Journal of an Open Sourcee

I was browsing through my favorite Linux magazine (it’s Linux Format by the way… I wonder if I mention it several times here on my blog if someone will send me a free subscription? What? A guy can dream, can’t he?) at a certain book store today when I came across a quick review of the game Ardentryst.

Ardentryst is an action/RPG sidescoller, focused not just on fighting, but on story, and character development. Strategy as well as reflexes will be needed to overcome the game. The game is set in another world. It is somewhat a cross between Donkey Kong Country, Mario, Castlevania and Kingdom Hearts. Ardentryst is focused on a fantasy world. The player is guided through a storyline which he or her must act in and play a major role in keeping peace and order in Ardentryst. It features two playable characters and a variety of weapons, items, armour, monsters, and beautiful level scenery and graphics.

I hardly ever play any games these days but I immediately thought of my older daughter who is just now discovering computer games and such. So I wrote down the url to take it for a spin once I got home and completely forgot about it. To my surprise, the moment we got back home my daughter reminded me of the game and asked me to put it in our main computer. The dependencies, python and pygame, were fairly easy to install on my system and once I downloaded the game and unzip it, all I had to do was run the “executable” and everything just worked.

For the next 5 minutes I followed the training stage, taking my time as I explained how the game worked to my daughter at the same time that I was learning it. I had barely finished it when she told me she was ready to give it a try.

I went to the kitchen to fulfill my cooking duties for the evening and what followed were 40 minutes of a lot of hacking, slashing and spell casting by a very excited little person who would come running to the kitchen and proudly do her winning dance every time her character would level up!

The game is fairly safe for little kids and it doesn’t require a lot of button mashing to conquer the objectives. The only “negative” aspect of the game was the fact that the heroine Nyx can not be used in the early stages, which was almost a show stopper for my daughter who was very reluctant to play with the “boy” character at first.

Take the game for a spin and enjoy!

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