Temple Of The Muses: Spirit
Demo available, Kickstarter complete
Writing about Spirit is a rare pleasure, not only because it looks like a lovely riff on the same ideas that Sword & Sorcery EP lovingly explored, but also because it has a Kickstarter campaign which has already met its goal. And there's a demo (Win/Mac). The pressure is off, although there are stretch goals, including the rather grand promise of a world double the size of that originally planned and an entire spiritual sequel. The player controls a man who has retired to a remote mountain village but he cannot rest. Beyond a nearby valley lies an ancient temple and he sets out on a journey to visit that temple. The journey may be spiritual. The temple may contain zombies.
Surprise! No zombies. How often does a person go wandering around in a ruined temple and find no zombies? I usually encounter a couple whenever I go near old ruins of any sort, including my car/my love life/my mother-in-law/my bank account Christ Church, Heaton Norris, which I visited at the weekend. I think I saw a lich at one point but it might have been a slightly fresher than the norm zombie wearing a toupee.
No matter what manner of undead I witnessed, I came away with a profound sense of my own mortality and that's precisely the sort of thing that Spirit might inspire me to explore. Without the zombies though, which is a welcome change.