the world ended a while ago.  Mega-corporations provide the final sanctuaries for humanity in the vast domed cities across our ruined planet.  Isolated for years, as the Global Matrix roars back to life, the world community is once again awakening.

And awakening a new age of competition.  The fires of corporate warfare are being stoked and all eyes are on the limited resources, the remaining metroplexes, and domination of the global technological and arms race.

You will take control of a Cyber Knight and work for these organizations on a need-to-know basis, burning out a living for yourself in this cold war conflict.  You are an urban mercenary–deniable and expendable.  You will assemble and train a team of elite runners, working the most dangerous and critical jobs you can handle, always pressing you limits, always right on the edge.

In the shadows of the metroplex, you will command your team in turn-based tactical combat to deploy skills, equipment and cybernetic implants for maximum effect.  Specialize your team members in stealth, combat or hacking skills. Dominate the mega-corporate landscape with infiltration, battle prowess or be a digital ghost.  Explore a massive persistent world with shops, citizens, contacts, jobs, drops, meetings and danger at every turn.

There’s a gameplay video, though in the execrable tradition of mobile game videos, it’s taken with a camcorder (there are alternatives, folks):

Cyber Knights RPG is currently still in beta, but it’s already playable and available for free on Google Play and on Amazon. Additionally, there is a separately listed “Elite” version of the game that costs money. I emailed the developers for a list of the differences in the Elite version, and got this reply:

For Cyber Knights, in the Elite experience you have access to all of the best equipment, cybernetic implants, gear, and contacts which you cannot get in the free version.  All the best guns and armor, the most alpha-implants–you have to play Elite to get access.  In addition, Cyber Knights allows your Knight to gather and groom a team of Runners who are his or her specialists, muscle, hackers, or negotiators.  In the Elite version, your team can grow up to 3 active Runners, while in free you can only have 1 other active Runner.

As Cyber Knights continues to develop in its BETA phase, we are working on more differences.  Soon there will be professions (such as Droid-master) that are only available in Elite, and I am finishing the art for a third Cyber Knight avatar.  We are working on two different story lines right now for the game, and one of them (the shorter, more tutorial story) will be available in free, while the longer more involved story will only be for Elite players.

Well! There you have it. You can find the Elite version for $1.99 on Google Play and Amazon.