The Random Adventure Game News Thread

[WallaceChambers]

Great Ace Attorney collection has been announced for July 27th. These are some of the best in the series.

 

[Boleskine]

Paul Morgan Stetler from Phantasmagoria 2 randomly appears, announces a livestream "Conversations with Curtis" to happen in April.



More info:

https://www.facebook.com/ConversationsWithCurtis/posts/3667343006728258

Spoiler

I completely forgot about this... the livestream was on April 14. There are also some posts on Facebook.

The next livestream is planned for sometime in May.

 

[LESS T_T]

MojoTouch, the developer behind the infamous Simon the Sorcerer 25th Anniversary Edition is back with another re-releases. Flight of the Amazon Queen: 25th Anniversary Edition, once again with the horrible filter by default. They provide original graphics setting fwiw.

Aaand Simon the Sorcerer 3D too.

 

[Morpheus Kitami]

Looking at the new features I was wondering what new features this had that couldn't just be accomplished in ScummVM. A lot of those features are just things that ScummVM does, and since the original game is freeware. The only thing really new seems to be controls and possibly menus. The extras, like a making of the [original] game seem to have been made before...since they also did a 20th anniversary edition on mobile. Huh...

 

[LESS T_T]

Looking at the new features I was wondering what new features this had that couldn't just be accomplished in ScummVM.

They're literally using ScummVM.

 

[Infinitron]

Charles Cecil, renown developer for Revolution Software, 40 years has developed titles across all formats and has dedicated his time towards the ever growing field of narrative in video games. From turn of the century Paris to the far fetched future where A.I must be subverted, there are no subjects that he's not thought about, or written about.

 

[Glop_dweller]

Strange game; the only way to win is not to play.

 

[LESS T_T]

https://grumpygamer.com/judith_lucero

Judith Lucero

It is with great sadness that I found out that Judith Lucero passed away.

Judith was the lead tester on Monkey Island, Monkey Island 2 as well as a vast number of other Lucasfilm games.

She was the one who taught me the importance of testers and how they are a critical gear in the machinery that makes up making a game. Testers aren't just unit tests in human form. They have a unique perspective on the game and poke not only at the bugs but also the design and the thought process of playing a game.

It's a lesson I have never forgot and never will and I owe most of that to Judith.

Here is a email Judith and MI2 testers sent me. It goes on for 5 pages. Some of the suggestions were implemented.

"D" bugs were design bugs.

https://www.mobygames.com/developer/sheet/view/developerId,2861/

 

[V_K]

There Is No Game: Wrong Dimension won most categories, including best non-traditional adventure and best adventure overall. I guess that's the big adventure title of the year that everyone here missed.

Not everyone.

And yes, the title is well deserved.
For me, it was not only the best adventure, but simply the best game that I played last year!

Played it today. It's certainly very creative with its puzzles and storyline, but rather short (I clocked just under 5 hours) and on the easy side. Seemed like it had an inverse difficulty curve - the first chapter, with the fake operating system, was the one that gave me most trouble, and things were just getting easier and easier from there on.

 

[LESS T_T]

Text Adventure Game REIMAGINED
200+ locations
8 endings
Tons of secrets
NON-linear progression
Spiritual child of H.R. Giger, Lovecraft and Zdzisław Beksiński
Ridiculously rich lore and game world.

『Explore. Solve. Run. Hide. Fight. Die. Rise.

『Antumbra - Vile Shards is a loss sequel to 2015's viral hit Antumbra.

『The player walks the land of Sorma'ksul in the shoes of Icon of Rust - an undying entity, forever cursed to be vessel of extradimensional consciousnesses.

『Story takes place right after previous game end - saving Eskalion, who then vanishes from his own universe, leaving the Land of Rust and Moss in hands of Vile.

『The main goal is to survive and maybe escape. Saving the world is probably out of your reach. Then again, who said this world want to be saved...?

 

[Morpheus Kitami]

The Dark Souls of Flash games, is finally getting a sequel? I forget if it was Flash games or adventure games but either way that description was cringeworthy. It was certainly well-made in the graphical department, but beyond that it was just awful to actually play.

 

[WallaceChambers]

First two chapters of Dream Machine are free right now. Worth giving a shot if you haven't already.

 

[LESS T_T]

The first Samorost is remastered and is still free.

https://amanita-design.net/games/samorost-1.html





https://amanitadesign.itch.io/samorost-1

 

[Boleskine]

'Conversations with Curtis' Part 2 aka Phantasmagoria 2 retrospective happening now.

 

[bertram_tung]

STRANGELAND IS OUT!

 

[Dreed]

RIP Benoît Sokal at 66 (the Syberia games)

https://www.microids.com/mourning-benoit-sokal/

29 May Mourning Benoît Sokal
Posted at 10:00h in Microids by Microids
Paris – May 29th 2021 – It’s with extreme sadness and heavy hearts that the Microids team must announce the death of Benoît Sokal, who passed on the 28th of May 2021 after battling a long-term illness.

Known first and foremost as a storyteller and talented comic book artist, Benoît contributed hugely to advancing the video game medium internationally, through a varied and prolific output over the past 25 years.

A true visionary and extremely talented artist, Benoît left an indelible mark on Microids’ history. He worked hard to share his vision with the world, starting in 1999 with his first title, Amerzone. His distinctive style made the various universes he built unforgettable for thousands of players worldwide, even earning him the position of Art Director at Microids for a time.

Benoît is also known and revered for creating the cult Syberia games. This was a series in which he brilliantly transposed his love for all things Eastern European, all encompassed in unique and singular adventures cherished and loved by a loyal army of fans.

The entire Microids team share the grief of his family and friends.

About Benoît Sokal
Benoît Sokal began drawing for À Suivre magazine in 1978. At this time, he created the Inspector Canardo series, featuring a depressed anthropomorphic duck detective with a penchant for cigarettes, alcohol and femmes fatales. In 1996, he started the video game project Amerzone, published by Microids. Benoît Sokal is one of the first graphic novel artists to design, implement and supervise the entire production of a video game. He then went on to become Microids’ Art Director, publishing his second game, Syberia, in 2002. He was recognized as “Person of the Year” at the 2002 video games Phenix Awards; Syberia was crowned “Best adventure game of the year” in 2002 in the USA. In April 2004, the release of Syberia 2 met the same success as the first episode of the saga and was greeted with enthusiasm by fans all over the world. With Syberia 3, Benoît Sokal chose to stick with the old-fashioned way of drawing with pencils and watercolors, rather than using digital tools, giving his universe and characters a very distinctive look. A multi-talented artist, he also crafted the beloved game story and the characters’ dialogue. During these last months, Benoît Sokal was working with the teams at Microids and Koalabs on the upcoming game Syberia: The World Before.

Despite his prolific career in video games, Benoît Sokal never let go of his original passion, and released the graphic novel Kraa in 2010. He also developed the Aquarica universe for several years with his friend François Schuiten. Together, they released the first graphic novel based on Aquarica in 2017.

 

[LESS T_T]

Dexter Stardust - Adventures in Outer Space
Space! Dexter Stardust barely escaped when the Vreesians, inhabitants of the menacing Planet X, sent a fleet of robots to destroy all life on Earth. Now, twenty years later, a mechanical man from the 10th planet seeks to communicate to Dexter a very important message - he is the key to saving both humans and Vreesians. Play the taco-loving Dexter Stardust as he, and his good friend Aurora, go on the greatest adventure of their lives and discover the mystery of the Robot from the Planet X!

Classic Adventure Gameplay
Created as a classic point and click adventure, you can walk, talk, and interact with everything in your surroundings. Use and pick up inventory items to solve puzzles in over 100 unique scenes.

5 Episodes in One Game
Playing Dexter Stardust is like watching back to back episodes of a Saturday morning cartoon! With 5 total episodes, feel free to jump to or replay any episode you’d like at any time.

Full Voice Acted
All characters, cutscenes, and gameplay are completely voice acted!

An Adventure for Everyone
The whole family can go on a spacey adventure; with its non-violent gameplay, incredible story, logical puzzles, and easy controls, Dexter and gang are sure to jump off the screen and into your heart.

And another re-release from MojoTouch.

On his way home after another successful day creating crop circles to amuse and entertain the simple people of the backward planet "Earth", our hero Feeble suffers a slight mishap in his spaceship which results in the utter destruction of a rather important Company research laboratory. The one run by his boss, in fact.

If that wasn't bad enough, whilst drowning his sorrows in the local Space Bar, he somehow manages to get himself involved with the shadowy Freedom Fighters, a crack team of rebels who seek to overthrow the tyrannous regime of the OmniBrain, Ruler of Everything.

What follows is an epic space adventure which sees Feeble undertaking acts of betrayal, intrigue, revolution, and even a bit of cross dressing, in an attempt to right his previous wrongs and save the universe from a fate worse than life.

With over eighty locations to visit, 6000 lines of dialogue and more puzzles than a HappyBot can shake your severed arm at, The Feeble Files takes adventuring into another galaxy!

• Great references to dystopia-themed books and movies
  
• A captivating story full of dark humor, set in a world you wouldn't like to live in
  
• Original and memorable characters that will fascinate, surprise and often repulse you

 

[jfrisby]

The last few updates from the team trying to make a new Laura Bow game have been promising:

5/1/21

Heya all you wonderful Laura Bow fans out there… Welcome back to another monthly update for Laura Bow and the Mechanical Codex! My my, it has been a bit of a crazy month! We are also a bit short on time, so let's just jump right into it, shall we!

Big Things Are Brewin’

Sooo… remember all that stuff we said last month about lacking money, starting another project, and everything? Let’s just forget we said any of that, shall we? At least for the time being.

Sometimes things change very quickly, and this has been one of those moments. Earlier this month we randomly showed our vision of Laura Bow to another expert in the industry - and, after a brief demo, we walked away from the meeting with an agreement to fully fund our project!

Yes, you heard us right! No crowd funding, no developing another app, no begging or pleading… but a nearly immediate agreement to cover all of the development costs for Laura Bow and the Mechanical Codex!

Now, while this is amazing news… we do still have one last big hurdle to go. There is still the matter of approaching Activision again for the licensing rights to Laura Bow. Luckily, our financing partner is also associated with the people we need to speak with there, and we should have a much more direct line of communication this time around.

What does all of this mean exactly? Well, it means the chances of this becoming a real project just went up quite dramatically! Before, we would have said that there was maybe a 10% chance of this becoming an official game… and now we’re thinking that it’s more like a 70-80% chance.

It's pretty amazing, and it is all happening so quickly.

There's still a lot more to do, and the funding is of course contingent on us obtaining the rights - so we're not popping any champagne corks just yet. But we are feeling really good about where we are compared to earlier in the year. And it's a very hopeful sign that all of you amazing Laura Bow fans might finally get the true sequel you've wanted for the past 30 years. We will keep you updated as this whole situation develops.

Since we don't have a lot of visuals to show off this month, here is a new render that our character artists put together as a promotional shot for our upcoming presentation with Activision. Hope you enjoy it! And wish us luck!

Another Checkbox

Not only did we manage to find funding for our project, we also got to check off another box on our todo list which was really important to us.

One thing we always wanted to do when we started this is to have a chat about our project with some of the original creators of Laura Bow, and get their consent for taking their original ideas and carrying them forward for a new generation of adventure gamers.

Well, we're very happy to report that we reached out to Ken and Roberta Williams to ask for their thoughts about what we've been up to. The reception was actually better than we anticipated. Roberta wrote us a long and very sweet message about her thoughts on Laura Bow in general, and the way we were approaching the project. She was super supportive and very much validated some of our own thoughts on the game we are making.

It was a very lovely experience... and we're so happy that we have a chance to pay homage to some of our childhood heroes, by making a game which we believe they'd be proud of.

6/1/21

Fully Operational Dev Station!

This past month, the team has been mostly on hold as we go through a lot of business related affairs - documents, slideshows, videos, oh my! It's not the most illustrious part of a project... but an extremely necessary step, none the less.

Overall, everything seems to be moving along great! Although, we do still have a lot of legal stuff to attend to before we can definitely say that we're moving into full production. We are aiming to have the entire team working on the project full time starting in August. This will mark the first time we've had everyone actively creating the game at the same time - so you should start seeing a lot more progress happening soon! Hopefully that will make up a bit for the lull in activity so far this year.

On top of that, we have some team changes happening! Our animator has unfortunately decided that he cannot dedicate full time to the project - so we needed to find someone else. Luckily, we had a wonderful candidate very closely related to the existing team! Her name is Sofía, and we believe she's going to be a wonderful addition to the team. In addition to that, we are also bringing on a 2nd full time environment artist, and a part time character artist. We have some candidates for these roles already, but we haven't made it official yet, so we'll wait until that time comes in order to announce them.

That's about it for now! There probably won't be a whole lot happening this month either, as our funding isn't likely to go through until July, and some of us need to wrap up work on other projects... Although there will be some part time art and design prepartion happening in the meantime - so if anything interesting comes from that, we will show it off next month.

Anyway, get ready! It looks like this project is going to happen, one way or another... :D

 

[<3sRichardSimmons]

I wonder if the angel investor is Ken Williams. He would fulfill their hints, and seems to be newly energized towards games.

 

[Boleskine]

Stumbled upon these videos and channel recently. I agree with him on the coziness factor in the appeal of PnC games.

 

[MRY]

Ooh, these look great!

Not sure anyone would be interested, but I did an interview with a site called Genesis Temple about adventure game design and Strangeland in particular: https://open.spotify.com/show/2iYAd9dCDnjnVlY5nfcgnW Just got through listening to it, and I quite like it.

 

[Jenkem]

Anyone know about this?

 

[Neuromancer]

Anyone know about this?

https://rpgcodex.net/forums/threads/lacuna-a-sci-fi-noir-adventure.138647/

 

[Zann]

Ooh, these look great!

Not sure anyone would be interested, but I did an interview with a site called Genesis Temple about adventure game design and Strangeland in particular: https://open.spotify.com/show/2iYAd9dCDnjnVlY5nfcgnW Just got through listening to it, and I quite like it.

I just cannot into radio interviews (or videos, for that matter). Will there be a transcript ?

 

[MRY]

Only if I write one, probably.

I’m like you—I generally feel a need to control the pace of consumption, and to be able to skip around as my interest takes me. But most interviews seem to be audio or video these days, alas.