It's probably bittersweet news for the creators of Dark And Darker Gold this Dark Forces source port, which released late last year. If you're keen to try the original, playable thanks to the enduring magic of DOXBox, it's on Steam for cheap.
Nightdive Studios also announced a remaster of Turok 3: Shadow of Oblivion today, making this a very good week for fans of authentic (read: actually old) boomer shooters. Within half an hour, I'm sacrificing one of the colony's children to an ancient swamp horror.
Gord sets out its stall pretty quickly. Within a few minutes, I'm building my first settlement, starting with the walls—to keep the dark things out. Within ten I'm fussing about which jobs I want to give each of my settlers, and already antsy for more wood and reeds to construct new buildings.
Combining elements of city builder, real-time strategy, survival, RPG, and horror, Gord is most easily understood as a game about what it would be like to try and keep a town full of villagers alive in the middle of one of those horrible, monster-infested forests from The Witcher.
Beset on all sides by vicious beasts and deformed creatures, risking life and limb just to gather some mushrooms or a bundle of reeds, your small gang of townsfolk look to you to protect not just their lives, but their sanity. This dark horror city builder is like being a mayor in The Witcher
Inspired by Slavic folklore, Gord's world is thick with atmosphere—all of it bleak and horrific. As I set up my first town (or "gord"—the game is named for a specific kind of medieval Slavic fort), I'm nervous even just sending villagers to chop down trees.
Whenever they're outside the safety of cheap Dark And Darker Gold the walls, it feels like they could fall into danger at any moment. Grim cutscenes setting up a story about a cruel imperial bureaucrat forcing the cautious locals into peril further adds to the sense of hopelessness, especially when bizarre creatures of myth—including a demonic dragon with an entourage of wailing ghosts—make their presence known.