Kingdom. Two Crowns. Norse Lands.

Kingdom has for a long time been my favorite pixel art game series, ever since its debut as one of Raw Fury’s first two published games. I wrote about all that in The fall and rise of Kingdom for Retronator Magazine. Good old 2016!

After the amazing sequel New Lands, Kingdom Two Crowns—the third title in the side-view strategy/tower defense series—brought co-op multiplayer and extra biomes including Shogun and the later-released free DLC Dead Lands. Long-time fans were also delighted about the more difficult Challenge Islands intermezzo, and now it’s time for the 4th full campaign!

Kingdom Two Crowns: Norse Lands is the first paid expansion for Two Crowns and boy is it worth its money. I mean, did you see the screenshots above? The gameplay is as good as ever, but they’ve really outdone themselves in presentation. As if the always-reflecting river wasn’t at maximum eye candy already, I feel like the pixel art watercolor explorations by Franciszek ‘Franek’ Nowotniak (the environment artist on Norse Lands) really left a mark on the art style. The shading is done with big, chunky clusters so that the glorious background scenes combine with the forest hills and foreground trees into screenshot paintings worthy of being 5K wallpapers (which is exactly what I did for you here). The style is so consistent it’s sometimes almost at the detriment of gameplay as it took me some time to get better at noticing how many payable items a certain building has left. Not a problem for us Kingdom veterans however.

Not only does overachievement in presentation apply to the visuals, the soundtrack is also instrumental at making Norse Lands worthy of being a premium chapter. The music permeates the landscape wider than previously, delivered by the folklore-inspired band Kalandra. I don’t know how music can do that, but the four Norwegians make you feel the morning mist or the evening calm, as well as give you chills with atmospheric vocals and unexpected instruments. You’ll know when the blood moon is upon you more than ever before.

I’ll stop selling the game now, I mainly just wanted to add the amazing art to the blog. Do download those wallpapers. And if you need a mystically-cozy (and at night scary) world to dive into, get the game on Steam ($7 for DLC, $9 for Two Crowns at 50% sale currently, macOS, Windows, Linux) or other devices.

I often say that to play text adventures, you need to be in the mood for reading a book—skipping through text to get to the gameplay will do you no favors. In The Longest Road on Earth there is no text, but there are no goals either. If you were to sit down on a train during the morning commute, you’d need to be in the mood for putting on a melancholic album and staring out the window, contemplating life, instead of mindlessly scrolling on your phone. Rushing to the end will do you no favors, much like in life.

You could think of The Longest Road on Earth as a long playable cutscene, somewhere between a 4-part music video and a walking simulator. In fact, it often made me question if it’s a game with a really good soundtrack, or a music album with a really good interactive pixel art animation. The melancholic vocals of Beícoli match perfectly with the black-and-white pixels by Mohammed Bakir and Edu Verz, capturing so many small moments of everyday life, the routine, the solitude, the service, the disconnect, the expected and unexpected joy. It’s music and fine art more than gameplay, but that makes the intersection of the three that much more special as it’s unlike anything I’ve experienced before.

The Longest Road on Earth released already in May and it also took me a while to be in the mood for it. When you’re ready yourself to let emotions take you over, you can get it on Steam ($10, Windows), iOS ($4), or Android ($4).

The world of Norco is just something else. The southern USA point-and-click adventure has been no stranger on this blog. Quite to the contrary, thanks to the magic of Tumblr I’ve had my eyes on @geographyofrobots’ project all the way back in its EGA days.

A lot has happened since my last look over a year ago, most recently this week Geography of Robots won the Tribeca Games Award, the latest addition to New York’s Tribeca (film) festival. The competition was strong and you can see the entries in the presentation where Norco gets introduced by the by-now-already-memeified Norman Reedus (at the 25:53 mark). It was nice to also finally put a face to Yuts after all these years.

In other news, Raw Fury picked up the publishing part of Norco’s release process. There’s even a new demo out that you can play right now on Steam.

No release date has been announced yet, so maybe there’ll be another post on this blog about the game in a year or so. We’ll see!

I had some catching up to do with the games on my to-do list, first of which was Backbone. Launched on Kickstarter in May 2018, the raccoon private detective adventure game captured imagination of many, including mine. In my case not just for the furry inhabitants of the dystopian Vancouver, but especially for its dynamically-shaded pixel art.

The game was estimated to release a year later in July. While this didn’t exactly happen (as practically no indie game manages to), there wasn’t much room for disappointment as we still got a full release of the game’s Prologue. Better yet (if you weren’t a backer), it launched as a free chapter on Steam. I finally played it and it’s as great as we expected, pulling me through its one hour of investigating gameplay with great intrigue.

The lighting engine is even better than what the Kickstarter promised. The team really outdid themselves and we since got a chance to hear a detailed explanation of their art approach at Unreal Indie Dev Days (if you’re a gamedev, it’s worth watching as much as playing the game):

In even more recent news, my favorite unpublisher Raw Fury took the developer EggNut under their wing, making sure the creators don’t burn themselves out trying to bring such a high level of quality to the players. They extended the financial runway significantly and we’ll see an even higher level of production delivered to us in 2021. I’m very excited by all of this and I’m guessing it’ll be worth the wait.

Epic news guys, Kingdom: New Lands is free for a week! Pun is of course intended as Raw Fury’s publishing debut becomes the infinitely-discounted title in the Epic Games Store until June 13. Get your copy here.

The trick is that New Lands is the 2nd installment in the Kingdom franchise and not the latest Two Crowns that brought local and online multiplayer to my favorite series of recent years. However, this works in your favor if you’re new to Kingdom’s greed-filled world. New Lands is arguably the best of the sequels as it introduced the much favored campaign gameplay without compromising the acclaimed minimalism of the original. Two Crowns was just not as elegant at adding new features (but still a great action strategy title overall).

In related recent news, Raw Fury bought the game’s intellectual property from the original creator Thomas van den Berg a.k.a. Noio. I met with Thomas in Berlin during my March Indie Eurotrip and this decision makes sense since he was already developing new, unrelated ideas, with much joy in his eyes. Getting an (undisclosed) lump of money as a parting gift from his creation extends his freedom to do so. I’m excited to see what he comes up with.

In the mean time, go play New Lands if you haven’t done so yet, while the rest of us celebrate a continued stream of content updates for Two Crowns and future sequels from the furious rawness.

Kingdom Two Crowns is almost upon us! Working towards its December 11 release, (un)publisher Raw Fury just released the launch trailer that shows many new goodies added to the Kingdom series.

I named Kingdom my favorite game of the year for both 2015 (Classic) and 2016 (New Lands) and I wrote extensively about its development in my Retronator Magazine article The fall and rise of Kingdom. It’s a finely designed strategy game with perfect, minimalistic controls and incredible atmosphere featuring a never-ending river to supply eye candy on every step of the way.

Two Crowns brings co-op multiplayer (online and split-screen) amongst many other gameplay additions (iron resource, new units, new mounts …). The campaign will bring us to feudal Japan at first, with new biomes following over time as the game gets expanded post-launch.

You can wishlist the game on Steam or wait for it to release on Switch, PS4, and Xbox One as well. Less than a week left!

Dandara was the first game I played on Switch, one year ago at GDC, and now it’s finally out—on ALL platforms simultaneously (Switch, PS4, X1, Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android)! 

You can play it with the analog sticks (and I’m assuming mouse/keyboard on computers), but for me it really shinned with the touch controls, because the gameplay is just unlike anything I’ve tried before. The tagline of the game is “Explore a directionless world” and boy was the Brazilian studio Long Hat House not kidding. In Dandara you stick to platforms on all 4 sides. No, make it 8—no make it ALL the sides. Better if you look at the trailer than me trying to explain it with words.

This guarantees quite unique level design and mastering a control scheme that often feels like orchestrating a flowing kung fu/parkour sequence.

Give it a go, for any platform, at $15. Links to stores in Raw Fury’s post.

I really thought this would be the happiest news for hardcore fans of Kingdom, but it’s only OK.

We got a nice surprise a few months back, when publisher Raw Fury mentioned we’ll be getting a new level—the 6th island—for our beloved tower defens(ish) strategy game. I easily called Kingdom my favorite game in both 2015 (Classic) and 2016 (New Lands). It had absolutely gorgeous pixel art, and brilliant minimalistic controls that earned it a nomination for Excellence in Design at the Independent Games Festival in 2016 (it was also honorably mentioned for Visual Art and Audio). Simply: the game is great and I spared no love telling you all about it in my article The fall and rise of Kingdom. 

The new content arrived this week and it came in the form of free DLC called Kingdom: New Lands - Skull Island. If you want no spoilers, stop reading and just go play it. It’s free. It doesn’t hurt. If you want full-on spoilers, you can read my Steam post I wrote after I finished it earlier today. For the rest, I’ll sum it up like this: either Raw Fury hyped it up to much calling it “challenging AF. Yeah, that’s right, capital A F. Fuuuuuuuuuuuu.” or I’m just too good at this game by now. I’m not saying this to brag (OK, a bit), but mostly as a disclaimer why it was just meh. I turned Kingdom inside-out 3 times already—4 times including this playthrough—with 100h+ total playtime and 100% all achievements in all versions. I built my own hopes too big since I would genuinely love a challenge and the announcement sounded like I might just get it. I didn’t. It just makes the game 10% longer to finish without getting any new content. Even the damned hourglass statue didn’t have any effect because I beat the game before it could get even close to running out.

So nothing really changes. We’re back to square one, waiting patiently for Two Crowns—the next big release in the Kingdom lineage, coming in 2018. 

If you aren’t on the band wagon yet, Kingdom: New Lands is available on pretty much every platform by now (mobile too), with the addition of PS4 coming soon on January 16. It’s a beautiful, atmospheric game that I love so much even this DLC couldn’t really make me disappointed. I just have to wait more. Looks like time isn’t on my side after all.

I should have a category for (pixel art) games released by my favorite unpublisher Raw Fury. Oh wait, I soon will—redesign of Retronator is almost here. Then their awesomeness will be easy to follow. But I digress.

We have a lot of new point-and-click adventures coming our way, which makes me very happy. The developer of Raw Fury’s second signed title Kathy Rain (our Burra wrote a lovely guest post about it) is teaming up with the raw and the furious to release their second game Whispers of a Machine as well. Joel Staaf Hästö (a.k.a. Clifftop Games) is mainly involved as a coder this time, with story and art coming from Petter Ljungqvist (a.k.a. Faravid Interactive). Raw Fury completes the circle as an (un)publisher and I’m glad they did, because I haven’t even heard of the game yet, which is to say how vast the scene is out there (but really how much I suck at covering it).

As is the case with Unavowed (Dave Gilbert’s iron in the fire), Petter left the familiar confines of 320×240 for double the dimensions. The backgrounds in modern-wave indie adventures were rarely pixel art in any case—just low-res digital paintings—leaving the characters as the only parts with sharp pixels. It’s still got quite the charm to it, like old-school cartoons’ cel-shaded heroes overlaid on lush, painterly backgrounds.

The story is more alike Technobabylon (you really need to know your point-and-click references to read this post) and deals with the future where artificial intelligence is not only in our devices, but in humans themselves. Well, it was, until we got scared shitless and pulled the plug. Some aren’t too happy about this and seek to continue fusing with the code towards singularity, others are going hardcore off the grid. Amids all this you are conducting a murder investigation in the shoes of Vera, the homicide detective on the case.

Looks like we have a good sci-fi mystery on the horizon and a cold nordic rural world to explore. You can follow Petter on Twitter to get new glimpses of art every now and then.

If you’ve been following Retronator for a while you’ve sure heard of my favorite 2015/2016 pixel art game Kingdom. I wrote about it extensively in Retronator Magazine if you need the back story.

The game just got its release on Switch so enjoy the new trailer that comes with it!

The Last Night was featured big time yesterday at Microsoft’s Xbox presentation at E3. 

If you like the trailer, I brake it down and write about the visual effects it uses in Retronator Magazine:

The future of pixel art with The Last Night

The future of pixel art with The Last Night – Retronator Magazine – Medium

medium.com Retronator Games Watchlist

It wasn’t long ago when I wrote about the teaser for The Last Night.

At E3 today, we’ve finally seen the real trailer and I break it all down in Retronator Magazine.

Another game that my favorite unpublisher Raw Fury only teased us about is Odd Tales’ The Last Night. 

The post about The Last Night’s initial #CyperPunkJam entry is one of the top 10 posts I’ve ever done on Retronator so you can understand how cool this game is.

Every since then I’ve been crazy about the game, like stalker crazy, I go as far as dig up hidden Pixelation.org devlogs to find never before seen screen captures and such. And then at GDC this year Raw Fury (known for publishing Kingdom and big fans of The Last Night themselves) announced they signed up with Odd Tales to help bring this gem to life.

Now we wait. Again. And again.

Oh man, Kingdom! Potentially my favorite game of 2015 (first version) and 2016 (expansion/reboot/very significant upgrade Kingdom: New Lands). I wish there was more to show about the second expansion, Two Crowns, than the Switch teaser trailer. If you’re craving some good co-op pixel art action, you’ll definitely want to be excited about this one.

In the mean time, read all about the game’s conception in my Retronator Magazine article The Fall and Rise of Kingdom.

Dandara has the privilege of holding the coveted title of “The very first Switch game played by Retronator”. Yes, I touched the magical controller one day before any of you mortals, having fun at GDC with a gravity-bending metroidvania from studio @longhathouse. 

It’s not as much bending as it is every-wall-clinging gravity, a directionless world as the game calls it. You aim around the level to jump to any valid surface, leading to a very fresh way to navigate around the puzzles and enemies in the game.

Did I mention the game is being published by my favorite pixel art superhouse Raw Fury? Indeed it is, and we can look forward to its release this Summer.