Little Indie Games Worth Knowing About (Probably)

Blendo Games (Thirty Flights of Loving, Quadrilateral Cowboy) have announced their new game, published by Annapurna:

CORRECTION: It was apparently announced a few years ago. We’ve even got a thread!

Wait. Seriously?

This has a steam page and early access trailer!

I feel like I won’t get lost on the map!

So this looks like a mix of chess and grand strategy game? Not sure what to make of it.

What’s so strange about a penis that is firing a weapon and flying an airplan?

Yeah, looks like it has a strategic layer, and then when armies meet it’s chess, but the pieces are based on army composition and supply, and then when pieces meet it’s a JRPG-style battle. I think.

I like the concept but boy, is that map butt-ugly.

Feh, looks like something from 1996, like Cavewars, so I’m fine with it.

In 1996 they didn’t have as many colors or pixels to work with, but graphic design had been invented well before that. Can anyone actually tell what they’re looking at in those screenshots?

Sure it’s a mix of world map, chess map and JRPG battle screenshots. The shots that suffer most, I think, are the world map shots.

Pretty sure that map is just a tile pack from the Unity Asset store. I played around with that same pack and they simply don’t fit together into a good looking map.

I meant more in the sense of text readability and picking up the details of what the units are supposed to be. Like in the shots of the chessboard, tiny but high detail units over a high detail background:
image

I can tell the lower left is a hydra looking thing next to an icon that’s sorta like a rook, but the rest of them?

That would be fine if it wasn’t 2021.

Man tough room.

I wonder what they think about Conquest of Elysium?
This looks interesting. Perhaps an evolution of the Archon series?

There’s a game I lost many hours to as a kid

To me it looks crisp and clean but the background really does make it hard to interpret the foreground - the units kind of get tangled up visually with the map for me. It might well be fine in motion, though.

Conquest of Elysium is ugly too, but at least easier parse. It doesn’t make them bad games, but I don’t think visuals are a selling point for either of these games.

Same here, it was brilliant. There is a modern version actually, I have it in my Steam library somewhere. I’m ashamed to say I haven’t really tried it yet; I should really get around to that.

2D platformer + action-strategy layer, Actraiser-like.