Project: The Eternal Castle [REMASTERED]

Occasionally a game comes across my radar that I totally dig and I'll just get lost in it for a few days. There aren't rules to this, it could just as likely be Celeste or Stephen's Sausage Roll or even Clicking Bad.

And so it was when I stumbled upon The Eternal Castle.

This game has all the things I loved about how games were crafted in the MS-DOS era: art that seemed to exceed the capabilities of the hardware, gentle narrative you wanted to expand in your mind, gameplay rules that would vary a little as the developer found an interesting way to subvert them (I'm looking at you here, Prince of Persia mirror man).

The Eternal Castle ("[REMASTERED]," if you like to buy all the way into the metanarrative, as I do) evokes all those experimental games of the late 1980s that we would never have called experimental: they were simply games at the time.

I got in touch with Leonard Menchiari, the developer, and pitched him on a Linux version, since there was already a Windows and Mac build, and this quickly became a fruitful enterprise. Not only is a Linux version now available on Steam, but we've got it up and running on a Nintendo Switch (although we aren't quite sure how to go about publishing it once we're done polishing it, but we'll run like hell across that bridge once we figure it out).

As I write this, the Steam build is 33% off, so for about 7 bucks you can grab it. If you liked the old-school Prince of Persia, or Another World/Out of this World, or Flashback, you'll probably like playing this.

As a side effect of this effort: I now have a license for GameMaker Studio 2 for both Linux and the Switch. If you have a game you want ported, I'm here to help. Slide into my DMs!

I know I don't update this Patreon often enough (alas, projects don't ship on monthly boundaries), but I appreciate everyone that sticks around between announcements; I assure you that I'm always working towards the next project, and your patronage has helped me go to several developers and say "I'm looking for game ports for my patrons," and not get laughed out of the room because I'm only getting 10 dollars. I definitely appreciate the money, but collectively, you all are opening doors just by being here. Thanks.   :)

More news soon; I've got another Linux game stuck in QA Hell that is hopefully going to slide out--like a QA Persephone--any moment now!