#noio

i made a new zine! (using screenshots from Cloud Garden's creative mode) it's a short poem i wrote serving as a comfort for the gnarled, knobbly, outcast, & downcast; ~ an encouragement to cultivate your fruits for softer, braver, better worlds to come.

NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO

Epic news guys, Kingdom: New Lands is free for a week! Pun is of course intended as Raw Fury’s publishing debut becomes the infinitely-discounted title in the Epic Games Store until June 13. Get your copy here.

The trick is that New Lands is the 2nd installment in the Kingdom franchise and not the latest Two Crowns that brought local and online multiplayer to my favorite series of recent years. However, this works in your favor if you’re new to Kingdom’s greed-filled world. New Lands is arguably the best of the sequels as it introduced the much favored campaign gameplay without compromising the acclaimed minimalism of the original. Two Crowns was just not as elegant at adding new features (but still a great action strategy title overall).

In related recent news, Raw Fury bought the game’s intellectual property from the original creator Thomas van den Berg a.k.a. Noio. I met with Thomas in Berlin during my March Indie Eurotrip and this decision makes sense since he was already developing new, unrelated ideas, with much joy in his eyes. Getting an (undisclosed) lump of money as a parting gift from his creation extends his freedom to do so. I’m excited to see what he comes up with.

So I met a fan of Zoras, then our OCs met, then they were girlfriends ! This is my oc puffer fish zora Nora, and @kascreations ‘ oc Noio. Go check their blog out the art is very noice!

Kingdom Two Crowns is almost upon us! Working towards its December 11 release, (un)publisher Raw Fury just released the launch trailer that shows many new goodies added to the Kingdom series.

I named Kingdom my favorite game of the year for both 2015 (Classic) and 2016 (New Lands) and I wrote extensively about its development in my Retronator Magazine article The fall and rise of Kingdom. It’s a finely designed strategy game with perfect, minimalistic controls and incredible atmosphere featuring a never-ending river to supply eye candy on every step of the way.

Two Crowns brings co-op multiplayer (online and split-screen) amongst many other gameplay additions (iron resource, new units, new mounts …). The campaign will bring us to feudal Japan at first, with new biomes following over time as the game gets expanded post-launch.

I really thought this would be the happiest news for hardcore fans of Kingdom, but it’s only OK.

We got a nice surprise a few months back, when publisher Raw Fury mentioned we’ll be getting a new level—the 6th island—for our beloved tower defens(ish) strategy game. I easily called Kingdom my favorite game in both 2015 (Classic) and 2016 (New Lands). It had absolutely gorgeous pixel art, and brilliant minimalistic controls that earned it a nomination for Excellence in Design at the Independent Games Festival in 2016 (it was also honorably mentioned for Visual Art and Audio). Simply: the game is great and I spared no love telling you all about it in my article The fall and rise of Kingdom. 

The new content arrived this week and it came in the form of free DLC called Kingdom: New Lands - Skull Island. If you want no spoilers, stop reading and just go play it. It’s free. It doesn’t hurt. If you want full-on spoilers, you can read my Steam post I wrote after I finished it earlier today. For the rest, I’ll sum it up like this: either Raw Fury hyped it up to much calling it “challenging AF. Yeah, that's right, capital A F. Fuuuuuuuuuuuu.” or I’m just too good at this game by now. I’m not saying this to brag (OK, a bit), but mostly as a disclaimer why it was just meh. I turned Kingdom inside-out 3 times already—4 times including this playthrough—with 100h+ total playtime and 100% all achievements in all versions. I built my own hopes too big since I would genuinely love a challenge and the announcement sounded like I might just get it. I didn’t. It just makes the game 10% longer to finish without getting any new content. Even the damned hourglass statue didn’t have any effect because I beat the game before it could get even close to running out.

So nothing really changes. We’re back to square one, waiting patiently for Two Crowns—the next big release in the Kingdom lineage, coming in 2018.