Winter Wolves (whom you may know as the developers behind Planet Stronghold) have just released a new game called Loren the Amazon Princess. The premise:

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.

It’s that special time again, folks! Jay Barnson has graced us with another indie news round-up, this one mentioning a veritable avalanche of games. Those games mentioned are:

• Age of Decadence
• Avernum: Escape from the Pit
• Aveyond 4  (no page exists for this game just yet)
• The Banner Saga
• Boot Hill Heroes
• Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land
• Cohorts of Kargonar
• Dark Scavenger
• Drox Operative
• Dungeons of Dredmor
• Echoes of Eternia  (no page exists for this game just yet)
• Forge of Legends
• Legend of Grimrock
• Legend of the Time Star
• Legends of Eisenwald
• Loren the Amazon Princess
• Penny Arcade’s On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness 3
• Rimelands: Hammer of Thor
• Telepath RPG: Servants of God
• Tortured Hearts
• Underrail

There may have also been a few non-RPGs in there that I missed. Check out the full round-up and see for yourself!

Games writer and RPG enthusiast Eric Schwarz has come out with another opinion piece on Gamasutra, this time concerning the use of ability cooldowns in RPGs.

In practice, my biggest complaint against cooldown-oriented design is that it tends to take a way a lot of the tactical depth in a situation.  As a brute-force stopgap to “solve” poor game balance and make up for problems in other mechanics, many such games feature abilities that are extremely powerful unless mediated, and often in very large quantities.  This usually raises the question: “if my abilities are all so powerful, why am I not just using them all the time?”

…

The end result of all this hard limiting is a system that isn’t just rigid and limiting, reducing the sense of control and interactivity the player has, it also ends up largely reducing combat from making smart and tactically valuable choices to a series of quick time events: press the hotkeys as they light up to win.  At absolute worst, this can create a feeling of “false interactivity”, where the player isn’t so much making smart decisions within the rules as he/she is playing a pattern-matching game.  Instead of “what abilities should I use, and when?” the questions posed to the player are “press all your buttons as soon as you can.”  The resemblance to quick time events, and their pattern-matching mechanics quickly becomes apparent.

The full piece is here.

It’s been a long time since I last had time to do proper game reviews, and my backlog hasn’t grown any shorter during the interim. So I’m doing a double-header: Styrateg and Age of Fear: The Undead King. This isn’t just to save time; these two games have a lot of similar qualities, and I think it might be useful to discuss them together. Read on to learn about two old school, turn-based, tactical fantasy games that straddle the line between RPG and not-RPG.

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Red Wasp Design has announced that Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land (previously out for iPhone and iPad) is now out for PC. (And two days ahead of schedule, no less!) The devs have generously provided us a trailer so we can see the turn-based WW1-era horror tactics unfold:

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.

You may recall Cohorts of Kargonar, a game announced only one month ago after four long years in development. As of right now, you can officially go ahead and start playing it for the low low price of absolutelynothing. (Which is to say, it’s free.) Cohorts of Kargonar is a browser-based MMORPG, so all you’ll need to do is register.

In case you forgot what made this game interesting, here’s a recap:

Cohorts of Kargonar features pleasant 2D graphics, turn-based party-based combat, skill tree progression, class promotion, quests with multiple endings, and a village-building mechanic that basically lets you create your own home town. You can visit other players’ villages too

I haven’t played it yet, so I don’t have any impressions to offer just now. Have you played it? Feel free to say what you think in the comments, or on the forums.

Aterdux Entertainment, an indie development studio based in Belarus, announced a new game last week by the name of Legends of Eisenwald. They describe it as a spiritual successor to the original King’s Bounty (and much more direct successor to their earlier title Discord Times).

LoE features “an original mix of RPG and strategy, with tactical turn based battles and a simple economic model.” You play as a sort of knight errant, gathering a small army of upgradeable units and questing, leaving castle garrisons in your wake. The devs recently summed things up in an interview with the RPG Codex:

[The player’s] main business is internecine wars, fulfilling the will of his suzerain and battle campaigns to find glory and wealth.

The game’s history is divided into separate scenarios that are connected within a large campaign where a player will have to solve different tasks: sometimes to conquer all enemy castles, sometimes to find a large amount of gold in a short period of time, sometimes to earn the loyalty of a certain faction, etc. Moreover in every scenario there are side quests that we aim to do as diverse as possible.

Castles play an important role in our game because they help to maintain your army. The more castles you conquer the bigger army you can afford. Moreover, you can collect tribute from villages surrounding your castle. The situation is complicated by the fact that surrounding feudal lords know about that too, so it’s dangerous to leave your castle without defense. But it’s not easy to defend it since the recruits for your garrison often are inexperienced units that are of no big help when they are attacked by a strong army. And to make a strong unit from a raw recruit takes time. So, a player will often face a choice – which units to leave to protect a castle and which ones to lead into a fight.

The remainder of that interview can be found here.

Aterdux are already more than 2 years into development, and are holding a Kickstarter to raise funds for completing the game. (They tell me they’ll finish the game even if they don’t hit their goal–the fundraising is there mainly to help them stay independent of the interference of publishers, it seems.)

The game has a Kickstarter-focused trailer, but they’ve just released a far more illuminating video showing the game’s combat system in action:

Also, here are some screenshots, in case that didn’t do it for you:

The engine is awfully impressive-looking, and I have high hopes for the gameplay as well, even if I do find myself raising an eyebrow or two at their assertion that tactical positioning in turn-based combat is “boring.” [Edit: Alexander tells me that they actually meant something more along the lines of “slow-paced,” not “boring”–they’ve updated their Kickstarter page with the better phrasing.]

Geoffrey White of Steamtank Entertainment writes in to announce To Be a Hero, an iPhone RPG that evidently draws some influence from the Ultima series. The plot:

The land of Illustria is in peril!  Monsters have began roaming about, the dead are rising from their graves, and worst of all, a string of suspicious murders plagues our towns.

…

Our enemy is attacking us from another plane.  They will be using an arcane artifact known as the DARK MIRROR to reach our realm.  First you will need to destroy it, if we are to have any chance of beating them.  But that will not be enough I am afraid.  Next, you must purchase a craft capable of inter planer travel.  The only way you can afford one is, to buy property across the realm and become richer than our greatest kings.  Finally, you must travel to many planes and discover our enemies world.  When you have slain him, and only when you have slain him will you be, a Hero!

The devs state that To Be a Hero will feature a huge open world with multiple planes of existence, more than 20 character classes, targeted attacks, and the ability to acquire real estate to increase your character’s income. Other features (such as the need for food, water and shelter) are discussed on their features page here. Combat is real-time, but the devs tell me that combat auto-pauses when selecting a skill or a body part to target. All in all, it seems To Be a Hero will be more hardcore than its cutesy art style suggests.

Here is a trailer showing the game in action:

Somehow, the “murder and pillage” part makes me think they might not be entirely clear on the whole “hero” concept. Me, I’d consider renaming the game To Be a Hero…Or Maybe a Serial Killer, If You Prefer. (On the plus side, it should make it really easy to solve those “suspicious murders” if you’re the one committing them.)

TBaH is currently playable, with content creation and balancing the core work left to be done. The game is tentatively scheduled for an iPhone release around December; if it does well there, the devs say they “will probably make enhanced versions for other platforms.”

Stygian Software has announced Underrail, an isometric wRPG with a post-apocalyptic sci-fi setting and turn-based combat. The premise:

The game is set in a distant future, when the life on the Earth’s surface has long since been made impossible and the remnants of humanity now dwell in the Underrail, a vast system of metro station-states that, it seems, are the last bastions of a fading race.

The player takes control of one of the denizens of such a station-state whose life is about to become all that much more interesting and dangerous, as our protagonist is caught amidst the conflicting factions of the Underrail as they secretly but violently struggle for the Humanity’s last gem of hope.

Personally, I really like the idea of subway stations as political entities struggling for power. Developer Dejan Radisic states that Underrail is inspired by western RPGs such as Fallout, Arcanum and System Shock 2, with all of the following to feature in the finished game:

• Great character customization possibilities through stats, skills, feats, items and more that allows for many different play-styles
• Tactical turn based combat that utilizes weapons, energy shields, grenades, psi abilities and more
• Vast underground world to explore: city states, abandoned building complexes, natural caverns, secret areas and more
• Elaborate item crafting system

So far, the only footage of the game exists in somewhat outdated alpha videos–I suggest checking out the below screenshots for a sense of where the game is at.

If these look familiar to you, it’s because this game has been in development for several years, formerly under the name “Timelapse Vertigo.”

Underrail is due for release on Windows exclusively, with release tentatively scheduled for late 2013. The developer has a thread on the forums, so head on over if you have any questions for him!

So, I met Dave Welch and Ben Rubach of Experimental Gamer at Indie City Games this Saturday. During the “open mic” portion of the meeting, they showed off Boot Hill Heroes, a Wild West-themed jRPG modeled after Earthbound. Boot Hill Heroes features support for 4-player cooperative play (one player controlling each of the four players in the titular party), as well as a job system reminiscent of Final Fantasy V’s.

Here is their description of the plot:

After an alleged attack by the Chepakwik Indians, the people of Bronco County are on the brink of war. Only a farm boy who knows the truth that can stop it. Together with his three friends – a gunslinging desperado, an Indian princess, and a calamity jane – he must expose a conspiracy by bringing to justice the six outlaws of the notorious Saints-Little gang.

Their journey will take them through cowtowns, Indian villages, ranches, gold mines, prisons, and into the very heart and soul of  the American Wild West. But on their epic adventure to right the wrongs of the past, will they see justice done or discover an even darker secret lying in wait behind the scenes?

BHH is in development for Windows and XBox Live Indie Games, with a Kickstarter campaign running right now to fund development of the project. (Note: I try not to do game announcement posts when a game is still up in the air, but the devs have confirmed to me that this game is getting made regardless of whether their Kickstarter pans out, so this one makes the “game announcement” cut.)

Here’s a trailer with some Ennio Morricone score and the team’s Kickstarter pitch included at the end: