Those of you with your eyes on the calendar will be aware that Valve plan to Greenlight more games on Monday. They’ll have quite the set to work their way through, as the catalogue is now absolutely packed with games, many of which show enormous promise. Here’s ten more that are particularly interesting.
FPS indie games are relatively, rare, so it’s interesting to see… Waitasecond? Is that a shark with legs? Why is there a shark with legs in this game, when the blurb says it’s “set in a believable future”?
Never mind. Alongside the increasingly common weapon customization and character development options, Interstellar Marines promises to be non-linear and open-ended, which will be an interesting thing for an FPS to pull off.
This isn’t just chess, this is battle-deathmatch-chess, a special kind of chess where things get really, really bloody, and each move takes you to a third-person perspective fight to the death. I’ve got to say, it looks a little bit more exciting than standard chess does, even with those Lord of the Rings sets that the young people are buying now.
A platform game with a whole host of roleplaying mechanics, all brought to life in an 8-bit style, is exactly the kind of thing to make my half-elven ears prick up, and I particularly like how one of Unepic’s features is “statistics.” Seriously, though, I really do like that. I’m a true RPG fan, you know, and Unepic is one of those Greenlight games I’ll be keeping a particularly close eye on. I’d recommend you try the demo that you can grab from the official site because, while it takes a little while to get going, it’s alarmingly addictive.
Designed
to be as much an educational tool as a game, Ludwig is the story of a
research robot searching for sources of renewable energy, solving puzzles as it explores an abandoned earth. It’s cute,
colourful and, according to the developers, also curriculum-based. Does
this mean it’ll be a little too stiff and staid, or can it still appeal
to gamers who aren’t playing as part of a homework assignment? I’m interested to see if Greenlight can become a home for projects with a wider remit.
CAPITAL LETTERS emphasise just how SERIOUS this Source Engine shooter is. Influenced by classic anime and manga series such as Ghost in the Shell and Akira, NEOTOKYO is about a future Japan fractured by political and economic strife. Check out the Greenlight blurb for more CAPITALISATION.
Eador, Masters of the Broken World
If Unepic’s roleplaying pricks my pointy ears, then Eador’s high fantasy, turn-based strategy makes my bowstring taught. As well as showing off all thetropes you’d expect, such managing medieval economies and forming fantastic armies, Eador has a karma system which judges you how you play the game and draws conclusions about the direction your moral compass points in. Much like your parents always used to.
A platformer that goes on forever, plunging you ever deeper into its procedurally-generated world,Probability 0 is like the like the cruellest of roguelikes in that it expects you to die, it just doesn’t know when. In addition to constantly making snap decisions as you leap and dodge your way downward, you’ll also be choosing new abilities which will hopefully help you to survive just a little longer, to snatch a score that’s just a little higher.
I’m keen to see more Castlevania and Metroid-style games on the PC, because I think we’ve been missing out. Soulbinder might be just what we need, because it plans to offer that same platform action mixed with exploration, but also with a strong emphasis on character development, all wrapped up with some stylish, animated presentation. Also, the world needs more giant ice cats. That’s just a given, right?
Guise of the Wolf
As soon as I looked at this game I had flashbacks to the horror adventure Amnesia and, despite how spooky that game is, those flashbacks were very welcome indeed.Creeping around a gothic, moonlit castle, solving puzzles and trying to overcome some great and supernatural evil is how I’ve always enjoyed my weekends, but with Guise of the Wolf I’ll have the opportunity to transform into werewolf and, I hope, wag my tail, shed hair on the castle rugs and drool as I smell a sausage from twenty meters. The blurb also says that players can combine ingredients to brew potions, though I assume you can’t do this while in wolf form, since glass would slip through your furry paws and a lack of opposable thumbs means you’d have to try and use your nose to nudge the corks off bottles. That’s never going to work.
Ew, that doesn’t even sound nice, does it? Eyeball Invaders is a particularly sticky, squishy arcade platformer which supports up to eight players, and a multiplayer platformer is something of a rarity these days but nevertheless very welcome indeed. All an Eyeball Invader ever needs to do is leap left or right, grabbing anything they touch along the way, but as all eyeballs know, making a jump is a matter of timing and it’s not made any easier by seven other eyeballs all trying to do the same thing at the same time. Man, life is hard when you’re an eyeball, but it looks like like quite a lot of fun.