The best indie games do one thing well. They have one mechanic, and they build everything around this central idea. Braid’s mechanical core—time traveling platforming—informed every element of its presentation, and it didn’t try to do anything else; it never gave you a gun, or the ability to fly, or anything to dilute its gameplay. Bastion did it another way, focusing on the story it was telling and then building a game mechanic around it. Both of these are viable answers, but as a rule a small team can only hit one or, at most, two things out of the park; history is littered with forgotten games that tried to do too much and failed.
Dark Scavenger breaks this rule about as hard as you possibly can. It’s a game made by three people (plus one marketer) that tries to do not one, not two, but three things, one being the whole “fully featured RPG” yarn. It doesn’t quite do any of these things well. Dark Scavenger carries itself, however, with an endearing sense of strangeness, one which make the game fascinating if not particularly good.
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