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We have a lot of time for solo developers here at Readwrite Gaming. For starters, unlike most of the industry, they are unlikely to lay themselves off to keep profits high, so that has to be a bonus.
We have recently looked at things such as Dystopika and Talk To Me Human and now we have another one that looks like it is worth your attention.
Upheaval by Alex Leone has a demo available on Steam that should definitely pique the interest of fans of roguelikes and old-school text adventures at the same time.
What Alex has created here is an open-world roguelike with “incredible freedom”. The premise is you have 30 in-game days to prepare for the arrival of a mysterious magician, and in that time, your choices could lead to all manner of things going wrong.
Upheaval is completely open-ended and has no quests. Basically follow the path you choose by selecting the text-based response you fancy the most – in a lot of ways it reminds me of playing the Fighting Fantasy game books as a kid – hand’s up who remembers such classics as The Warlock of Firetop Mountain by Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson, but instead of page turning, you are mouse clicking. That’s no bad thing, and the fact that the variations here are so wide-ranging looks like once the game has captured your imagination, there will be plenty to come back through, especially as each playthrough is short and will only take between 30 and 90 minutes to complete.
You can follow and wishlist Upheaval on Steam right now and support Alex in his work who said. “I love games where you get to know the world very well as you play: my favorite game is The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, where you can watch each of the citizens of Clock Town go about their lives over the three-day cycle, and you have opportunities to interfere in their lives for better or for worse. I wanted to make a game where the player can get to know the patterns of behavior in the world but has more freedom to interfere with the characters and experiment with how different paths might turn out.”
Make sure you check it out.
Features:
- Short runs: Each adventure usually takes players 30-90 minutes.
- Open-ended adventures: No actions are prescribed, no quests are required to complete the game. Follow a trail of clues to find a powerful artifact, make friends with NPCs, or muck around and stumble into adventures anywhere you go (though the demo may feel a bit sparse right now, much more content is coming).
- Blind-accessible: Play with your favorite screen reader on the command line version (instructions here), no sighted assistance is necessary. TTS is planned soon for the graphical version.
- Mobile-friendly: Made to be easy to play on your phone (alpha + demo is out on Google Play, still working on iOS). Play for a few minutes or a few hours.
- Choose your own adventure gameplay: You always know what your options are in any situation, no need to type commands or play guess-the-word games.
