It was only a couple of weeks ago that we were giving you some spicy footage of Only Human Studios’ Ensign-1 in action. Now, after successful funding campaigns through Kickstarter and 8-Bit Funding, the game can be purchased for PC, Mac and Linux through Desura.
The space combat game, offering both single-player and multiplayer components, is the UK/US development outfit’s second commercial release, following on from 3D platformer Helena The 3rd. While those who helped fund the game during its initial development phase have been promised access to its level editor, there’s no confirmation as to whether or not this will also translate to post-release Desura customers. As it currently stands, the game can be acquired for a UK price of £3.49, which will eventually rise after further in-game updates are issued.
Discord Games are back, and they’re unleashing 48 Chambers on PC and Xbox 360.
The American studio, best known for developing Take Arms, a constituent of last year’s Xbox Live Indie Games Summer Uprising, has made 48 Chambers available for 80 Microsoft Points via the Xbox Live Indie Games channel, and for $1.99 via its official site and on Indievania. The latter price is part of a temporary post-launch offer this weekend only, after which the price will rise to $2.99. A Supporter Edition is also available on the official website for $4.99, with all proceeds for this version going towards the development of Discord’s next title.
Discord describes 48 Chambers as “an old-school indie challenge,” in which players must navigate a series of chambers by collecting orbs and dodging projectiles, all whilst striving for the highest possible score. Online leaderboards are also present in the PC version, but they aren’t yet included in the Xbox 360 release.
Game designer veteran most famous for the Gabriel Knight adventure game series, Jane Jensen, has launched her own indie studio called Pinkerton Road Studio and is asking her fans to help fund and decide what games she should make over the next year.
With more and more industry veterans realizing that they can go back to their roots and rediscover the kinds of games they really want to make, it is not a huge surprise (if a delightful one) that Jen Jensen has followed that path. Known for her mystery novels and similarly themed adventure games, Jane Jensen most famously authored the Gabriel Knight series for Sierra Entertainment back in the nineties. More recently she released Gray Matter in 2010 which featured music composed by Robert and Raleigh Holmes, Jane has also been working for Zynga.
Now, however, Jane has set-up her own studio called Pinkerton Road Studio which will be operated from her farm, making games alongside Robert and Raleigh. The studio is founded with a vision of “community supported gaming” or CSG which is derived from agriculture practices and means that fans can pre-invest into the games, currently through Kickstarter, and then choose and help shape the games into what they want them to be.
“I’ve wanted to return to adventure game development for years, and now is exactly the right time. The casual game market is ready for meatier fare and the hardcore audience is nostalgic for games like these. Plus, tablet use is exploding, which gives us access to a brand new audience of e-book readers — an ideal target for story-based games,” says Jane. “Forming Pinkerton Road means retaining control of my ideas and ensuring my games’ quality all the way through development. At this point in my career, this level of involvement is very important to me, and I know it will enable me to get my best work out to my fans.”
Currently there are three project ideas which those who invest can start discussing – all of the games are adventure game thrillers, typical of Jane’s style.
The first is Moebius – “A man investigates a series of events around the world for a mysterious benefactor and learns a secret that changes his entire world view.”
Secondly we have Gray Matter 2 – “Dr. David Styles, a renegade neurobiologist, and Samantha Everett, a street magician, seek the truth about a dead girl’s strange powers.”
Last but not least is Anglophile Adventure – “Visit Regency England for a little sex, lies and scandal.”
You can help fund Pinkerton Road Studio and the many planned game projects over on Kickstarter until May 19th 2012.
More information on Pinkerton Road Studio and their upcoming games can be found over on the official website.
You know those pretentious games that take themselves really, really seriously, even though they lack any semblance of the subtlety they’re trying so desperately to convey? Apparently, GZ Storm is somewhat averse to them, as evidenced by its latest wacky release.
Vidiot Game, out now as a free download for Windows and for the price of 80 Microsoft Points on the Xbox Live Indie Games channel, is perhaps best described as a minigame compilation injected with a healthy dose of insanity, with in-game tasks purportedly ranging from “robbing a bank” to “flying through cyberspace”. Three playable characters by the respective names of Ungus Fungus, Doug Beach and Hiratio are all playable, and the PC version also features gamepad support. Oh, and it comes with a health warning from the Surgeon General of Nigeria and apparently killed someone’s family, but you didn’t hear that from us.
Feel free to take a look at the trailer below, but don’t say we didn’t warn you about its explicit content.
The ethereal movement of Birnam Wood to Dunsinane Castle was one of the foretold omens of MacBeth’s brutal demise in Shakespeare’s classic piece of stage theatre, but will the sprawling mass of woodland and shrubbery’s namesake prove to be a similarly purveyor of destruction on the indie scene?
Premature drama aside, Birnam Wood Games has announced the release of Loc: Can You Escape?, its first commercial gaming project. The brainchild of a four-man, Vermont-based team, Loc is a 3D puzzle/fantasy mish-mash of sorts for PC and Mac. And it also appears to touch on a current issue or two in its wake.
The game’s basic premise is that the player has been imprisoned by the antagonistic Queen of the Faeries, who, to put it mildly, is a little ticked off by humanity’s adverse influence on the balance of nature. Faced with the prospect of lifelong captivity, it’s up to you to solve bountiful sequences of ‘Loc’ puzzles in order to break free of the Queen’s iron fist and rise off into the sunset.
While that’s the long and short of the game on a conceptual level, it also looks rather intriguing in action, as the trailer below will testify:
2 Dawn have released a teaser trailer for their upcoming post-apocalyptic online multiplayer FPS, Ravaged. There are gyrocopters and that’s all that needs to be said.
Disappointed by RAGE? Or just by FPS’ in general? While Ravaged may not offer an alternative as such it certainly looks pretty fun and the developers behind it have the experience to deliver a strong title. 2 Dawn are a new studio which set-up back in 2009, since then they have been working on Ravaged. The team took the indie route after years working on AAA titles such as Desert Combat, Battlefield 2 and Frontlines. Now they’re hoping to bring a solid FPS online mulitplayer experience to players once again and to a concept of their own making.
Ravaged is set in a future in which the Earth has been devastated by a series of natural disasters. The result is a sandy landscape in which ‘Scavangers’ and the ‘Resistance’ battle it out territory, resources and survival in general. It is here that Ravaged places its experience, amidst this struggle, offering players a fast-paced FPS battle with each other on-foot and with vehicles. Speaking of which, there are buggies and cars to traverse the vast sandy lands, but the game also takes a cue from Mad Max 2 (obviously) and features gyrocopters too!
You can check it all out and more in the new teaser trailer for Ravaged below:
More information on Ravaged can be found on the game’s official website.
Today, we bring sad news – A Valley Without Wind‘s 1.0 release has been delayed for a week. A whole week!
(Drops to knees) NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
Wipe your tears dear child, it’s only a week that you must be parted from the 1.0 version of A Valley Without Wind. We know it will be hard and this is tragic news, but you can get through it…we have no doubt.
Okay enough tomfoolery – AVWW really has been delayed for a week as it will be coming out on April 23rd rather than the 16th. The reason? PAX East. Yeah. Arcen Games wrote in the update that because they’ve had to prepare for PAX and now that more than half of the team will be unable to work on the game during the convention, they won’t have enough time to prep for the big release on the date as planned.
(Shakes fist) Curse you PAX East!
Well anyway, AVWW will still be coming to Steam for $14.99, unless you grab it before it’s released in which case you’ll get the game for $9.99. If you have no idea what all this commotion is about then you need to get educated – AVWW is a procedurally generated, sidescrolling kick-ass-a-thon which is fully co-op able and very, very luring with its unique visuals.
More information on A Valley Without Wind can be found on the game’s official website.
If you’re looking for a good deal on some quality indie games then you may want to mosey on over to our good friends at GamersGate who have just announced the IndieFort Bundle.
As part of their big announcement of their new IndieFort platform, GamersGate have organized a bundle to get the ball rolling called the IndieFort Bundle. IndieFort is a collaboration between indie game PR guru, Alexander Poysky, and digital distribution platform, GamersGate. It is intended to allow indie developers access to resources for development and to cater to greater control over distribution for both finished games and those in various testing or funding stages. More details will be on the way about that soon!
No doubt the majority of you are interested in the bundle though. In which case, for those of you not familiar with these kinds of campaigns, it really is as simple as choose a price, pay it and then all those titles will be yours forever! The IndieFort Bundle will be going live this Thursday, April 5th 2012 and if you really wanted to, you could get it for as little as $6. That said, please do try and think of the hard working developers who put their heart and soul into these projects. The reason for guilt tripping you is that anything over the minimum $6 goes straight to the developers themselves, no cuts for anyone else at all.
There are other incentives in the form of tiered unlockables though. That means that there are more goodies up for grabs upon reaching targets like 10k units sold, 20k, 30k and so on – we’re talking soundtracks, art and other surprises that will be announced when the bundle goes live. If enough people buy the bundle to reach 50k units sold in total, then the developers will release their upcoming games for free to those who bought the bundle.
So, without further ado, let’s have a look at what you’ll be able to grab in the IndieFort Bundle:
Rougelike is an age-old genre that’s managed to get steadily more and more bloated over the past couple of years, but this streamlined top-down RPG cuts that beast down to the basics and runs with it! It might seem a little simple at first glance, but I warn you, it can get dangerously addictive if you let it get ahold of you.
We’ve already given Cardinal Quest pretty extensive coverage here at IGM, so if you want to learn more then check out our interview with lead developer Ido Yehieli or take a gander at our review where it earned a healthy 70% (“good”) on our rating scale.
Fight, trade or die in the cold abyss of space with this 2D space sim from BigBlockGames. Chose to either follow a preset storyline of space piracy and corporate conspiracy, or forge your own destiny in the sandbox free-for-all mode. Either way, you’ve got a whole universe in front of you and ton of space-age weapons to blast it to bits with!
While we don’t have any major coverage of this title just yet, there’s some free version available on the official site if you want a little taste of what this space epic has in store.
With Kenshi, enter a free-roaming RPG world with over 400km2 just waiting to be explored. Command a small army of desert samurai dudes or go it solo with just one core character, it’s all up to you. Kenshi also breaks with established RPG tradition by abandoning crutches like level scaling or giving player characters super high stats over their NPC counterparts. So if want your guys to be badass invincible super heroes, then you gotta work for it! Also, it has really big swords. Always a plus in my book.
Just so you know up front, this game is still very much in the alpha stage of development, thus is by no means a “finished” product. As a matter of fact, it ranked in our list of Top 10 Most Promising Indie Games in Alpha Stage!
Hey, do you want to control a giant hover tank and shoot lasers at stuff for no real reason? It’s ok, you don’t have to hide it, you’re only human after all. Steel Storm is old school styled top down shooter full of destruction and mayhem across 25 missions and various multiplayer modes. Think you could make it better? Then hop into the unique real-time mission editor and share your masterpiece with the world.
If this game tickles your fancy then you may also want to take a peek at the early rumblings of Steel Storm 2, which is going to be…… a first person shooter?? Crazy times.
By far the most “harcore” game on this list, Demise: Ascension is the latest iteration of a long lived series of ultra-in depth dungeon-crawling fantasy romps that should be immediately familiar to anyone who’s “experienced” some of the earlier Elder Scrolls games. Be warned my friends, this one ain’t one for the faint of heart!
For more info, take a history lesson with lead developer Decklin (aka the Twisted Dwarf).
And last but by no means least, Wanderlust. Love your RPGs but looking for something a little more accessible than demise but a little more fast paced than Cardinal Quest? Then this is the one for you! Go it on your own or team-up for some 4 player co-op action in a colourful fantasy world that should tickle the nostalgia glands of any longtime JRPG fans.
If that doesn’t quite sell you on it, then perhaps you should take a quick read of our Review where it scored a incredible 80% (“amazing”) on our review scale!
For more information on the IndieFort Bundle, be sure to check GamersGate when it goes live, we’ll keep you informed though of course.
As we enter April we find ourselves thinking, “hmmm, what games come out this month?” So, naturally, we’ve decided to round up some of the many indie games that are coming out in April 2012 for ourselves as well as you of course. While this list is far from comprehensive we would love for it to be! So if you know of any indie games coming out in April 2012 that deserve to be on the list then give us a shout in the comments or email us at editors@indiegamemag.com and we’ll add them!
Frictional Games‘ survival horror masterpiece, Amnesia: The Dark Descent, is now on the Mac App Store.
One of the most outstanding indie titles in recent years is Amnesia: The Dark Descent. It’s a survival horror in the most pure and twisted form and has become renown for making people scream, panic and probably urinate. You follow Daniel who awakens in a dark castle with no memory of how he got there. Finding notes left be himself, he finds out he must travel down through the castle past its many haunts and murder someone he doesn’t know and for an unknown reason.
The Dark Descent will be getting a follow up with A Machine For Pigs which is being developed by thechineseroom with Frictional acting as producers – we expect big and horrible things. If you haven’t played it yet and you’re a Mac owner then definitely consider picking it up from the Mac App Store now it’s on there.
More information on Amnesia: The Dark Descent is available on the game’s official website.
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