Hello everyone! AngelWolf, your NWC Gaming LAN curator, here to tell you about all the new games that will be added this year. One thing I learned from last year’s LAN was that more people wanted to play single-player games. I searched high and low on the internet, compiling a list of free adventure games that I had played in years past. On top of this, I was given a small budget to buy a few more games from GOG.com during the past winter sale, and thanks to their generous licensing agreement, I can also add GOG games from my own personal library. Come visit us at our new location in Maxi’s!
Free Games:
Brutal Doom – The original ‘90s shooter, cranked up to 11 with lots of red pixels.
Mega Man 8-Bit DeathMatch – Someone took the Doom engine and turned it into a colorful 3D representation of the original NES classics. Mega Man and every robot from the original series are in there.
The Marathon Trilogy – Long before Halo, Bungie made a trilogy of shooters exclusively for the Mac. They made it freeware and released the source code, so someone made a PC version.
King’s Quest 1, 2, 3 – Fan-made VGA remakes of classic Sierra point-and-click adventures.
Maniac Mansion Deluxe – Fan-made VGA remake of a classic LucasArts adventure.
Quest for Glory 2 – Fan-made remake.
Heroine’s Quest – Original game in the style of Quest for Glory, with a female protagonist.
Mental Repairs, Inc. – In the future, machine AI requires psychological soothing. It’s up to you to repair a depressed coffeemaker and a photocopier with low self-esteem in a high-tech office.
Sam And Max Episode 104 – Cartoon hijinks ensue as Sam & Max, Freelance Police, take on a semi-fictional President of the United States in this 2007 adventure game.
Beneath a Steel Sky – A classic cyberpunk, sci-fi adventure game set in a dystopian future.
The White Chamber – A sci-fi adventure game with some horror elements. A girl wakes up on a spaceship with no memory of how she got there.
Cayne – Another sci-fi horror adventure, involving a pregnant woman waking up in a creepy facility. Where is she? Why is she there? And why do they want her baby?
Yahtzee’s Adventure Games – Zero Punctuation’s satirical game reviewer Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw once made a series of adventure games about a thief named Trilby.
Slender: The Eight Pages – The original indie horror game. Collect 8 pages in a spooky forest while being stalked by a creature that kills you if you see it.
StarCraft – Blizzard’s original space real-time strategy game is now free, and we have it!
Enclosure – A creepy adventure in a haunted research base in Antarctica.
Flight of the Amazon Queen – An adventure game in the style of Indiana Jones.
FEAR Combat – The free, multiplayer component of FEAR, a shooter about a supernatural cleanup crew and an army of psychically controlled clones.
Bendy and the Ink Machine demo -This indie game demo is a first-person adventure about an animator being stalked by his own creation, an early 1930’s cartoon character.
Paid for games:
Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons – Two brothers must work together, journeying across a fantastical land to find medicine for their sick father, in this cartoon adventure.
Dungeon Keeper 2 – A building game where you get to be the bad guy. Carve out dungeons and populate them with monsters to keep those goody-goody heroes away from your gold!
FTL – Advanced Edition – Micromanage the crew of a starship as you attempt to deliver a message to headquarters in this randomly generated game of strategy and resource management.
Thief Trilogy – A series of first-person stealth games, where you play as a master thief named Garret in an atmospheric medieval world with steam technology.
Outlast – An anonymous email leads an investigative journalist to Mount Massive Asylum to get the scoop on the shady corporation that runs it. He ends up trapped in a horrific nightmare in one of the scariest video games ever made. (ADULTS ONLY, during night gaming)
The Dig – A classic LucasArts adventure about 3 astronauts who get whisked away to an alien planet and must unlock the mysteries of an alien archaeological dig in order to get home.
Monkey Island 1 & 2 – The classic LucasArts adventures of Guybrush Threepwood, a bumbling pirate searching for treasure and his true love in these pirate comedy adventures.
Loom – Another LucasArts fantasy classic from the ‘90s about the weavers of fate, which allows you to use musical notes to cast magic spells.
Free Gifts:
Hard West – A randomly-generated western survival adventure.
Oxenfree – Side scroller about teenagers uncovering a mystery in a small town.
Curator loaned:
Back to the Future – Picking up from the end of part 3, this adventure has Marty travelling back to the prohibition era and teaming up with a teenage Doc Brown.
Game of Thrones – An episodic adventure based on the TV series, it follows members of the Forrester house immediately after the Red Wedding.
Clive Barker’s Undying – Horror author Clive Barker wrote the story for this spooky shooter.
Grim Fandango Remastered – An adventure, based on the Mexican afterlife, about a Grim Reaper/travel agent who uncovers a conspiracy to steal souls in the land of the dead.
Jade Empire – A martial arts role-playing game set in mystical Japan.
Syberia – An adventure game about a reporter uncovering the mystery of a dead toymaker in Syberia.
Walking Dead: Michonne – A 3-episode miniseries adventure game based on the comic book character.
System Shock 2 – A spooky shooter set on a spaceship infected by an alien virus and a rogue AI.
Darkwood – A spooky top-down survival adventure in a dark forest that won’t stop growing.
Fran Bow – A creepy indie adventure about a little girl living in an insane asylum with a very Tim Burton-ish art style.
Are our laptops allowed onto the LAN? I’d love to get in on some Starcraft and FEAR Combat, and not take up a computer that someone else could be using.
Hi Joe! I’ve just asked our Gaming department, and will update again here once they get back to me.
Here’s the official word: “at this time we are unable to support other laptop/pc connections to our system but it is a question i will bring up to our gaming I.T. administrator to see what we could do to support that in the future” Looks like you’ll need to use our machines, but thanks for asking!
Currently it’s more about not having enough space in the actual room for you to set up the laptop since the surrounding tables will be in use by tabletop gamers. We have a reservation system on the LAN though, so if you and a group wanted to play Starcraft together, you could reserve X number of computers for an hour and play as a party. With all the new single player games we have now, finding other people playing the same game at the same time will be a bit tricky without a reservation.
Last Minute Additions:
A program called ScummVM, which allows a HUGE collections of classic point and click adventures to be played on modern systems, got a major update this past December, allowing us to add some games that myself and Yvonne Pawtowski had sitting on our shelves in their original boxes.
Space Quest Collection: All six wacky adventures of space janitor Roger Wilco in a series that spoofs every sci-fi movie made up to that point.
Gobliiins: Yes, the title is spelled correctly. There are 3 i’s in the title because you control 3 different goblins in this classic adventure, each with their own abilities that you must use together in order to solve some devious puzzles and break a curse on the goblin king.
Bad Mojo: A thief living in a seedy building makes the score of his life and makes plans to run away with the money. This changes when he touches a magical amulet that turns him into a cockroach. To break the curse, you must use your wits and ability to push small objects in order to explore the disgusting building from a roach’s point of view, guided by a ghostly apparition to uncover a mystery.
Adventure: The Inside Job & All in the Game: A series about adventure games in the style of Wreck it Ralph. Behind the scenes of your favorite old adventure games, the characters are all actors who go somewhere else when they aren’t needed, sometimes even into other games. Thalia James, a character from a cancelled game, is a member of a task force that keeps order in this crazy world that transitions from EGA to VGA and shows off some unused rooms from classic adventure games.
Classic RTS games: Command & Conquer: Tiberian Dawn, Tiberian Sun, Red Alert, and Dune 2000 were all released as freeware years ago. We have all 4 games installed in both singleplayer and multiplayer modes with a wide variety of custom map packs for any number of players. Groups wishing to play these titles are encouraged to reserve time beforehand.
The Bard’s Tale: Cary Elwes plays a snarky bard in this fantasy game that pokes fun at the tropes of the genre, while Tony Jay lends the voice to an equally snarky narrator, who can’t help but comment on the bard finding armor and weapons in the stomach of a wolf. Wait…..that can’t be right…… Oh, and there’s a singing chorus of imps that shows up every time the bard sees a “chosen one” die, similar to the oompa loompas. It even has the original 80’s Bard’s Tale games inside it for those feeling REALLY nostalgic.
Jotun: Valhalla Edition: A beautiful, hand-drawn action adventure game about a Viking warrior who dies an unheroic death and must prove herself to the gods in order to enter Valhalla.
Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver 1 & 2: An action adventure series about a vampire-turned-wraith who must hunt and kill his sire in a vampire post-apocalypse.
Psychonauts: A young acrobat named Raz runs away from the circus to attend a summer camp for psychics, a secret training/recruitment facility for the Psychonauts, government secret agents who work by entering the minds of their opponents. But something dastardly is afoot, as Raz begins to notice that the brains of his fellow campers are vanishing and he’s the only one who can stop a madman from turning them into psychic weapons. Every level is unique and whimsical, based on some aspect of the person’s nightmares and it’s up to you to collect their emotional baggage, clear their mental cobwebs, and get to the bottom of the mystery.
More scary games:
Amnesia: The Dark Descent: A man named Daniel awakens in the foyer of a large castle sometime in the 1700’s. He has amnesia and must journey deeper into the castle to piece together a horrifying mystery involving torture and human sacrifice.
Amnesia: Justine: A young woman must make her way through a series of Saw-like traps that will kill people she knows if she doesn’t solve a series of puzzles correctly. There’s no saving and death is final in this tense thriller.
Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs: A wealthy industrialist named Oswald wakes up from a long fever in his London mansion. The year is 1899 and the city is strangely silent. Drawn onwards by the ghostly voices of his twin sons, Oswald makes his way under the mansion and into the guts of a gigantic machine for processing meat. Some unseen person on the phone called the “Engineer” wants him to fix the machine in order to save his sons, but is that really a good idea with all the pig monsters lumbering around down there in the dark?
Firewatch: While it doesn’t really have much fantasy or sci-fi, this beautiful forest walking simulator is a well-written mystery story. You play as an older guy who’s having a spot of marital trouble (the extent of which you get to choose during the opening narrative) and takes a job doing firewatch duty in a large state park to get away from it all. While you explore this large forest, you stay in radio contact with your supervisior, a woman on a nearby tower who chatters with you constantly. You investigate kids lighting off fireworks and see a mysterious figure in the distance that might be messing with your tower while you’re away. Things start to happen that make you question who exactly you’re talking to on the radio.
Indigo Prophecy (Fahrenheit): A cinematic action adventure about a man who kills another while possessed and a large conspiracy perpetrated by an Illuminati-like cult. You play as both the killer, and the cops hunting for him in this mashup of police procedural and Matrix style action.
Phantasmagoria: At the height of 90’s adventure game popularity, Sierra experimented with emerging CD-Rom technology to create games using real actors instead of sprites. King’s Quest author Roberta Williams wrote this macabre game that originally came on a whopping 7 CDs, packed with grainy, low-res full motion video that was revolutionary at the time. Filmed like a cheesy horror movie, it caused controversy with it’s adult subject matter and practical gore effects. It’s about a couple who move into the house of a dead magician who was rumored to have killed his previous wives. While exploring, the wife unlocks a mysterious box and sets events into motion that allow her to see what actually happened. Unfortunately, it’s also starting to change her husband’s personality.
Phantasmagoria 2: A sequel in name only, this game follows an office worker who is starting to have a series of horrifying hallucinations just as his co-workers start getting killed off by a mysterious figure. Is it him or is someone setting him up? Oh, and it was filmed right here in Seattle back in 96′.
Even more last minute additions:
Just as I was finishing up the last computer, I got an alert about another sale on Gog. Next thing I know, we passed the 100 game mark.
King’s Quest 4-5-6: We already had VGA remakes of the first three games in the series, but 5 and 6 in particular hold a nostalgic place in my heart so I just had to add them.
Simon The Sorcerer 1-2-3D: An adventure game series about a boy wizard that came out long before Harry Potter.
Broken Sword 1-2-3-4: A series of adventure games about an American tourist and a French journalist who uncover an Indiana Jones-style mystery involving the Knights Templar in modern day Europe.
The Legend of Kyrandia 1-2-3: Another classic adventure game series from the 90’s. This one is about the fantastical land of Kyrandia, which has been taken over by an insane court jester.
Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines: A first person RPG based on White Wolf’s game of the same name. You play as a fledgling vampire in modern day LA.