TTRPG Bundle Supporting Reproductive Rights on Itch.io

TTRPG Bundle Supporting Reproductive Rights on Itch.io

For those who are unaware, in the United States, there has been a bucketful of controversy over reproductive rights (mainly Abortion rights). Currently, a leaked Supreme Court opinion may lead to overturning a critical ruling that allows abortions to be performed.

Reproductive rights are fundamental and non-negotiable human rights that need to be defended at all costs.

Several TTRPG designers and publishers have banded together to support reproductive rights, and are currently offering a collection of almost 300 titles that send all of the proceeds to Planned Parenthood and the National Network of Abortion Funds.

You can check out the bundle here. It’s only $5!

These rights are incredibly important, and we hope that you can support those who need their voices heard.

50 Indie Games To Watch – July 2021

50 Indie Games To Watch – July 2021

Welcome indie fans! This is our curated list of recent games that caught our eye on Twitter for #WishlistWednesday. The list is in no particular order of quality or rating.

These indie games are in various stages of development, and we recommend wishlisting, watching, following or otherwise subscribing to each of the developers by clicking the title of each game!

Enjoy!

Monochrome RPG Episode 1: The Maniacal Morning

Monochrome RPG is a 1920s cartoon adventure focused on exploring the political and societal struggles of the city of entertainment, Vaudeville.

Crooks Like Us

A chaotic online party game that drops players into riotous robbery scenarios where the goal is to collect as many valuables as possible and get back to the escape van before time runs out. Battle your way to first place by using gadgets like anvils, ice, earthquakes and more!

Digital Janitors

Digital Janitors is an action-packed desktop defense game where hackers have taken your employer’s network hostage, which means the player must go to each computer in the company, excise the virus, and beat the hacker threat.

Business Heroes: Food Truck Simulation

Discover the joys of entrepreneurship as you manage and grow your own burger truck business in this delicious simulation game. Create the perfect burger for diverse customers, manage your finances, upgrade your business, and cover the city! Play alone or with friends, and unleash the tycoon in you!

Fioresia Online

Fioresia Online is a fantasy MMORPG set in a vast open world. Play with thousands of other players, conquer castles, explore fantastic locations, discover dungeons, solve puzzles or simply manage your home and farm.

Alien Scumbags

Alien Scumbags is a sci-fi action platformer with a big slice of horror and a stack of pop culture references. You’ll run, hide and kill across several levels, collect items from capsule machines and unlock characters.

Silicon City

Retro city building is back! As mayor, build your city block by block. Manage your citizens (silizens) with the help of deep statistics and analytics and get re-elected!

Moo Lander

Moo Lander is a 2D adventure platformer, where you take control over your civilization’s last remaining spaceship to scour varied environments in search for the source of infinite amounts of milk. Tame the Mighty Cows, discover hidden secrets, solve puzzles and fight intelligent enemies!

Mira’s Brush

Mira has been tasked with restoring colour to Chromaland across all 8 art-style based worlds, and squaring off against the villainous Blump. As a house painter, Mira uses her magic brush to steal colour from a host of enemies and use those colours to jump, dash and figure her way through Chromaland.

Awakening The Light

This 2D top down RPG follows NoName #1892 as he fights his way through vast amounts of monsters, navigates dangerous dungeons, and searches for the most important thing in his life: answers, while blending the excitement of classic adventure games with the fun and impact of story driven RPGs.

A Couple Of Cubes

Split-screen voxel fun! A Couple of Cubes is a co-op puzzle game set in a world of cubes. Progress through increasingly complex puzzles to escape the government facility that you are held in with the special abilities granted to your characters.

Phaseshift

Phaseshift is a sci-fi combat racer with cyberpunk aesthetics. Pilot your agile vehicle through futuristic locales, and assault your opponents with tons of weapon combinations! Fast paced, frantic racing action with intense strategic combat.

Espresso Tycoon

Espresso Tycoon – the future of tycoon games is here! The sound of the coffee machine, the unique aroma of coffee grounds… in your own café! Jump into a world full of hardcore management, picky customers, and fierce competition! Build your coffee business from a small place into a whole empire!

The Vagabond Emperor

“The Vagabond Emperor” is a 2D RPG where you begin as a simple vagabond who decides to become an emperor in the fictional Middle Ages during a spreading curse. It’s up to you to decide what to do and where to go to achieve your goals.

Dark Dragonkin

Every Level is like an old school RPG puzzle.Even the enemies are puzzles of how to avoid or destroy them.Control each character separately and use their unique skills to get past obstacles.You must figure out how to gather the party at the exit portal to advance.

Billiards Dungeon

Billiards Dungeon is a pool-based, procedurally-generated rogue-lite. Players control the direction and force of the cue-ball character against a range of enemies. Explore and battle through floors of unique dungeons that change with every game, while unlocking more items in subsequent runs.

Wild Souls

The world is your garden : chill and cute Ecosystem Sandbox ! Create your biomes, balance the food chain, build unique landscapes. Take the control of any creature and roleplay as a wild beast that must survive. Imagine your own unique stories.

TISIS

TISIS is an indie horror game currently in development by a single developer. Its atmospheric and existential horror elements are inspired by The King in Yellow, by Robert W. Chambers and its philosophy revolves around the works of Nietzsche and Zapffe.

During World War II, there were expeditions in Antarctica by both the Allied and the Axis forces. Although the reasons behind their existence were that of asserting control in the region, the true intentions were far more sinister. The game takes place in 1952, eight years after the Antarctica Expeditions. You follow the story of a member of the Allied expedition, who, after waking in a lunatic asylum with no recollection of his past, must search for clues to retrieve his identity and face the horrors that were unearthed in Antarctica.

The plot is heavily inspired by the philosophical background of the worldview in ancient Greece, the cost of committing hubris (ὕβρις), the intervention of the gods with ati (ἄτη), their anger and vengeance, nemesis (νέμεσις) and finally the punishment and destruction of the abuser, tisis (τίσις). Additionally, the game is set in the universe created by Robert W. Chambers in The King In Yellow and its atmosphere and story greatly focuses to visually represent philosophical concepts and ideas proposed by Friedrich Nietzsche, Peter Wessel Zapffe, Thomas Ligotti, H.P. Lovecraft and more.

TISIS is developed in Unreal Engine 4 mainly with assets from the Epic Games Marketplace, with no existing budget. I strive to keep that fact from affecting the quality of the project and intensely work to, at least, reach the expectations that I believe should be achieved by a project entirely developed from a single person.

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Justin Wack and the Big Time Hack

A cozy 2D point & click adventure featuring multiple playable characters and plenty of silliness… Oh, and there’s also some time traveling and relationship stuff going down too… Yeah, and robots – robots too…

Terra Earth

Terra Earth is a 2D platformer with a mostly NES-faithful pixel art style. You can visit the six stages in any order, and the order in which you complete stages affects how the story plays out. That’s basically it; it’s not that complicated, so give it a shot if it seems interesting to you.

Heat and Run

Heat and Run is a unique 2D shooter MOBA experience. Compete against players worldwide in team battles of heroes with unique skills, equipped with magical relics and the outstanding ability to create blocks. Cursed blazes of Navadran island await you.

Mr. Sleepy Man

A 3D Platformer Adventure focused on the interactions you have with characters in a non linear open world. Your actions will have consequences.

FRAGGERWAVE

FRAGGERWAVE is a Retro First Person Shooter with a Vaporwave PixelArt Aesthetic. A celebration of shooters that collects my favorite mechanics from the past 2 decades of FPS goodness, into a single highly offensive-based FPS. A niche game, made by an obsessive gamer, for obsessive gamers.

Star Traders: Frontiers

You are the captain of a starship venturing through a massive open universe. Customize your crew and take command at the helm of your very own ship as you explore a galaxy torn apart by internal strife, alien threats, and political intrigue.

Venice 2089

Explore a future Venice struggling with the effects of rising water slowly destroying the city as a bored teenager, with your hoverboard and your trusty drone.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJxdO7D0Uvc

Gods Domain

God’s Domain is a realistic VR MMORPG that tries to capture the essence of reality with added fantasy elements in a virtual world. The goal is to build something that lets you the player escape to another world where all of your worries from your 9-5 job or your daily life can be replaced with a new life full of adventure, exploration and excitement.

Shatter Sky

Shatter Sky is an upcoming indie flight sim where you get to fly really fast and blow stuff up.

  • Shatter Sky is an upcoming arcade style flight sim currently in development due for release later in 2021
  • Full game pad or mouse and keyboard integration, pick up and play jumping straight into the action
  • Fast paced no strings attached combat, taking down swarms of aggressive enemy AI across multiple terrains and obstacles using an array of weapons and some fancy flying
  • Low system requirements, keeping the frame rates as high as possible
  • Aircraft loadout customisation and optimisation
  • Unique HUD with some familiar flight sim components
  • Low poly graphics for a 90s arcade flight sim feel with some modern comforts

Wirewalk()↳

Wirewalk()↳ is an adventure where you raid virus-riddled systems for the lols.

Ad Wars

Ad Wars is a multi-genre adventure game where you travel all over the Internet to destroy ads, once and for all!

The game is divided into 3 episodes, where each one of them is a completely different adventure with it’s own type of gameplay. You’ll find yourself jumping and shooting the mischievous yet endearing Gengens in Super Freemium Lands, taking on all sorts of monsters RPG-style in Clickbait Kingdom and playing the role of a roguelike detective in Download Highways. Oh, and did we mention that it all starts with Bullet Hell mania?

KEO

KEO is a team-based online multiplayer vehicle combat game set in a sci-fi post-apocalyptic world. Build your loadout to suit your playstyle and balance your team to dominate the battlefield using futuristic remote controlled vehicles! #PlayKEO

RushOut

Rushout is an enthralling and hilarious 3D ragdoll platformer with simple gameplay set in fantastic flying landscapes. And the prize for the best result will spark real excitement in you!🐔 Beware of crazy chickens!🐔

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eryn2afODPM

Tribulation

In Santabell City, political intrigue and shadowy organizations have become commonplace. To counter these growing threats enter Sharla, Indira, Kyra, and Liria of the newly-formed Santabell Arbiter Branch in this intricately deep turn-based JRPG.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-u7TzQscUM

MONSTERGEDDON 42

Join your monster brethren and sistren in psychedelic warfare across historically-inaccurate battlefields of glorious mayhem. It’s the classic struggle of Wicked vs. Evil in this electrifying conclusion to the infinite war of the monster armies.

Sally forth to the monsterfront, do your absolute worst, and have a great time.  An ever-expanding theatre of madness awaits.

* 1 to 14 players (subject to change)
* 13 highly-diverse monster soldiers
* 27 mostly-authentic weapons
* no-lag hit detection
* fire-from-the-barrel mechanics
* tight controls
* beautifully-nonsensical ambience
* structured disorder

Becloudead

Becloudead is a post-apocalyptic sci-fi hack and slash cinematic platformer. Unravel the dark truth behind the zombie apocalypse as you venture deep into the bloody and gruesome narrative of Becloudead.

Slime:Evo

Slime:Evo is a #Metroidvania#indiegame that challenges players to face monstrous #dungeons as an adorable, but morally ambiguous slime.

Kanso

What if Super Hexagon was a walking simulator? Meet Kanso, a hyper relaxing follow the line game. Avoid obstacles while you trace around circular forms and find your moment of Zen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtGkO1ladi4

Winter Survival Simulator

Dive into the ultimate winter survival experience and see if you can survive long enough for rescue to arrive.

Blippp

A generative art drawing tool for drawing drawings. Chase shapes, make pictures!

The Frosts: First Ones

​​The adventure about hunter’s trip, nature and an alien meeting! Explore the wild nature, climb and move further through the cold lands. Save the lost friend and yourself! Meet the Unknown and find the mystery!

Gwan Moon High School : The Ghost Gate

High school students return to school late after hours, each with their own reasons and an ominous feeling. After midnight…the fears deep inside become a reality.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOhtmmVTcCc

Bakemono – Demon Brigade Tenmen Unit 01

Bakemono is an anime themed VR mech simulator.

Hack and Slime

What could be scarier than a massive dungeon-tower infested with skulls, ogres, and dragons? That those same monsters ride the largest multinational in the world with it. You know; business is business. 

Fight your way with fire and sword through more than 25 levels of pure action in a Hack and Slash as epic as it is hilarious: Skip all the sequences and dialogues, who cares? Farm dozens of hours until enemies are nothing more than punching bags, beat 200 hours of a no-budget indie game, and then cry on forums about how short it is. 

HOCKEY HEROES

HOCKEY HEROES is a 3-on-3 arcade hockey role-playing party game. Play alone or with friends as you draft your team from a roster of diverse characters and travel across the country battling through tournaments to win all Original Six Cups and become hockey legends!

Nobody’s Quest

Nobody’s Quest is a relaxing adventure game with light sandbox and RPG elements. Explore the realm of Hubbington, collect crafting materials and resources, save the citizens of Hubb Burg so they can help you in return, defeat Evil spawns and face LOATHE!

GameAMonth2021 – Felis Armis

Every month of 2021 I will create a game on a given theme

NEG: The Threefold Cord

NEG is a 2D Platformer game developed using Godot Engine.

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Sanctuary Saga: Prelude

Follow the antics of disgruntled guilds leaving their homelands to face the harsh unknown in the Untamed Wilds. Row-based combat system forces players to make strategic choices at every moment. Monitor each hero’s Argument meter; if it gets too high they may refuse to help fight!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2StO2jF-J94

Venaitura

A retro RPG wherein you assemble a party of 4 Heroes from 12 Classes and embark on a journey to rid the world of Tsufana from the titular tower’s corruption.

Mech Armada

Command custom mechs and outmaneuver the Swarm in this post-apocalyptic turn-based tactics game. Leverage the terrain, your Mech’s unique skills and your wits to survive a series of ever-changing strategic battles and give humanity hope.

Trash

Discover a post-human earth in Trash, a beautifully crafted open-world action adventure game where strange and wondrous trash-based life thrives. Explore your surroundings with friends, solve puzzles, craft unique attachments and emerge from the heap.

Riot Review – Best Medieval PC Game 2021?

Riot Review – Best Medieval PC Game 2021?

Riot:    Try to overthrow the government

Me:      Yeah!

Riot:    If one peasant like you can’t do anything, perhaps a hundred peasants can

Me:     Hey! Who you calling a peasant?

These are the first lines in the Readme.txt that accompanies the download of Riot from Itch.io. I don’t think I’ve ever been abused so early on in a game. Riot was made during the Brackeys Game Jame 2021, and received a fair amount of praise upon submission. This off-hand, jaunty attitude runs all the way through Riot. It opens with a pirate sea shanty and a bunch of faceless characters being hurled by trebuchets (a catapult to you non-historians) into the wall of a fort and exploding.

I’m not sure why these little fellas explode but there we are. It’s slightly comedic and sends the message….we’re here to have fun. I haven’t seen that many medieval games in 2021, and I would be hard pushed to list the best medieval games for PC. But I’m thinking I’d probably include Riot.

best medieval games for pc

Reverse Tower Defence

Riot is a sort of reverse Tower Defence or a simplistic reduction of an early Total War game, where you play as the attackers and you get given hundreds of them to throw into the breach. You must begin a short distance from the settlement, you are always attacking a small circular settlement, which will be increasingly well defended; towers, turrets and double walls all making more frequent and dense appearances as each level passes.

You choose a spot to attack from and press the left mouse to begin deploying your men. They appear and immediately and lemming-like, charge at the nearest building to begin attacking it (which seems to mean clubbing it with their fists). You end up with a long line of synchronised running guys all heading for the palisade.

The goal of each level is to break into the fortified medieval style village and storm the ‘Town Hall’ at the centre, although it looks little more than a barn. In compensation for the increasing fortification of each level you are afforded an increasingly large mob of peasants to deploy, an ability to place trebuchets and eventually the addition of ‘bombers’.

best medieval war games for pc
Riot!! By Mechanical Beer

The medieval trebuchet will only engage action if some of your men are attacking a structure and then it will fling a single fella through the air to land on top of the building roughly every five seconds or so. The unfortunate volunteer seems to like it as the little flung men ‘wheee’ with excitement, they land however, with the visible splat of a pancake and motionlessly slide off the structure like Wylie Coyote hitting a rock wall. The bombers on the other hand appear to be flaming mummies that run straight to the nearest building and explode like some sort of bandaged, possessed suicide bomber.

Resource Management

There is an element of managing your resources to Riot as the trebuchet costs 15 peasants to place, but does not seem to deplete your reserves with the men it flings (there’s an exploit here) and the bombers costs 5 peasants. The only other strategic element is where you choose to drop your mob, because this matters. We’re not talking Terra Invicta level of strategy here, of course.

The little fellas are programmed to charge at and attack the nearest eligible structure and when they destroy it they charge the next nearest one from there. So where you place and launch attacks from matters.

This all sound wonderful fun and it is, but…

Whilst classes of men might differ the overly simplistic AI your peasant mob is endowed with is does not. For example, having breached a wall they do not head for the next wall or the tower blocking the way to the town hall…no they just start to attack the next segment of wall, because it is the next nearest eligible structure. All the while the towers defending the cities are bombarding your idiot crew. Even if you reserve men and dispatch them later when a gaping breach in the wall has been made in front of you they will still head off at a 50° angle and attack a pointless barn off to the right.

You will shift around the gap trying to find the sweet spot to stop them running that way and then all of a sudden the men you lay start running off at a 50°angle to the left now.

Best Medieval Game 2021 Nominee: Riot

The Trebuchet’s just follow suit and so do the bombers. It is frustrating and there are few more annoying things in a game than controls which result in an action you did not input or want and there being little you can do about it.

This does promote a disengagement with the game in the latter third, which is a shame, because I began by thinking this was reasonably fun.

Riot!! - One of the best medieval games for PC?

Riot offers 12 levels of increasing difficulty and can be completed in an about two hours. There are not many decisions to make or much variation in play; make a choice of where to start, release the mob, watch for results, move and repeat. Simply calling Riot a medieval game is doing it an injustice. I mean, I did compare it to Total War not long ago.

With improvements Riot might become something more interesting, it has character, charm and appeal. I do love the menu soundtrack, but overall Riot is a nice idea that starts well and does not really develop.

Somewhat spoiled by poor AI, Riot still has enough about it to make a decent, lunchtime distraction; a surprisingly relaxing and unstressful one for a game named Riot.

NUTS – Review

NUTS – Review


Squirrels
…Shifty buggers I always thought. Stashing things, hiding, staring at you and running off abruptly like you caught them saying stuff about you or making some sort of plan to get you. I was looking forward to this NUTS review and playthrough. A pleasant squirrel surveillance puzzle game; a chance to have them endeared to me.

Cream chinos – check.

Blue shirt – check.

A chance to be David Attenborough for this NUTS review. Nope…a chance at revenge.

NUTS review

Last year a squirrel defeated me. No ordinary squirrel mind you, clearly the local Ninja Warrior champion. He kept invading the garden and stealing the bird food.

I tried lurking at windows to shoot him with a super soaker, I tried making squirrel baffles that meant he couldn’t climb onto the bird table. I hated him… he beat me time after time and every time he just used to sit there staring at me through the window, eating the food. NUTS was going to be military grade training for me in tracking and understanding the enemy.

Three Years In The Making

NUTS was originally a short demo created in 48 hours for Global Game Jam in 2018. So much good comes out of that annual event in encouraging developers to just go ahead and make that idea with the specific goal of perhaps starting them down the road to completing something. NUTS is a great example of that journey. Published by NoodleCake it has taken three years to get from that short demo to the full game you see today. You can still download and play the original demo from Itch.io. Jonatan van Hove (Joon in the listed designers), the original Icelandic designer has left it there for posterity.

NUTS Chasing XP Indie Game Review

NUTS is a beautiful, calm game, that bears a lot of similarities to Firewatch. In both games you operate in a remote location of natural beauty with only a more experienced colleague in telephone contact with you as the other human, who offers guidance and tasks.  Here your job is to save the Melmoth forest from developers by proving that the area is a significant squirrel habitat and that they live here.

Lights, Camera, Action

After a brief set up you are into the game and it’s pretty simple, with few command options. You pick up cameras and place them to track squirrels, then you return to the caravan, hit record and watch the playback in the morning to see if you captured any on film. If you did you go out and move the cameras to try and ultimately find out where these squirrels are coming from and going to. That’s it; you play on your own, set cameras and scrub video for stills of them to print and fax to your boss for the next mission.

Really…that’s it.

That’s all you do for the whole game. Review over… go photograph some squirrels.

NUTS squirrel game review

I am aware that this sounds implacably dull and cyclical gameplay, but it really isn’t. It is remarkably engaging. You can be cautious and place cameras quite close together and be certain of tracking their route, you can try to find high wide angle positions or examine the land and take your best guess as to where they might go from where you saw them last. This approach is most rewarding as you scrub the video the next morning to see if you were right.

It’s great when you cut down the chase with a well deduced guess in placing the camera and, surprisingly it’s also quite joyous when you are totally wrong and stare at empty video for 90 seconds and realise you’ve been had…the cunning blighters.

Sure, there has been some criticism of the needless walking back and forwards but you find new routes, new possibilities for your cameras and the sprint function dramatically cuts down the retreading of steps or the return walk to the caravan. It honestly never bothered me one bit.

NUTS gameplay review

Let’s Talk Aesthetic

NUTS takes a different slant on look as well as gameplay. At first I am reminded of those stories of kids turning orange from drinking too much Sunny Delight day after day.

Well NUTS looks like it fell into a vat of Sunny Delight and you are wandering around playing the game through a diving mask filled with Sunny Delight. The entire game is presented in stark pastel shades of green, purple and yellow. Again though, this works and it is a clever choice that gives this game a very pleasing aesthetic. Imagine they made your standard glossy natural looking forest, the game would appear a lot duller and perhaps the gameplay intrigue would not be enough to save it.

In addition, the abstract colour palette makes Melmoth forest and the game in general both pleasing to the eye and memorable. It also allows the game to take something of a minimalist approach to surroundings. I don’t know how they do it, but what I noticed while putting together our NUTS review is the environment is entrancing – and the design of the levels makes this visual approach work for highlighting and negotiating different terrain in a way it just wouldn’t if it were plainly shown as a grey rock and green tree in clear definition.

I got about five hours of pleasant gameplay for this NUTS review, and the only replay value are tapes left lying around from when your boss was surveying the squirrels some time ago.

You may miss them as you progress through each of the six levels. You don’t need them to complete the game, but given a large part of the game is the narrative then it certainly adds to the game to seek them out.

Let’s Go NUTS

All in all, NUTS is definitely worth a pecan. It’s basically a giant game of hide-and-seek and has a great feel to it all round. It’s a good example of simple ideas done well – work. So go check it out and bathe yourself happily in this luminous squirrel conundrum. The story is strong, the gameplay straight forward, but engaging and you’ll have a good time discovering what these squirrels are up to.

The discovery is going to make me treat the one in my garden with a little more respect…I might even give him some nuts.

Stephen Daughton

What Lives Below Review

What Lives Below Review

This isn’t really a game… this is a secret recruitment program for the Japanese whaling Industry. If you complete this game your download IP location is given to the Public Security Intelligence Agency in Tokyo; then a strange man in black shades and black badly smelling rubber overalls sidles up to you in the milk aisle asking you how handy you are with a harpoon and if you want to join the fleet? I can’t quite verify this because the game is not as straight forward to finish as I imagined. 

What Lives Below

The game opens up with a beautiful menu screen of a vast colourful setting sun as you rise and fall on the swell of the sea, backed by a great electronic beat; It all bodes well. ‘What lives below’ is currently a demo and the developer has created what they describe as four boss fights, taken in a first person perspective.

You begin on the wharf of a tiny island with one mock Tudor house and a small boat reminiscent of Jaws; you just know that at some point you are going to whisper to yourself, ‘you’re gonna need a bigger boat’. 

What Lives Below Review
Indie Game What Lives Below

The procedurally generated ocean swells are big, vast and combined with the changing lighting and weather it does a good job of creating a dangerous, brooding and malevolent environment. It all makes you feel alone and vulnerable, this is reinforced when you meet the first sea monster and it leaps vertically 40 foot out of the sea.

The four fights on offer see you hunt an electric humpback whale, a giant brooding octopus who might even pick you up and throw you around if you don’t keep moving, an oversized (incongruous) eagle and a bloody great Godzilla sized sea turtle.

What Lives Below Indie Game Review

They will all try to destroy you by smashing or shoving you under the waves and it gets quite intense and chaotic in battle at times.

Initially in seeking the monsters they stick to a generated route (except for the octopus who is clearly a sedentary obese octopus) but the moment you do them the slightest damage the creatures pursue you and the frantic battle is on. To succeed you need to do a variety of things, stop the boat from bursting into flames, repeatedly harpoon the monsters to wear down their health and deal with additional dangers like avoiding lightning strikes.

You can’t do these things at the same time as you might in a standard fps. In this sense you have to manage your situation, rather like Command and Conquer or Company of Heroes, frequently taking care of the needs of survival (repair and steering) trying to give yourself time to fight in-between these moments, all whilst under attack; It is challenging.

The difficulty is set reasonably high. It’s fair, but there is a sense of ‘Live, Die, Repeat’ about this; when you die you start again back at the island, have to hop on the boat and go find the sea beasts again. And you will die a lot to begin with as you adjust and find your strategy; that is as it should be in a demo presenting boss fights; these are meant to be the difficult bits of a potential full game, but it might be frustrating at first.

Then there is the weapon, you only have a harpoon and there is something slightly repetitive about this, despite an alternate fire mode which simply electrifies it. Currently this harpoon feels a little flimsy, there isn’t much noise or punch to it and you don’t feel you are using a significant weapon here. Things are also a little difficult to control overall because the ocean swell is so great.

What Lives Below Screenshot

During your adventure, you move quite considerably on the boat in terms of field of vision and it makes it hard to get off accurate shots against the monsters, so it’s just as well they are huge. These things are all just minor gripes though and the developer, keen for feedback, is perfectly able to improve on them based on what we can see already on offer.

What Lives Below Gameplay

What lives below has garnered lots of positive attention, surpassing 2000 downloads in its’ first week on Itchio; a sizable achievement for a young developer. They have just gained a Steam development page and it is amazing to think that this is the work of one 19 year old in just eight months. It looks good, is something different in style, has some impressive ocean physics and shows a tremendous amount of potential.

Currently you’ll get a couple of hours play out of it and it will be interesting to follow the development of the wider levels, weapons and story building. So head on over to Steam, follow it there and download this boss demo on Itchio to give it a go. It is free to download, but you’ll regret not giving them a donation once you play it. 

…and if you do well at it, you’ll find me wearing shades and a black suit, serving you at the sushi counter with a car outside waiting to take you to harpoon training.