Bridge of Fate

In Bridge of Fate, you control a living crucifix named Crucee who is on a quest to cross the dying world's craziest bridge and has opted to run across it sideways so that he can spin to grapple platforms more easily. Traverse a long level of pits, fire, and random selections of terrain with a lot of secrets to find and rewards for replaying.

Bridge of Fate's addictive primary loop consists of running - or walking, if you're still getting the hang of it - and jumping over gaps in the giant bridge, rotating freely as you fall and land, spinning to attack Morguers and Wheel Boys as you defend yourself, navigating the interiors of large buildings, picking up items that provide health, power, and surprisingly-important score points, and learning how to cope with an increasingly challenging, often-changing highway of likely death.

A great majority of indie games use a pseudo-retro graphical style - and rightly so - but Bridge of Fate truly ensures that all graphics and views conform to the lowered resolution as soon as the preloader and logos are done. You will find no rotated pixels, shrunk points, or any other distortions here. The resolution after the preloader and logos is consistently and always a fixed 240x135 pixel display that has been tactfully nearest-neighbor scaled to fit to whatever the window size may be. It's like the resolution of a Game Boy Advance game if it was 16:9 instead of the taller 3:2 that those classics have!

By beta-testing players, the game has been compared to Commander Keen. I suppose Secret of the Oracle probably subconsciously inspired some of the design while it was being put together. Hindbodes grew up with a lot of DOS games, and Bridge of Fate is quite short, kind of like how those games were.

Bridge of Fate may look it, but unfortunately it is not low-spec. An average-tier 2014 computer will have noticeable drops in framerate compared to the smooth 60 FPS animation of Bridge of Fate on a modern computer. A modern computer should have no trouble running it smoothly, so if your computer was bought recently, I would not worry. It also uses less RAM than Mozilla Firefox (yes, the browser) does on average, according to tests. This factor felt nonthreatening, but important to warn about.

This game can run on Windows, Windows 32-Bit, and 64-Bit Macintosh computers. There has not been a game from this publisher so far that does not use the engine LÖVE, and the way LÖVE is distributed at this time provides no 32-Bit Macintosh build option. The only hiccup, perhaps, is this: you will need to have Winrar, Winzip, or another similar program in order to extract the game files so that you can run Bridge of Fate and play it. This might go without saying, as most people who play web-distributed games already know every immediately important aspect of how to use archive extraction programs, but the message is here just in case, because this game costs money.