Avadon 3 - A Truly Retro RPG

An editorial at PC Gamer makes the case that Avadon goes above and beyond the faux-retro trend in RPGs; Avadon is truly a retro RPG throwback.

The first wizard I ever killed was the wireframe master of the Dungeons of Daggorath, at the end of a grinding slog through five grid-based, monochromatic levels that took me most of a summer to finish. I've played (and loved) a lot of RPGs since then, but it's been a long time since I've dug into one like Avadon 3: The Warborn. It's not just retro-flavored, it's retro, full stop: Top-down and grid-based, with simplistic graphics (or primitive, if you want to be less charitable about it), minimal sound and visual effects, no music or voice acting, and lots of reading. It feels like it belongs to a generation of games where the 'c' in 'cRPG' was an important distinction, because most people still thought of RPGs as pen-and-paper games.

Some RPGs in recent memory, like Obsidian's Pillars of Eternity and inXile's Wasteland 2, promised to bring back that old-school feeling. Avadon feels old.

And yet it's managed to find an audience. Not just the Avadon trilogy—developer Spiderweb Software has been making games like Avadon for more than 20 years, long enough for the games industry to move on while it continues to make a very particular kind of RPG. There aren't a lot of people playing games like Avadon, but Spiderweb's survival shows there's still a small group of players hungry for RPGs that genuinely feel like they'd run on a Pentium. Experiences like those can't fall back on swanky eye candy or sprawling first-person worlds to draw in their players, so they rely on something that sometimes feels downright novel these days: Telling a good story.