However, the precious thing is inconveniently torn apart into twelve pieces, which are scattered around the catacombs, so the monster/king has to look inside every nook and cranny to get them back. After a thousand years, the former king finally sees an opportunity to escape, but before he can retake his country, he needs to regain his soul. Beginning with the story told in the animated intro, there’s no nebulous artistic message, only refreshing ’80s simplicity: The good king declares “a time of peace for all,” which pisses off his plainly evil right-hand wizard, who rips out his soul, turns him into a beast and throws him into the dungeon. The result is a honest-to-god explorational platform game that could just as well have existed in the C64’s heyday. Now the latter game’s programmer Georg Rottensteiner has teamed up with Trevor Storey, who already did the title artwork for Joe Gunn, to create the latest Psytronik release: Soulless. One of the institutions dealing in real retro throwbacks is Psytronik Software, producers of such modern Commodore 64 classics as Sceptre of Bagdad, Psyko Zone and Joe Gunn. Stylistical clashes like blocky sprites and backgrounds with high-res effects or similar disregard of authenticity are frequent probable cause to assume “retro throwback” doesn’t mean more than a bad excuse to put as little work as possible into the graphic assets.īut then there are the developers who go the extra mile not only to make the games look and feel like the kind of games we played in our childhoods, but even make them run on the hardware we’d have played them on. Despite most of these games harken back to the good old days when video games were made out of blocky pixels, the verdict is often that there’s a lack of respect for design traditions, replacing them with countless cheap deaths – cheap in both the ways they are inflicted and in their consequences. Some people feel that the creators’ artistic ambitions (or pretense?) celebrated in the mainstream and indie outlets tend to distract from the actual gameplay. There’s been a growing resentment with some aspects of the indie game scene in communities lately.
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