Driven Out
Driven Out is a challenging 2D side-scroller with deliberate combat and beautiful 16-bit retro aesthetic. A farmer is forced from her home into a dangerous world in upheaval. Forced to fight dangerous fantastical creatures.
Luckily she has stumbled upon a magical contraption that creates copies of herself if she perishes. As long as this device has power she can place custom checkpoints. However it is a fragile device and if the enemies choose to attack the device it will quickly break.
Features
Deliberate combat. Read the enemy and act accordingly.
Beautiful 16 bit retro art style with fluid animations.
Seamless world without any in-game load screens.
Checkpoints can be placed anywhere.
Destructible checkpoint,
Skill based combat. No character progression and no loot.
1 player
DUALSHOCK®4
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No Pest Productions all rights reserved.
Steam User 5
This is the Barbarian thing, the ever-present and never-dying Dark Souls thing, a thing in gloriously simple 2D, with none of the dozen layers of interlocking level-up systems that seem to thickly encrust -- like a disease of hideous, oozing warts -- all the "major" relatives of the Souls thing. It's simplicity itself, with three (literal) levels of attack and parry. Watch your enemy and read those tells, as the description says; it's just what you get, one hundred percent, and it satisfied the dickens out of me. Bizarre and strange and silly, lovingly crafted, but not without some quizzical bits of jank. Be on your guard for the jank -- for those rapier bees with no corporeality, for those projectiles that fly at you (but not too often) from the scene of your death and into your fresh load. But the really smooth bits are smooth indeed. It feels like an old game and a new game, and it feels . . . right to me.
Bastard's Tale was the developer's opening salvo, and it was rough but worthwhile, an indicator of things to come. This here is a lovely Nordic lass of a project, blonde and blue-eyed and tall, skin like milk, but still with some vestigial traces of youthful gawkiness (though with no actual shyness about what she is). It's good. Can we get another? I think we need another. That one will dance on a moonbeam.
(Okay, so I was playing Sifu, which I like to call "Seafood," and it's not bad in the least, far from it, but it's got systems, man, too many systems. "Unlock this ability five times to permanently unlock! Unlock this one with points and that one with icons . . . or something!" In this game, in Driven Out, you don't level up anything except what's inside your brain. You strain to make the thing -- that is your concentration, your reaction time maybe -- work better, and it does, after a while. I'm busier these days. I'm not young, I have some other foolish aspirations, and I can't abide all these damn systems in my friggin' action games!)