Cadwallon: City of Thieves

It's great to see Cadwallon is still alive - since the original game was one of the first to drown when Rackham's ship started sinking. Rackham is somehow still afloat, but that is another story.

I was sad at first to see that Fantasy Flight had purchased the rights to Rackham's games and not really kept their spirit alive, but this game looks like a promising, light-hearted venture into the beautiful territory of Cadwallon (which is one of the best fantasy places ever created). Let's hope that City of Thieves gains a good following and convinces Fantasy Flight to publish a new edition of the original RPG.

Utopia Engine

Utopia Engine is a solitaire dice game about an old artificer searching the wilderness for pieces to an ancient device. Doomsday is coming. If he can reassemble the Utopia Engine before the world ends, the crisis will be averted and the earth will finally know peace.

A solitaire dice game that is deep and extremely challenging? Yes! Guess what... it is also free to download, print and play. Get this game immediately and give it a go. Since it is currently still in playtest, the designer Nick Hayes is very open to suggestions. Check out the message board and please let him know what you think.

Law of the West

That night beneath the sagging shelves in my friend's cramped wooden closet we unlocked seemingly-infinite worlds within his Commodore 64 computer (recently rescued from a yard sale) - using that magic command: load"*",8,1. The most memorable of these worlds was Law of the West; A pixely, almost-first-person-shooter set in the 1800's American West. It was more immersive than any game I had seen. Not until I later played Cosmic Osmo on the Macintosh would my fascination with virtual worlds be stirred the way it was by Law of the West. This game was the grandfather of "choose your own moral destiny" games like Dark Forces and Fable.


You play the game as the sheriff in a series of interactions with the citizens of Gold Gulch - one at a time. Your goal is to make it to the end of one very eventful day alive and with the highest score possible. It is up to you to decide whether you will use your position of power to uphold the greater good or abuse it for your own murderous whim. The conversations in the game go back and forth between citizens making statements and you choosing a response from four options of varying attitude. You have the freedom to draw your pistol and shoot people dead at any point during an interaction. However, you will discover that the consequences for your actions and attitude can quickly catch up to you.

Law of the West is a short game, involving just one day's worth of events in the sheriff's life - but there is quite a bit of replayability to be had by going back and exploring all of the conversation nodes. In addition to effecting your final score, the choices you make will also determine which of the multiple endings you'll experience. Surviving to sundown is not necessarily a win. You'll need to defend the town from robbers, capture the fancy of the right girl and do some good deeds. While you're at it - try to avoid offending the town doctor. Sure, he's also the town drunk but his opinion of you can mean the difference between life and death if you get gunned down in the line of duty.



You can still play this game today if you just do a quick search for a commodore 64 emulator and the ROM.

Samorost

This excellent game was created by Czech graphic designer Jakub Dvorsky. Since you can play through it in a few minutes right now online, I will refrain from explaining it.

Go play Samorost.

If you get through that, go play the demo of Samorost 2.

Then buy the full version. So cheap.

If you need more awesomeness, check out the rest of Dvorsky's stuff at Amanita Design.