If you enjoy games like Alone in the Dark and Call of Cthulhu - both of which Jamie and I have spent many a happy (and happily terrified) evening playing - then you will love Megara Entertainment's Arcana Agency iOS gamebooks. The first (AA: Prologue) was published a couple of years back to critical acclaim, but in the meantime Megara have been sidetracked with projects like Fabled Lands and Keep of the Lich Lord. Now comes news of a new instalment in the series, written by Paul Gresty and with art by the talented Megara team.There's an Arcana Agency Facebook page where you can see the new release taking shape, with great concept art and story snippets to whet your appetite and curl your tentacles, like this one:
The Mystery of the Walking Corpse
Just as Arcana Agency is ready to close for the weekend, Humphrey Brown and Tom Shanigan are called to the morgue of New York Cornell Hospital. One of their bodies has disappeared – apparently getting up, and walking out of the hospital by itself...
The picture, incidentally, is by Faiz Nabheebucus and shows Amber Giles, intern at the Cornell Hospital. "The Mystery of the Walking Corpse" is just one of several cases lined up for the new app. Jamie and I have had a sneak peek at the storyline and it is really something. Now... how about an Arcana Agency RPG?
Thanks for the mention, Dave. I think the new Arcana Agency app will be a great leap forward from the 2009 prologue. Megara's work on the Fabled Lands games really seems to have brought about a great evolution of what's technically achievable with this kind of app. When I first starting talking to Mikael Louys about this app, I sent him a long list of questions about what I was and wasn't allowed to do - 'Can I have an interactive map, that's updated with each new clue?' 'Can I keep track of each place visited, and each event that's taken place, so that they affect things that happen much later on?' His response was essentially, 'Paul, anything is possible.'
ReplyDeleteThat's why I and Jamie believe the future of gamebooks is in digital formats. You can do so much more. I wish that when we were writing Fabled Lands we'd had Megara (and iOS) to work with. One of our coders at Eidos saw those books in the late '90s and said, "Why would you even try to do something like this in a printed book?" That's even more true today.
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