Small indie game developer Cube Noir recently gave let us play with their forthcoming ‘text based adventure game’ Incursion.

By their nature ‘text based’ games are considered old hat these days; in an era of high-def graphics and motion-controlled input the idea of gameplay momentum generated by reading passages of text and typing in commands seems slow and antiquated.

But Incursion aims to breathe modern magic into the tried and tested format.

Incursion

Nostalgia fans will be happy to hear that, by and large, Incursion looks and feels like the adventure games of Atari, DOS and Apple II yore.

Slowly-revealed on-screen text informs you about the scene, scenario or situation you find yourself in, and, at certain points, a prompt will appear for you to enter information (name, nickname etc) or make a choice.

Quaint, if predictable, right? Well that’s where Incursion get’s interesting. The narrative of the game will exploit a ‘non-linear storyline‘ so as to make gameplay more interesting, and more challenging. It’s likely for this reason that one of the games unique features has been implemented. A ‘roll back’ feature can be triggered by the mouse scroll wheel, letting you you rewind text, actions and choices made.

The exact nature and set-up of the narrative is still being decided on (the game is in development) but, whatever form it ends up taking it’s sure to put a new spin on an old classic.

Public Beta

So when can you get your hands on it? A public beta demo will be available in ‘early March‘.

The finished game is expect to appear in Autumn of this year and, if all goes to plan, will be available to buy on Desura for Mac, PC, Linux at a not-so-shabby cost of $4. One would also hope to see the game appear in the Ubuntu Software Center so that the less ardent gamer can easily discover it.