Kingdom. Two Crowns. Norse Lands.

Kingdom has for a long time been my favorite pixel art game series, ever since its debut as one of Raw Fury’s first two published games. I wrote about all that in The fall and rise of Kingdom for Retronator Magazine. Good old 2016!

After the amazing sequel New Lands, Kingdom Two Crowns—the third title in the side-view strategy/tower defense series—brought co-op multiplayer and extra biomes including Shogun and the later-released free DLC Dead Lands. Long-time fans were also delighted about the more difficult Challenge Islands intermezzo, and now it’s time for the 4th full campaign!

Kingdom Two Crowns: Norse Lands is the first paid expansion for Two Crowns and boy is it worth its money. I mean, did you see the screenshots above? The gameplay is as good as ever, but they’ve really outdone themselves in presentation. As if the always-reflecting river wasn’t at maximum eye candy already, I feel like the pixel art watercolor explorations by Franciszek 'Franek' Nowotniak (the environment artist on Norse Lands) really left a mark on the art style. The shading is done with big, chunky clusters so that the glorious background scenes combine with the forest hills and foreground trees into screenshot paintings worthy of being 5K wallpapers (which is exactly what I did for you here). The style is so consistent it’s sometimes almost at the detriment of gameplay as it took me some time to get better at noticing how many payable items a certain building has left. Not a problem for us Kingdom veterans however.

Not only does overachievement in presentation apply to the visuals, the soundtrack is also instrumental at making Norse Lands worthy of being a premium chapter. The music permeates the landscape wider than previously, delivered by the folklore-inspired band Kalandra. I don’t know how music can do that, but the four Norwegians make you feel the morning mist or the evening calm, as well as give you chills with atmospheric vocals and unexpected instruments. You’ll know when the blood moon is upon you more than ever before.

I'll stop selling the game now, I mainly just wanted to add the amazing art to the blog. Do download those wallpapers. And if you need a mystically-cozy (and at night scary) world to dive into, get the game on Steam ($7 for DLC, $9 for Two Crowns at 50% sale currently, macOS, Windows, Linux) or other devices.

I wanted to share the quite striking visuals from My Work Is Not Yet Done, an exploration/survival/simulation/horror game by Spencer Yan a.k.a. @spncryn. 

The purely black-and-white look resembles the original Macintosh with its high resolution traded for the lack of colors, here wonderfully used to accentuate the darker nature of the game. It works even creepier with the tense music and fast-cut editing, so enjoy exploring it in full form either on the Kickstarter page (where the game was already fully funded) or in the trailer below:

Just a quick post in case anyone’s into isometric spaceship colony sims, Space Haven (@spacehavengame) from the Finnish studio Bugbyte is in its last day of the (well overfunded) Kickstarter campaign. The graphics are quite high res and on the side of pre-rendered 3D, but still very charming and fitting to the space theme.