We’ve been keeping a close eye on the upcoming NES role-playing title Former Dawn, and with very good reason – it’s shaping up to be one of the most technically impressive games ever made for Nintendo’s classic 8-bit console.
The game’s Kickstarter campaign has been live for a bit now, but developer Something Nerdy Studios has just released a new playable demo which allows potential backers to check what the fuss is all about.
“Do you love sprawling, epic science fiction sagas? Then you’ve come to the right place,” says the game’s crowdfunding page. “Chronicles of Astraea: Former Dawn is, in a nutshell, a story of discovery, resistance to evil, and exploration of the human condition. The world is rich, the plot complex, and the characters dynamic and multi-dimensional.”
Something Nerdy Studios is looking for $160,000 to help finish the game – which is also coming to PC via Steam – and has raised almost $100,000 so far, with just under a fortnight remaining.
The team behind the game explains the origins of this ambitious project:
We wanted to tell this story, but tell it in a unique yet classical style. In other words, we wanted to make it a retro game with a huge amount of rich content, yet run on authentic 1980s hardware: the Nintendo Entertainment System.
This wasn’t possible without inventing our own memory mapper, so that’s what we did.
This wasn’t possible without recruiting the most skilled artists we could find from the pixel art community, so that’s what we did.
This wasn’t possible without holding ourselves to the highest quality programming and design standards, so that’s what we did.
We believe that Former Dawn is on track to be the most advanced NES game ever created. It’s not there yet, but with your help, it can be!
You can check out some footage of the demo below. We don’t think we’re exaggerating when we say this is one of the best-looking NES games we’ve ever seen – let us know what you think by posting a comment below.
Go on.... treat yourself to a new game.
