Avago: Avadon 2 - The Corruption Is Out, Plus Demo

Spiderweb's Jeff Vogel has been making RPGs for twenty years, but I only caught onto them a couple of years back. But my tardiness doesn't dampen my enthusiasm to learn his new game is now out. Avadon 2: The Corruption, the sequel to 2011's Avadon: The Black Fortress, is out today. And it promises lots of improvements over the last, already very decent game, based on player feedback.

We spoke to Vogel about the fantastic success of his Humble Weekly Sale back in July, and found out about how important feedback is to him. It's with this promise that Avadon 2 appears, but loyal fans need not worry about sweeping changes. There's something peculiarly comforting about his lo-fi top-down RPGs, with their extremely familiar artwork and sound effects. A green robe is still a green robe, because of course the pictures serve to tell the story he wants to tell. Money has not changed things.

However, changes there are. This time out you can play as a female or male character in any of five classes, and he promises they spent quite a bit on adding new art this time out. There's also promise of more meaningful choices for characters to make, and multiple endings. Although truth be told, I've yet to reach the end of any of them - I play for ages, have a great time, and then get distracted by the next shiny bauble. I'd have to quit my job to get through them, despite my job being to get through them.

Maddeningly, one of the changes not made to this game is keyboard shortcuts also closing menus as well as opening them. Argh! Please! Please just patch it in, Mr Vogel! It's so infuriating.

But that aside, it's on Steam for just £5.60, and you can pick up the free demo here. You would usually be able to buy it directly from Spiderweb's site for a much larger fee, but right now their MySQL seems a touch broken. While the two games are related, you don't need to have played the first to pick this one up, it's worth noting.

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Yeah, my plan was to load it up, check it works, and then get a screenshot for this post. It's some hours later now. Oops.