Word has it that Beyond the pillars, a Parisian indie outfit, have released a public demo of their turn-based strategy RPG Winter Voices.

Quintin Smith of Rock Paper Shotgun describes the game like so:

Winter Voices is an episodic RPG about a girl trying to overcome the death of her father. It’s set in a small snowbound village where everybody knows everybody, to the point that it feels deeply claustrophobic. The game’s turn based battles – of which there are many – see your character doing battle with spirits representing everything from guilt to a crushing fear of your own mortality. Instead of dying, your character has a breakdown and flees the scene.

The game will have 7 episodes in total, and according to the devs, they are not standalone episodes: they must be played in order. Here is some gameplay footage showing a battle:

I make it a point not to post news items about every minor update that enters my Inbox, instead focusing on reviews, interviews and new releases.

But every once in a while, some brave soul (typically, one named “Jay Barnson”) takes the time to amalgamate all of those tiny little updates into a giant wad of News. Today, Jay posted that very wad online for all the world to see.

The indie RPGs mentioned were:

• Age of Decadence (new character animations, video released)
• Alternate Reality – The Remake Project (demo 4 is under development)
• ArcMagi (new gameplay video released)
• Avadon(it was released for iPad)
• Dead State (new developer update)
• Driftmoon (entering alpha 5)
• Dungeons of Dredmor (there was a developer interview)
• Eschalon (there was a developer interview)
• Frayed Knights (it’s in beta now)
• Magical Diary (it has been released)
• Soldak’s Upcoming, As-Yet-Unnamed Space RPG (it’s in development, and it sounds really interesting)
• Sylia (it has been released)

Check out the full news round-up here.

Banov has released a public demo of Phantasmaburbia, a new RPG he’s working on using the Dubloon engine.

The premise of the game:

Ghosts and evil spirits begin to appear all over town, corresponding with the impending reincarnation of a transdimensional demon. A group of teens, armed with weapons found in their homes and assisted by spirits of their ancestors or former residents of their homes, set out to prevent the rise of this evil being.

According to Banov, the demo contains about 30 minutes of gameplay. The demo will only be online until June 25, so if you’re curious to try it out, get the demo now. It’s available here.

Today I scored an interview with Jeff Vogel, one of the great-grandaddies of the indie RPG world.Vogel has been developing indie RPGs for a whopping 15 years, and by all accounts, he’s been quite successful at it.

We discussed the reaction to Avadon (his latest game), what his next move will be as a game developer, and what the heck Matt Findley could have possibly been thinking when he opened his mouth to Gamasutra. While we were at it, I also pressed him for specifics about his recent development choices, and got some details about what we can expect to see in Avadon 2.

Intrigued? Hit the jump and find out what Mr. Vogel had to say.

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Or, as I somewhat-less-tactfully put it on my developer website: “So you created an action RPG. Stop congratulating yourself.”

You may have heard about the recent (and highly unfortunate) Gamasutra interview with Matt Findley, in which the former Black Isle dev announced that turn-based RPGs were basically an unfortunate accident of history caused by limitations on computing power. He seems to imply that, had Black Isle possessed the processor capabilities of today, they would have happily spat out a gaggle of God of War clones instead of Fallout and Baldur’s Gate. Even worse, he went on to say that action games are at the heart of computer gaming.

As a longtime turn-based RPG fan, I was less than pleased.

At the outset, let’s get one thing clear: games are not, at their heart, about anything in particular. Video games are a medium. To say that video games are fundamentally about one group of gameplay elements is tantamount to declaring that novels are about romance, or that films are about dialog. As I’ve written repeatedly, this is stupid.

Click here for the full ran–er, uh, reasoned discussion.

Viridian Games has announced the release of Inaria, a very old school, turn-based, tile-based RPG “but with modern interface conveniences that make it easier to play, giving the best of both worlds.”

You can pick up the game for a mere $4.99. Check out the trailer below to see if it’s your style.

 

Instant Kingdom writes in to let us know that its forthcoming top-down action RPG, Driftmoon, now has a soundtrack available for purchase. For $5, you can own the musical stylings of composer Gareth Meek. You can preview the entire soundtrack here for free and decide whether it’s worth the price tag.

It turns out that Dead State isn’t the only Fallout-style zombie RPG in development right now. Developer The Indie Stone recently released a tech demo of Project Zomboid, a real-time isometric survival RPG taking place in an infected city.

According to the developer, Project Zomboid will feature a massive city environment with open-ended, sandbox gameplay; a dynamically changing game world; co-op multiplayer; and “advanced item crafting,” as well as “Starvation, illness, loneliness, depression, alcoholism, drug addiction, suicide, insanity, trust issues.” Sounds like a blast!

Here is a video showing the engine in action:

• Title: Monster’s Den: Book of Dread
• Developer: Monstrum Games (Daniel Stradwick)
• Platforms: Windows, Mac, Linux
• Price: Free

Guest Review by Tof Eklund

Monster’s Den and its sequel Monster’s Den: Book of Dread are pure hack-and-slash. As Book of Dread is half-sequel, half updated version (it includes the
original dungeon in Monster’s Den in it), this review effectively covers both games. The Monster’s Den games incorporate old-school front and back row turn-based combat as well as the sort of magic equipment, skills, and shopping we’ve come to expect since Diablo. Story in these games is intentionally nominal (you’re exploring a dungeon to rid it of evil, whaddayawant?) and exploration is simplified to a nicety, so it all comes down to inventory management and combat.

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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.