Retronator

When I was watching the trailer for Arco at Summer Game Fest, I thought to myself, those trees sure look like something Franek would draw. Sure enough, the environment artist from Kingdom: Norse Lands is indeed one of the 4 developers behind this story-rich tactical turn-based RPG, mesmerizing us with breathtaking scenes of grandiosity.

I played the demo on Steam (macOS, Windows) and enjoyed the unique fighting system, a blend of turns and active pause. You plan your moves based on telegraphed actions and watch the turn play out in real-time. As for the full game—potentially coming out this year—I’m looking forward to experience the Tarantino-esque intertwining of the “3 tales forged in bloodshed, laced with magic, and united by revenge.”

The art of Wargroove 2 is wonderful! Chucklefish’s second original IP (after Starbound) finally got a sequel today and oh, it’s a lovely world to dive into. Instead of being developed in-house as the original, the second installment of the tactical turn-based strategy is brought to us by one of my favorite studios, Robotality, whose shading-bending game Pathway was previously published by Chucklefish.

The collaboration between the two developers clearly paid off as Wargroove 2 gets the trademark mood lighting of Robotality’s art director Simon Bachman on top of the original Wargroove cuteness. The shading is not as crazy as Pathway’s fully dynamic engine—instead, Wargroove 2 enhances the visuals of the Halley engine with subtler animated halos around characters, both in-game and in the many story cutscenes.

The game stays smartly close to the original by keeping everything you loved while introducing more content, more factions, more units, more strategy, more everything! As a big fan of Advance Wars back in the day, I had a great time, but there are plenty of other 9/10 reviews that can more sufficiently speak of Wargroove 2’s gameplay goodness.

If you’re up for some cozy turn-based tactics (as cozy and wholesome as a war-themed game can be), you can get the game on Steam ($20, Windows only) or Switch.

This post has been 9 months in the making. 1 day for playing the wonderfully-illustrated city builder that is LakeSide by Massive Galaxy Studios, 1 day for trying to capture pixel-perfect GIFs, and 9 months for agonizing over the fact that it’s sometimes impossible to capture or post pixel-perfect GIFs, therefore, it’s better to not post anything at all until you feel so bad for your blog hiatus that you say enough is enough, get over it, and post this beauty of a game and talk about it because, really, that’s what matters. Apologies to Gonçalo Monteiro, the main developer, for waiting this long.

LakeSide is a bit of a rougelite in that you’re not building one eternal city over many sessions. Instead, it offers quick turnaround and replayability as you receive different building upgrades each time and experience random events. It’s currently in Early Access on Steam ($11 at 25% off right now, Windows-only) with new features coming out regularly, most recently the addition of armies and sieges. Oh, and if you’re wondering why the game looks this pretty, it’s simple: art is made by @kirokazepixel.

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 was a big fan of Antoine ‘Sir Carma’ Lendrevie’s voxel art ever since I wrote my big article on pixels and voxels in 2016. Not long after, Antoine moved to Vancouver—the home of Brace Yourself Games—and started working as lead artist (and now art director, among other artists) on the simulation/strategy game Industries of Titan.

What followed were 4 years of patiently looking at cubes being carefully arranged into delicious dioramas on his Twitter, merging slowly into vast sci-fi cityscapes you can marvel at in the screenshots above (make sure to see them up big to take in all the voxel detail).

Finally the good news, you can now start colonizing the largest moon of Saturn yourself, as Industries of Titan landed in early access yesterday on Steam and Epic!

Freshly launched on Kickstarter, Dwerve is a tower defense-dungeon crawling combo with a lovely, smooth pixel art style. We’ve seen the tower defense mechanic mixed previously in Aegis Defenders (a platformer), but this time we get to experience it in an RPG with a ¾ top-down look and plenty of action.

A bunch of well-known pixel artists have ties to the project. Leonard ‘Sun Pixels’ Leon is behind the wonderfully big dialog portraits, Enchae does various stuff from enemies to environments, but most of all, Dwerve is shaped under the hands of Peter 'Pixel Pete’ Milko, who has a substantial following on his very educational YouTube channel. Besides him, Percy 'PJ’ Legendre is responsible for designing (and also coding) their brain child to life.

It makes me very happy to see the Kickstarter campaign already funded, which will move PJ and Pete from 2 years of previous development (on the side of freelancing) into full-time status. If you’re into action RPGs with a bunch of strategic defending and towering and storytelling to go with it, you can support the project on Kickstarter ($15+ for the game, macOS, Windows, Linux, with stretch goals for additional platforms).

I’ve been playing Yes, Your Grace in short, rich gameplay sessions over the last couple of months. I previously wrote a bigger story on the game’s (troubled) Kickstarter/publisher history, and the developer Brave at Night kindly provided a review code for me to try the final game. I played it on Windows, but no better time to write a mini review now since the game just released on Switch, Xbox One, and macOS as well.

So how is it? Deliciously good. If narrative games with choices that matter are your thing, Yes, Your Grace will be right down your alley. If you like the personal and political drama of Game of Thrones, the game gracefully delivers. And if you miss the times when Cinemaware delighted the world with illustrated strategy adventures (Defender of the Crown), you’ll get the same feels of colorful immersion as you did at the end of the 90s.

You can sense the love that went into the production with all aspects of the game, from exciting story events and relatable characters, to an immersive presentation and a memorable soundtrack. The art direction crafted by the main developer Rafal Bryks (design, code, art, writing) is straightforward and incredibly rich at the same time. Most of the gameplay areas are drawn in 1-point perspective (the exceptions being the 2-point title and map screens) and it’s the lighting that brings the environments to a whole new level. The shading is one of the best pulled off examples of modern pixel art with lavish use of gradients and translucent reflections, while never losing the handcrafted feeling so associated with the medium. A sprinkle of parallax and dynamic zooming round up the effects, all together painting a world you simply want to return to, a desire I haven’t felt so strongly for a pixel art world since Kingdom and Thimbleweed Park.

Yes, Your Grace is an aesthetic experience not to be missed. If you haven’t had the delight of playing it yet, now is the time to get it on Steam ($16 on sale, Windows, macOS), Switch ($17) or Xbox One ($17). 

YES, I finally got my hands on a game with @kirokazepixel’s art in it!

For The Warp (@forthewarp) is a spin-off from another project Kirokaze is doing art for, Massive Galaxy (@massgalaxy). The core crew is in fact the same: Gerardo Quiroz on pixels, Martyn Stonehouse on audio, and Gonçalo Monteiro as the main coder/designer/mastermind behind both ideas. During development of Massive Galaxy (a space exploration/trading point-and-click adventure, still in development), the space combat mechanic grew into a life of its own and broke off as a standalone roguelike deck-building game. Gonçalo sent me a copy of the alpha last week when it released into Early Access and boy did I have some fun with it! Granted, I haven’t built any decks since my middle-school years of Magic the Gathering fandom, but my deprivation for card mechanics was equally matched by the coziness of the colorful-yet-dangerous universe that keeps pulling you back in for more dueling.

The goal in the current alpha is to make your way across 5 levels full of fighting encounters (and other less lethal ones). Unless you pick up some hull-repairing drones on the way, the runs generally end up very fast and you’ll be replaying the game often (with pleasure, that is). After 3 hours in the game I explored barely half of the possibilities and the play style did feel quite different based on the cards that I had. The variability still has some rough edges though—once I lucked into some very rare cards, I was able to defeat all stages in one go. But that’s why it’s in Early Access, so things can get balanced as more cards and ships make it into the game. It’s a perfect title to start playing in alpha as it’ll be exciting to see how things change with each update.

If you’re into cards, strategy, space, pixel art, weird sci-fi tech … head over to Steam or Itch to get your spacefaring runs started ($15, Windows only).

I gave a talk about Crowdfunding today. I was working on it for the majority of this week and during my research I found some ongoing projects to write about (on top of a couple already on my TO-DO list). Brace yourself for an overview of Kickstarter projects in the next few days!

First up is Seablip, a real-time tactical RPG fought across pirate ships and coastal towns. The environment art alone is enough to get me intrigued, with a happy, sort of a Stardew Valley of sea plunder vibe to it. The Kickstarter video is quite worth watching so head on over to the campaign page to see how the gameplay looks in practice. There are 3 days left to join in with the support and the game already cleared its $10k goal. Aye!

There’s not much more that I like than a good development story. Yes, Your Grace was started by a team of students at the University of Huddersfield in England, all the way back in 2014. An ambitious goal was set to finish it by the end of 2015, if the lead designer/artist and programer were to go into full-time development with a help of a Kickstarter.

The funding campaign succeeded, alas without much extra funds on top of the £6,000 goal. As is typical for game development, the work was not complete, and with the Kickstarter money burned through, the team started looking for a publisher. This proved to be more challenging than expected and without funding, the pair decided to go back to uni. The programmer left the project to solely focus on his studies, leaving the main creator Rafał Bryks to work on the game alone, with the code part left dormant.

A publisher was finally found in 2016, bringing a new programer on board. All would be fine if the programer didn’t quit the publisher a month later, leaving the future of the project again uncertain. A new coder was promised, but the word was never fulfilled.

After months spent in publisher limbo and without funds to find a programer on his own, Rafał pulled the most ambitious move and started learning to code himself. 2017 saw no progress on the game as Rafał took on pixel art freelancing to pay the bills. After hours he worked on improving his programing skills and trying to get out of the sour publishing deal. This would continue all the way into 2018 when the game he was contracted to do, the post-Brexit bouncer simulator Not Tonight was released by the publisher No More Robots. Rafał was able to get a one hour demo of Yes, Your Grace written from scratch in Adventure Game Studio earlier that year, so he showed it to No More Robots and happily got their support.

There was one last development twist: No More Robots suggested a switch from Adventure Game Studio to Unity (a sane choice to accommodate more release platforms), meaning Rafał would had to learn a completely new programing language and engine and write the whole game from scratch again. Hat is off to him, because that’s exactly what he did in 2019.

With the legal battles with the old publisher finally resolved, the project could come out of hiding, explaining the grim tale the development went through and surprising everyone with a trailer that showed a greatly enhanced game, compared to the Kickstarter.

The spaghetti-legs art style was replaced with a more realistic stylization of characters, complementing nicely the smoothly shaded environments. The softness of it all is so inviting and peaceful and moody, it makes me want to get back to the game world to listen to yet another peasant story and weight yet another hard decision of where to contribute my coins and supplies.

The demo that was released yesterday on Steam shows off a game with a unique approach to telling a story, joining a point-and-click interface with a turn-based strategy game. The result is deliciously satisfying. I felt like I was dropped in one of Westeros’ throne rooms, having to rule over the lands as much as dealing with family matters. It tells a story of being a king with the same personality and cinematic feeling as the legendary Defender of the Crown. When you mention this in relation to Game of Thrones, there’s much to be excited for the chapters that will follow in the full release of Yes, Your Grace.

Like I said, there’s not much more that I like than a good development story. When it’s as challenging as Rafał’s and we also get a great game out of it, it makes my heart warm beyond words. You can wishlist the game and try out the demo on Steam as we get ready for a release in early 2020.

I love turn based games. In fact, the reason you’re not reading this mini-review sooner is because after playing Pathway for 40 hours, I was pulled into a Civ 5 multiplayer frenzy (it’s a long story) and I haven’t had a free evening since. I deleted Civ yesterday (because that shit is heroin) and so here we are, finally talking about the game with the most advanced pixel art graphics engine so far.

I mean look at the screenshots. It’s gorgeous. Ever since the game was announced, I meticulously analyzed every screenshot that the german developer Robotality put out. I touched upon the behind-the-scenes stuff in my pre-release post and suffice it to say this is some advanced black pixel magic (much like the game’s supernatural nazi-cultist setting). 

The art is joined in perfect unison with the incredible music score, immersing you into your very-own Indiana Jones turn-based strategy adventure. The game is a casual entry into the tactical genre with fast-paced, easy-to-comprehend combat. Fighting is very predictable with shots always landing when there is a clear line of sight (hit percentages are also always right there in the HUD to indicate otherwise). With good strategy you can often get in and out of a fight in 2 or 3 turns. Great for short, relaxing evening sessions, rather than hardcore strategizing.

The glue that holds the numerous randomized battles together is a board-game-like map of Africa and the Middle East, the home of scorching-hot sand dunes, palm tree-filled oases, brick-built villages, and mysterious underground temples. Each of the five campaigns has an enveloping story that tries to give purpose to your team’s expedition, but due to the procedurally generated nature of adventures, you’ll find the random situations you get yourself into more interesting on their own, rather than supporting a progression of the overall arch.

The lush story vignettes are beautifully illustrated and offer a chance for your characters to lead to extra riches and equipment, the latter of which is the key to progression in the game. The 16 available recruits have unique skillsets and combining them into expedition parties offers plenty of varied playstyles. You’ll replay the campaigns often, but that’s by design as you get to try different team compositions and embark on a whole new set of shenanigans, some of which are available only with specific character perks.

Overall the experience does plateau, especially with as many hours as I put into it. It shines best in short, chill sessions for when you feel like immersing yourself into its pulp pre-world-war-II archeologist setting that the graphical wizardry so perfectly captures. A new campaign and improved story events are still on the way, so there’re plenty of reasons to stay excited for the future. If you live for advanced pixel art like I do, Pathway is an absolute must in your library. Get it from Steam, GOG, and Humble (mac, linux, windows, $16).

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.

Just a quick post in case anyone’s into isometric spaceship colony sims, Space Haven (@spacehavengame) from the Finnish studio Bugbyte is in its last day of the (well overfunded) Kickstarter campaign. The graphics are quite high res and on the side of pre-rendered 3D, but still very charming and fitting to the space theme.

Head over to the campaign page if you want to support the game and get a copy ($20 or more, Windows/macOS/Linux).

Pathway’s release is just around the corner! While there’s no date yet, the development is in its final moments and the game’s publisher Chucklefish (Wargroove, Stardew Valley) released a 10-minute gameplay video from the Wrath of God campaign (second of the five adventures you’ll be able to embark on in Pathway). So if you haven’t heard me rave about the next best turn-based tactical strategy game yet, the new footage shows exactly what we’ll soon be getting into.

Some of you know I’m on my March Indie Eurotrip right now. As a fan of everything pixel art+3D, I made it a special priority to stop in Hamelin, Germany, the home of Pathway developer Robotality. The company was founded by the Bachmann brothers in 2013, with their debut title Halfway coming out in July the following year. In fact, Halfway—as the name similarity hints—already featured quite some of the turn-based combat mechanics you’ll find in Pathway. Everything else is new in the follow-up however, whether it’s navigating a board-game-like map, random-generated story events and encounters, quicker pace designed around replayability, or Indiana Jones/Adventures of Tintin setting.

The crown jewel of course (at least for this blog) is the new graphics engine that supports dynamic 3D lighting with pixel-perfect art assets. I got a peek behind the scenes of the different tools and techniques that the guys use and it’s as clever and complex as I imagined it would be. There are multiple tools and modes that deal with embedding the 3D information into 2D pixel art sprites, from voxel and low-poly 3D-geometry bases (manually pixeled on top with perfect control over texture and details), to ground contours that project the bottoms of the sprites to correct depth for perfect shadow positioning. Perhaps the most surprising part was that almost every scene object eventually ends up converted to pure, untextured polygons (as in, there’s almost no trace of the source pixel art textures in the game at all, pixel clusters get triangulated into different-colored polygon meshes).

Getting my hands on the gameplay was just as satisfying as nerding about the art production pipeline, even if I annoyed the developers by taking my sweet-ass time staring at each location more than actually playing the game. (I have no regrets!)

It’s obvious that I’m head over heels for what Robotality has in store for us. So far I can only say that the game will be out in the first half of this year, but that’s plenty to be excited about. Until then, watching the 10-minute video posted above should help to keep the flames of 3D+pixel art glowing bright.

The moment has come; we finally know quite a bit more about Robotality’s next game Pathway. Its hybrid pixel/voxel engine has been fascinating me since the game’s announcement two summers ago, with dynamic lighting unlike anything we’ve seen before in seemingly pixel-perfect style. The game’s first trailer (as well as the marketing bullet points) put this into the forefront, and I can hardly wait to experience the passing of time in a more calmed-down setting while immersed in the game.

A few things immediately jump into my mind: Indiana Jones, Curious Expedition, and Jagged Alliance. The pre-World-War-II-Nazi vibe could hardly be more reminiscent of George Lucas/Steven Spielberg’s favorite archeologist, whereas the board game overworld navigation with narrative intermissions remind me of physical Eurogames—not surprising, since both Maschinen-Mensch and Robotality come from Germany. Finally, we can only hope that the character-driven turn-based combat will be as good as in one of the best tactical strategy games of the DOS era.

It makes me chuckle (oh god) that we’ll be getting two turn-based epics from Chucklefish now, as they took on the publishing duties for Pathway. This puts the 20th-century adventure on the same excitement hype train as Chucklefish’s medieval/fantasy Wargroove, which means 2018 is gearing up to be a spectacular year for turn-based strategies in the world of pixel art.