Avernum 6 world map series#

The gameplay is enjoyable, without being as complex as modern systems can get.

It’s engrossing, and helps make what is a very lengthy adventure by indie RPG standards simply fly by. Spiderweb Software’s lead creative (and, realistically, it’s a one-man band), Jeff Vogel, has a real way with words, and though Avernum 3 features a lot of reading, it’s presented in such vivid and elegant depth that it paints a picture where the primitive visuals of the engine struggle. To be able to play a game that approaches a topic so closely in parallel is a wonderful experience indeed. Starring the drow, Drizzt Do’Urden, who escaped the evils of his home town after a century of youth (elves live long, remember), to come to the surface for the first time was a topic Salvatore addressed in vivid depth. Salvatore, has dealt with the same topic so well over the years with his Dungeons & Dragons novels. One of my favourite pulp fiction authors, R. The world they’re exploring is so foreign and alien to them, and the experiences all written up as so new, that the ignorance and naivety really plays to the sense of the mystery and discovery. In the leadup to your heroes taking their first steps outside, there’s an amusing moment where they get lectured on what a tree is, for example. Secondly, there’s a genuine sense of wonder and adventure that comes from stepping out of the dark and into the sunlit world for the first time. Related reading: The other Spiderweb franchise on iPad is Avadon. Predictably, those first steps are positively fraught with danger. Playing an expeditionary party, your role is to take your society’s tentative first steps into the surface world in a very, very long time. After a war breaks out between the two “nations”, the people of Avernum decide to use powerful magic to send people back to the surface to start looking around and, perhaps, set up colonies on the surface. Instead they manage to scrape together as a society and eke out a resentful and miserable existence in the dark.

Avernum 6 world map series#

There’s the surface-dwelling Empire, and then there’s Avenum, a series of caves deep underground that has no exit, and where the Empire teleports its criminals and unwanteds, expecting them to die. This game features a lot of text, but to summarise what it’s about in as few words as possible: In Avernum, the world is split into two “nations”. I’m not sure if at this point there are going to still be people “discovering” these games for the first time, but on the off chance there are, here are a couple of things to know about Avernum 3: firstly, you can play it without having played the other titles and secondly, as subjective as it is when talking about purely narrative-driven games, I reckon this one might just be the best of them. There are a fair few Spiderweb games on the Apple App store already in addition to the two preceding Avernum games (and Avernum 6, for some reason), there are also three games in Spiderweb’s far-too-similarly-named Avadon trilogy.