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Journey through Viking purgatory with Jotun
We've seen games about Vikings and we've seen games about purgatory – but this is the first time we've seen a game about Viking purgatory. Jotun is a top-down, 2D, action-exploration game with mechanics inspired by classics such as The Legend of Zelda and Super Smash Bros. It's not hack-and-slash, and the game uses minimal numbers and text, meaning there are no experience points and few stats. Jotun follows Thora, a Norse warrior who dies a dishonorable death and must prove herself in purgatory, facing off against the gods to enter Valhalla, the glorious Viking afterlife. "Jotun's core loop revolves around collecting Runes to summon and fight the jotun, gigantic Norse elementals," creator William Dube says. "The game focuses on the balance between atmospheric exploration and ferocious combat. Imagine the mysterious romantic mood of Journey mixed with the scale of the boss fights in Shadow of the Colossus in top-down 2D." Jotun was Greenlit after fewer than six days on Steam's brand of community-driven purgatory, and its Kickstarter is well on its way to a CAD$50,000 goal, with almost CAD$34,000 raised and 16 days to go. Jotun is due out on PC and Mac – via Steam, of course – by September 2015, with alpha and beta launches before then. [Image: William Dube]
Vikings, pizza-delivery ninjas and more get the Steam Greenlight
Hopefully you didn't feel like Steam was already feeling overcrowded with content, because Greenlight, the service that lets Steam users vote for the games they want to see offered on the store, has pushed through 50 new games eager for your love and attention. Don't get attached just yet though, as some games are still a ways off from release. Ninja Pizza Girl, for example, was greenlit but still has 11 days left on its Kickstarter campaign. The game, which is less about saucy culinary delights and stealthy warriors and more about bullying and helping girls in particular with self-confidence, has not yet cleared its $35,000 AUD goal. Jotun, a game featuring a hand-drawn art style and taking place in viking purgatory, has also not yet cleared its Kickstarter funding goal, despite being greenlit. If neither emotional encouragement nor fighting giant viking monsters are your thing, keep an eye on the minimalistic - yet nonetheless visually mesmerizing - Absolute Drift, a game where your tires leave bold streaks across a white landscape as you race around, smashing into or avoiding bright red obstacles. Alternatively, there's Quadrant, a horror game where you play as a NASA facility employee in 1979, who must survive being trapped with mysterious creatures. We'd suggest keeping both eyes on that one, so you can see where all the bad things come from. Okay, so that's two paragraphs and we've described less than a tenth of what was greenlit yesterday. To avoid breaking the Internet (and your patience), we're gonna leave the list of games that were greenlit riiiiiight here. Enjoy. [Image: Valve]
ArenaNet unveils the Jotun race of Guild Wars 2
Guild Wars 1 players are familiar with the Jotun race, mostly as "the giant creatures that won't stop KDing me," but they're going to have a continuing and more involved presence in Guild Wars 2, according to the ArenaNet blog. Ree Soesbee took a close look at this race in the newest ArenaNet blog post, "The Savage Pride of the Jotun." In the post, she explains how the Jotun have essentially devolved over the years thanks to infighting: "Over the centuries of their existence, the Jotun have fallen far from their state of grace, losing command of technology and magic they once utilized, and remembering their place as kings of the land only in legend and story." The post delves more deeply into the past and present effects of this change, then switches gears for a behind-the-scenes look at the race's creation. The full post is a good read for anyone interested in the game from a lore or development perspective.
