Forums > Submission Feedback > viridian_moon's Avernum 5 review

I didn't know Avernum went beyond the initial Exile trilogy. I'm off to buy Avernum 1-6 at GoG for an embarassingly modest payment. Those Exile games were more immersive to me than any game with shint graphics and a bunch of cutscenes. Jeff Vogel has a real flair for a setting.

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I do like a lot of modern games with all the bells and whistles. They're like movies, doing most of the imagining for you so you can just kick back and enjoy the spectacle. But I feel like I'm falling behind on today's discourse about games, because ultimately I don't care NEARLY as much about those bells and whistles as some of the most "hardcore" of folks do. They wouldn't dream of playing a game that doesn't have ray tracing, or 60 fps, or whatever else. Meanwhile, I'm happy to go back and play any old games where the technology hadn't yet reached that point and developers--often working in very small teams--had to focus more on presenting worlds that immersed me for other reasons and let my mind fill in any gaps. I haven't gotten to Vogel's work yet, but maybe I will someday because he clearly has found a devoted following for his games and that never happens by accident.

"Too often we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought." - John F. Kennedy on reality

"What if everything you see is more than what you see--the person next to you is a warrior and the space that appears empty is a secret door to another world? What if something appears that shouldn't? You either dismiss it, or you accept that there is much more to the world than you think. Perhaps it really is a doorway, and if you choose to go inside, you'll find many unexpected things." - Shigeru Miyamoto on secret doors to another world2

Yeah, I think he did the Exile trilogy first, then remade them as Avernum and added three more games. I guess 4-6 were enhanced even more because he's recently-ish re-re-released the first three games. Have those on Steam and have done the first two, as well as his Avadon series, which is more linear and has you going from one place to the next, instead of having an open world.

I dig them; they're more accessible takes on stuff like Baldur's Gate or Divinity: Original Sin where you don't have complex rule-sets to have to remember and things like skills/spells/monsters are more straightforward. I mean, a few fights per game are brutal, even on normal, but most of it isn't that tough if you're reasonably good at character-building and digging up the good equipment and stuff.

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