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One indie developer has made their early access roguelike game entirely free and moved on from the project after declaring it "fails in fundamental ways that made it hard to fix."
Developer Emerick Gibson had the idea of making a side-scrolling roguelike about a mechanical sandworm with turrets latched onto its side after watching Denis Villeneuve's Dune, and that idea eventually blossomed into Iron Mandate, which actually received pretty positive reviews from the people who did play it.
But in a blog post from earlier in the month, Gibson states the game wasn't salvageable. "I've wanted to write this post mortem for a while now," Gibson says. "I was finally moved to do it for two reasons: the first is that I have put this on hold for a while to work on another game: The People of Sea, Sun & Salt. The second is that an alert now appears on the Steam page mentioning the fact that it has not received any updates in the past 23 months."
"It's entirely fair of Steam but I don't want to give the impression that this is some abandoned game. It is fully functional and completable as it is. This pushes me to release it [out of early access] but I don't want to do so without an explanation. So here we are. I'm still very proud of the project and I think it is a fun experimental game. I'm so happy that tens of thousands of players have had the chance to try my game. Unfortunately, the game fails in fundamental ways that make it hard to fix."
Gibson explains that the Iron Mandate's failures stem from its wonky controls that made lots of people tap out early, visuals that didn't make "the ground you go through look good," and a lack of variety, which is what a roguelike game "lives or dies on." Of course, Gibson had a ton of ideas about how to fix these issues. They cite Pepper Grinder as an example of how to make diggable ground look eye-catching, for example, but none of their solutions seemed to be feasible in time.
As mentioned, the roguelike dev has also moved on to another project that sounds much further along called The People of Sea, Sun & Salt, a beautiful and minimalist city-builder set on a Mediterranean island.
Here's some of the other best roguelike games to check out.
