Players travel to the 20s in Pendula Swing

 

There seem to be a lot of story-driven adventure games popping up at the moment. It’s odd how we don’t see a huge amount of a certain genre for a period of time then it suddenly seems like everyone is doing it. Please don’t take this as any kind of criticism on my part, far from it actually. I love a game with a good bit of story, as long as it’s well written. I’m just musing on how things seem to come about. There is also obviously a point to this. The first installment of a new adventure has just arrived on Steam and actually, it looks pretty interesting. The game is Pendula Swing and it’s taking a different slant on … well … quite a few things really.

Pendula Swing invites us to travel back to America’s roaring 20s and join a world where elves, goblins, dwarves, and orcs co-mingle with humans. This kind of diversity allows the game to approach complex issues such as racism, prejudice and the disparity between wealth and poverty. To help us better fall into the world in which this tale is set, this fantasy take on a storied era of history is also rendered in a beautiful 1920s Art Deco style.

As I mentioned briefly earlier Pendula Swing is an episodic story. Each of these episodes will take the player between 40 and 60 minutes to play through. This gives the overall game the feel of a TV series, where we are playing through each installment only to have to wait excitedly for the next one. This initial release features the first two installments with the remaining five in the series set to roll out at intervals over the next year.

Named “Tired and Retired” and “The Old Hero’s New Journey,” these two opening episodes introduce us to the game’s protagonist Brialynne Donu Tenum, a once famous dwarven hero who served the world 400 years ago and is forced to interrupt her indefinite retirement when she discovers that an important artifact has been stolen. In “The Old Hero’s New Journey,” the heroine returns to the town of Duberdon for the first time in 400 years to find it utterly changed from the way she remembers it. Having been allowed through customs you will travel into Duberon’s Business District. From here players will have to solve problems and unlock other areas of the town in an attempt to help Brialynne make sense of the fast-moving world in which she finds herself and find her ax, something that is going to prove more difficult than it may at first seem.

“What has already been quite a journey for us begins today for players, and we are so excited to unveil Pendula Swing for Steam,” said Anna Janelius, CEO and creative director of Valiant Game Studio at launch. “We set out to make a game that discusses some of the sensitive social issues that face society, in such a way that players are faced with sometimes difficult choices to progress through the game’s deep storyline.”

If you want to decide whether or not you’d like to commit to this unfolding story you will be able to get the first installment of Pendula Swing for PC (also available on Mac) over on Steam for free. You really can’t be fairer than that. If it all floats your boat, the second installment is coming in at $4.99. Should you just want to go the whole hog and purchase the entire serial from day one you’ll be able to grab the season pass for $17.50 until August 31st. This is giving you a 30% launch discount on the game. The same season pass will be going up to its regular price of $24.99 after this date. If you want in, now would appear to be a very good time to go for it.

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