There’s a new pixel art side scroller based on Halloween right around the corner, where you play as 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Michael Myers slicing and dicing your way across Haddonfield. Actually, there isn’t just one game here, there are two, and the other one stars Ash Williams, specifically the 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Ash Vs. Evil Dead iteration, chainsawing and boomsticking away at deadites of all shapes and sizes. Actually, these are just two titles that start a big horror IP mashup of interconnected games that will be releasꦏed annually arou𒁏nd Halloween. The whole project is called RetroRealms, and it's surely the most high-concept approach to a 16-bit platformer I’ve ever seen.
I met with RetroRealms executive producer Tim Hesse at PAX West earlier this month expecting to see a cute little pixel art game, and was completely thrown for a loop when I heard the grand plan for RetroRealms. It🎉 wasn’t until Hesse took me into the RetroRealms Ar𒁃cade, a virtual abandoned arcade that serves as the hub space for an ever-growing library of games, that I started to understand the big picture. There in the entryway were two arcade cabinets, Halloween on the left, Ash Vs. Evil Dead on the right, and enough space for plenty more machines to fill in over time.
Dragon Quest 3🤡 Remaster Previ𒆙ew: Prepare To Be Insulted
Wonder how being a raging narcissist willღ help me on my quest...
Before I get deeper into the intricacies, a bit about the actual games: both Halloween and Ash Vs. Evil Dead are set in a shared universe and follow their respective mascot character on a quest to thwart the Overlord, a demonic creature who has dark, mysterious plans. In Halloween, the Overlord aims to enthrall Jason and turn him into a minion, while in Ash Vs. ♋Evil Dead the O🐎verlord Is scheming to get ahold of the Necronomicon and use its power for bad guy stuff.
A Bold Vision For A New Franchise
Gameplay is the same in both games. You traverse 2D environments ღkilling monsters with a mix of melee and ranged attacks to eviscerate and/or liquify hordes of enemies, buy upgrades, and overcome big story-centric boss fights. Each character plays a little differently. Ash is smaller, faster, and more agile, while Michael is bigger and slower, but can teleport short distances to catch enemies by surprise. Both characters can also enter the Dark Realm, which is a hellish version of each level that offers alternate paths, often used to solve puzzles and get past obstacles. They are two different games each with its own story, but they’re also kind of the same game.
Here’s where things get interesting, and complicated: you can buy either game and play it totally on its own. Other than accessing them through the RetroRealms Arcade, they’re treated as two separate games entirely. But, if you own both games, you can play as Ash in Halloween, or play as Michael Myers in Ash Vs. the Evil Dead. If you bring a character over to the other game you’ll have a fresh progression track to work through, and more importantly, the story and world will change in small ways to accommodate t🗹hat character.
If there are RetroRealms games you ♌don’t own, you’ll find their arcade cabinet turned off in the hub. Interacting with them will prompt you to leave the game and visit the store onꦉ whatever platform you’re on to buy the games you don’t have access to.
So if you play as Ash in Halloween, you won’t get the same intro with the Overlord where he teases Michael and frees him from his cell, it will be a different intro un🐽ique to Ash. As you escape the asylum, all of the patients Michael♕ normally slashes his way through are replaced by deadite versions of those characters, since it would make sense for Ash to be going medieval on humans. The levels themselves won’t change, but because the characters are different, the way you play through them will.
Mix And Match All The Characters You Own
To make it even more complex, both games offer DLC characters - Laurie Strode for Halloween and Kelly Maxwell for Ash Vs. Evil Dead - and both of those characters have their own unique playstyle, weapons, and stats. If you own both base games and either of the DLC characters, you can also take those characters to the opposite gam💫e. In other words, if you buy Halloween, Ash Vs. Evil Dead, and the Kelly Maxwell DLC, 🔯then you can play as Kelly all the way through Halloween. As RetroRealms grows with two new games every year, you’ll be able to take any character you’ve purchased into any games you’ve purchased and play through the campaign with them.
I had about a million questions for Hesse about how the big interconnected system is going to work, and I got the sense that there’s still a lot to be decided. Will new characters get new, unique introductions in older games? Will older characters get rebalanced or gain new abilities in new games? Will every game be a 2D side scroller forever? Are we going to fight the Overlord in every game? So much of what RetroRealms is going to be is still TBD, but𒁃 Halloween and Ash Vs. Evil Dead est🌸ablish the foundation for the future of RetroRealms.
I chatted with Hesse and played both games for quite a while before I truly got the vision for RetroRealms, which may make it seem like a tough sell to a crowd as fickle and apathet❀ic as gamers, b﷽ut at its core RetroRealms is bloody platformer with a couple of strong IPs, and I suspect that will be enough to get a lot of people in the door - it worked for me after all.
I was impressed with what I played enough to want to play𒐪 through the entirety of both games to see how the gameplay evolves and how the story is handled, because there were some hints of a couple of pretty meไaty cutscenes you wouldn’t expect to see in a game like this, but I’m not sure I’m sold on the long term vision of RetroRealms just yet. I’m not sure how much juice there is to squeeze out of a series of platformers that need to be similar enough that the characters from every game work the same in every new installment, but I’m looking forward to seeing what Boss Team Games can pull off while working within those parameters. It’s an incredibly ambitious project, which isn’t something I’ve ever said about a side-scroller before.
