So has anyone tried out this roguelite card game Forward: Escape from the Fold? I’ve been playing it a bit and it’s a quick game, light but strategic and pretty enjoyable so far. The gameplay is pretty lean: you move through an array of cards, with up to 3 cards to per row, picking one card in each row, which can hurt you, buff you, give you resources or give you the chance to buy/receive an inventory item. You also have a single spell per character you can fire off when you get enough mana. It is very simple and yet the depth is in all the ability, card, and inventory combos. So far, it’s giving me a very satisfying and crunchy “Oh I bet I could combo THIS with THAT” kind of feel.
I’m playing Norco on Gamepass, and I expect I’ll have more to say later, but for all the comparisons being made with Kentucky Route Zero, it’s also a lot more like a standard adventure game. Yeah, the world is a surreal blend of sci-fi and mysticism and metanarrative, but there’s also a mystery to pursue and puzzles to solve and systems to interact with. I’d call it one part Kentucky Route Zero, one part Disco Elysium (in the writing style), and one part Unavowed. So far, so good!
Okay, Forward looks fantastic! This is the sort of game I just love, with many small interesting, tactical decisions. Just as you said, it’s very simple, but there’s clearly all kinds of synergies like you’d expect from a Slay the Spire or whatnot.
I’ve played other tile or cards based games that are had similar movement and combat, but not with the depth this has.
This is soared to be coming to iOS, but I’m going to buy it on pc to spur development.
@Sharpe i think you should start a thread to bring attention to it
Interesting, an indie take on Prince of Persia/Karateka!
I have to say I find the look of black & white video games extremely hard to focus on. They bore me. (Taps ash off end of cigarette holder) This one, Othercyde or whatever the heck… I want to look at literally anything else.
Just a cry into the void for video game makers to go back to using colors.
It seems Trek to Yomi is deliberately invoking early Kurosawa movies. The black and white seems more a matter of source material than an aesthetic choice.
But I agree with you in principle. It’s far more challenging to make a game/movie in black-and-white than color, because you have to justify the decision somehow. Ideally by your movie/game looking amazing. Based on a quick look at that video, that doesn’t seem to be the case with Trek to Yomi. It just looks flat and washed out.
I see colors all over Omori, and I couldn’t hang with Obra Dinn because I hated how it looks. Sorry, Dinnerdawgs! (That’s the official name for Obra Dinn fans.)
That’s what immediately came to mind for me. The world of Limbo absolutely needed to be in black-and-white. It had a gorgeously minimal quality, oppressive and bleak.
Maybe I was being harsh on Trek to Yomi, it could be going for a more generic “old samurai movie” feel. But GoT explicitly name checks Kurosawa, who as we all know was famous for coming up with the idea of filming samurais in grainy black and white.
I’m still very early in Norco but so far it’s been about 95% story/mood and 5% puzzles, so I’m definitely getting Kentucky Route Zero vibes more than anything else.
It’s definitely a narrative game, but at the very least, I was expecting a purely narrative experience with maybe choosing what order to do things in, but there are more gamey sequences than that, and there are obstacles and dependencies. Kentucky Route Zero had gameplay in a sense, but it was almost all bespoke to a particular moment and often subverting your ability to understand and interact with the systems. Norco feels slightly more conventional than that (if still very light-weight in the gameplay department), which was a surprise to me.
