
It seems Stone Monkey Studios, like me, thinks that we can never have enough adventure games. These guys have fired up a Kickstarter for City Quest, a rather silly take on the old ‘small town boy travels to the big city, hoping to make a name for himself’ story, with a heavily pixellated art style, plenty of humour, a fair amount of politics and… much more. One man, one mission!
While quite a few adventure games have used ‘pixel art’ in recent years, most haven’t taken it as far as City Quest – this is definitely more The Last Door and less Resonance. There’s nothing wrong with that, however, but the pixellated/old-school look can be taken too far, and I wasn’t too fond of Mikolaj “Sos” Kaminski’s McPixel either, for the same reason. As such, quite a few might be turned off completely by the art, and not see it as an interesting throwback to genre classics. That said, there might be more than meets the eye here, as the game seems full of over-the-top humour and charm, even if it’s hidden by blocky visuals. But visual fidelity is not all that matters, or should at least, in a video game.
City Quest is a fantastic new adventure game with stylish, cutting edge high definition graphics. See?
Sarcasm. Gotta love it! Anyway, I’m sure most are eager to find out where the ‘pre-order’ tier is, so here it is: $8 will get you a glorious DRM-free copy! Their goal is to raise $8.000 though, but with 18 days remaining and close to 50% donated at the time of writing, this campaign just might end up enjoying sweet success. Whether or not the game itself will share such a fate remains unknown until September 2013, which is the current release window.
Still here? Great! I’d suggest trying the demo then. Even if you dislike how it looks, chances are its over-the-top humour will still give you a good laugh or two. Oh and don’t forget about Greenlight.