Silly title aside, this post is a way for me to buy some time, while letting you know of the lovely freebies I've been recently playing. And yes, oh inquisitive and slightly rude reader, I do find the time to play the odd freeware offering between designing that Wikileaks Stories text adventure, preparing a ton of reviews (for your eyes only) and working on a major -possibly the biggest to ever appear on the Lair- feature. Anyway. On to the games:
Tiny Barbarian: A short fantasy themed run-and-hack game with beautiful pixel graphics, amazing animations and a lovely chiptune soundtrack. It's quite difficult, mind, but ample checkpoints and them infinite lives do help minimize frustration levels. Oh, and there are some interesting mechanics thrown in for good measure too.
L'Abbaye des Morts: Locomalito's best platformer so far, The Abbey of the Dead, feels a lot like Jet Set Willy and sports some impressive Spectrum-esque graphics. Despite being an incredibly simple game, it can at times feel very deep and allows for some delightful exploration. The game also sports top production values, a huge variety of surreal bad guys and comes with manual, DVD cover and poster.
Treasures of a Slaver's Kingdom: Another game with excellent production values. ToaSk is a brilliant, expansive, humorous and very unique text adventure, that lets you parley with and regard stuff in the cruel kingdoms of the Viraxian Empire. Oh, and it's cunningly pushed as a lost retro adventure, that never actually existed. Especially loved the digital feelies.
Divis Mortis: This is a rather more traditional piece of interactive fiction, that has players survive the zombie apocalypse. It's tense, dark, gory, realistic and at times humorous. Divis Mortis isn't huge, but do expect to die quite a bit.
Related @ Gnome's Lair:
Out of all of those I have only played Tiny Barbarian. I like how we both gravitated to different parts of the game (graphics for you and gameplay for myself), I think it really shows how well rounded and fun the game is.
ReplyDeleteYou are indeed right good sir Jonathon. A lovely little retro offering, or as I mentioned on your blog a rather amazing game.
ReplyDeletesweet jesus!!!
ReplyDeleteHeh!
ReplyDeleteTiny Barbarian looks neat, I have recommended L'Abbaye des Morts long time ago (when I still had time for blogging...), the other two are not my cup of tea, so I guess I'll have to give this little pixelated guy a chance then.
ReplyDeleteWhich reminds us all, just how much your blogging is missed dear Barts. Hope you soon find the time to get back to it. Oh, and do enjoy Tiny Barbarian!
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