The Shadow in the CathedralGears within gears | Submitted by EmilyShort on Mon, 11/16/2009 - 00:50. |
The Shadow in the Cathedral is a member of a supposedly extinct species, the commercial interactive fiction game. It's the second work out by Textfyre, and was designed by Ian Finley and written by Jon Ingold -- both well-known in the hobbyist community for diverse, gripping, and sometimes disturbing work, though Finley's last notable game came out back in 2000.
A Student Showcase nominee at the '08 Independent Games Festival, Mayhem Intergalatic is a fast-playing space conquest game. My first thought was "Risk clone," but it isn't actually; although combat seems to be per the Risk combat algorithm, there's no concept of adjacency (any ship can move anywhere on the map, though trips to distant stars can take multiple turns), there are no cards, and a fleet can only make one attack per turn.
What it really is, is "4X lite"; your only real actions are dispatching ships to target systems, and upgrading your shipyards. Basically, upgrading a system's shipyards increases the number of ships it produces each turn, but doing so forgoes one turn of production.
