News: Mazes of Fate, Back to Stone

January 14, 2007, 02:13 PM

by brandon, via Graffiti -
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I've been dragging my feet on this one as well (surprise), but in case you're as-yet unaware, Graffiti has published two nice 2D RPGs for the GBA in recent months, to little or no fanfare. Mazes of Fate is a first person dungeon game from argentina of all places (Sabarasa), and seems to have very deep systems, branching paths, and a lot of gameplay time (if you're into that - I prefer shorter games).

Check out some impressions on neogaf, complete with images - you can grab a video on the official site, but it's flash so I can't direct link. The overhead town sections look nicest to me, and I sort of wish they'd done the whole game that way. One thing that particularly impressed me when reading the aforelinked impressions is that everything in the dungeon happens in realtime. So if you're fighting an enemy, other enemies may be flanking you, or otherwise approaching, and can join in the battle. Anyway, it seems like a lot of work was put into this, so it's nice to see it come out here. According to an informative interview with n-philes, Sabarasa is currently working on a DS sequel. Incidentally, I have no idea why there's an O~3 publishing logo on the box art in that neogaf thread, when Graffiti released it. If anyone has info, let me know!

Next there's Back to Stone (french in origin). It's a 3/4 view action RPG along the linds of LandStalker (sort of kind of). There aren't a whole lot of impressions of it around the internet, so here are some from comic-kaze of the sngp forums: "Great concept, and the first bits reminded me of great oblique angled 2D games. It has a promising combat system and a lot of puzzles mostly involving beating up enemies and turning them to blocks of stone and then knocking the stones around to get them to land on special tiles to unlock keys. Good storyline about the ruins of a technological society beseiged by magic and demons from the past.

But the game is entirely ruined by lack of a saved game system. The damn thing is pretty hard and it uses like 13 character passwords that are impossible to remember and really clumsy. Totally ruins the game. I can't believe some companies are still using password systems to save the cost of a little SRAM on carts. Disappointed after how great Mazes of Fate was (same publisher, different developers)."

Even so, I rather like the look of it...and you can download a movie of the game here. There's a visual representation of the gameplay here as well, even if you don't speak french. The bottom line on both of these games is that they're interesting european-style 2D efforts, really late in the GBAs lifecycle, and would probably otherwise go unnoticed. So give them a look, if this sort of thing grabs you. They're a bit tough to find on store shelves, I'd say, but you can get them from Amazon, or Graffiti's ebay store. If you have to go for one, sounds like Mazes of Fate is the winner, which is unfortunate given how much I like action RPGs.