Tag: Bluesky

A Bluesky User Points Out Excellent Indie Adventure Games

It was posted by Francisco González, who laments that people rue the death of the adventure game genre, when, as he says, there are more great adventure games being made now than ever before. Perhaps what we’ve lost is the big publisher, the press that will call attention to them, or maybe just the narrow field of releases that allows single specific games to stand out above a handful of peers. Although I notice that many of these games have positive Eurogamer and Rock Paper Shotgun reviews!

So Francisco posted links to some games that he personally likes. A lot of these games have a pixel art style to them, in ways that purposely evoke the Sierra and Lucasarts games of the 80s and 90s. You can read Francisco’s post on Bluesky. I’ve called out a few below, but encourage you to check the post!

Death of the Reprobate

Death of the Reprobate: An adventure through real Renaissance portraits by John Richardson, creator of comedy adventure games Four Last Things and The Procession to Calvary.

Near-Mage: You play as a student who’s just discovered she’s a witch, and has been sent to study magic in Transylvania. Maybe a bit of a Harry Potter vibe, although with more vampires and less of Rowling’s transphobia. Its description states, “A game about about Transylvania made by Transylvanians!”

PRIM

PRIM: A “cute and creepy” aesthetic suffused this game about a girl who finds out she’s Death’s daughter. Discworld vibes, perhaps?

Rosewater

Francisco’s own Rosewater: A quest for fame across an alternate world version of the old west.

Perfect Tides

Perfect Tides: Set in the year 2000, follow an internet obsessed teen through a year of her life on an island paradise.

Paradigm

Paradigm: A surreal game with bizarre character art, starring a mutant fighting against (adjusts glasses, reads) “a genetically engineered sloth that vomits candy.”

Beyond the Edge of Owlsgard

Beyond the Edge of Owlsgard: Another game set in a world of anthropomorphic animals, the art has a VGA vibe to it and a strong classic Lucasarts vibe.

(And let’s not forget, World of Goo 2 has a change-up last chapter that’s actually an adventure game!)

Nintendo’s Unusual Structure

Over on Bluesky there’s an extremely interesting thread by Max Nichols, that reveals a number of groups that are often thought of as divisions of Nintendo are, in fact, separate companies!

A LOT of the companies that we think of as "Nintendo companies" were actually external studios that happened to work closely with Nintendo.SRD, despite programming basically all of Nintendo's flagship games and being physically located inside Nintendo's offices, was independent until 2022.

— Max Nichols (@maxnichols.bsky.social) 2024-12-13T18:25:40.072Z

It’s a good idea to click through and read the whole thread, and there’s a number of people among the respondents, as well as Max Nichols himself, who are likely worth following if you’re on that platform. One of them, Hyrule Interviews, has this quote from old Nintendo of America employee, and idol of millions of preteen NES addicts, Howard Phillips:

SRD is such a strange case. When Phillips talks about working with external programming teams to develop arcade games, they’re talking about companies like Ikegami Tsushinki, who programmed Donkey Kong for them based off of Shigeru Miyamoto’s design. Brought into context with Nintendo’s “independent subsidiaries,” it becomes evident that they never really stopped doing that, but became more careful that they had the rights over whatever was produced.

It’s also interesting to put this into context with:

  • Rare, who came to work very closely with Nintendo for Donkey Kong Country and all during the N64 era, but then parted ways and was bought out entire by Microsoft. Rare still made games for other platforms during the 16-bit era, releasing Championship Pro-Am for the Genesis and versions of Battletoads for SNES, Genesis, and even for arcades.
  • Argonaut Software, who worked with Nintendo to make the 1st party release Star Fox and then-unreleased Star Fox 2.
  • Intelligent Systems, developers of Advance Wars, Fire Emblem and Paper Mario, among other games.
  • HAL and Game Freak, which are other companies Nintendo has close relationships with but are technically separate. HAL has released mobile games like Part-Time UFO; Game Freak made Drill Dozer and Pocket Card Jockey.
  • And as pointed out in the thread, Masahiro Sakurai, creator of Nintendo’s megahit series Kirby and Super Smash Bros., has never been a Nintendo employee! He created both series while working for HAL, then broke away and worked as a freelance game director.

It causes one to wonder: is Nintendo’s reluctance to staff up on the people who actually construct their games old-fashioned, very modern, or just idiosyncratic of them?