Ever wished you could play an 80′s-style RPG like Dragon Quest, but with friends? No? Well, someone else did, and then they made this game. NEStalgia is a primarily-free (more on that later) small-scale online RPG in the style of Nintendo JRPGs of old, built on the BYOND platform. It’s simple, it’s accessible and available for PC, Mac and Linux. Boasting turn-based combat, simple party mechanics, some modern MMO refinements and a whole lot of 8-bit content all controlled via an interface that could fit on a NES gamepad. After the break, a trailer and some initial thoughts on this cute neo-oldschool romp.

As you can see from the above trailer, it really does look like a NES game, right down to the simple menus and interface, lightweight cutscenes and turn-based combat. In fact, you can play it completely solo should you wish, but it’s really designed to be a social experience. Bring a couple buddies with you and form a party of three, and the game really opens up, with you able to progress through content and quests with more tactics and less grind. As the acronym above points out, this isn’t a ‘Massively’ multiplayer game. Each of the (currently 3) game servers can hold around 80 players, which seems like a reasonable number of heroes to be running around a comparatively small NES-style world.

Combat is simple, but fairly tactical if you’re running with at least one friend. Anyone who has played the recent Steam re-releases of Cthulhu Saves The World or Breath Of Death VII will know what to expect here. Choose when to block, attack, use items, etc in turn-based combat, albeit with a time limit placed on each turn if you’re in a party. Each player chooses their own character’s orders, but only the party leader has the ability to call a retreat, so it’s best to hand that particular control to someone who knows when it’s best to run. The death system seems fairly forgiving, with dying just depositing you outside the last town you visited after a short cutscene.

As mentioned earlier, the game is primarily free. There is an optional subscription that unlocks a few perks and a couple of additional character classes, which the developers are keen to stress are merely different from the more standard ones, not better. It’s hardly an epic price-tag if you do choose to chip in, at 9$ for six months, $15 for a whole year, or even $27 for the lifetime of the game. Aside from the optional subscription, there’s no microtransactions or horse-armor to be found here, and all world is available to all players. After all, it just wouldn’t be authentically retro to find a pay-gate around every corner, would it?

With the absurd deluge of games this month, I’ve only had a little time to put into NEStalgia so far, but my experience has so far been a pleasant and (as advertised) nostalgic one. The art, the music and the general feel of gameplay hits all the right notes, and the content of the game hasn’t been bad, either, with some quests requiring a little bit of puzzling, or taking you to unusual locations, such as being shrunk down to tiny size in order to hunt down a rogue mouse. The BYOND online platform takes just a couple of minutes to sign up on, and the client is for all three major operating systems, so grab a friend or two and give it a stab.

[NEStalgia]