In our last episode of Free Indie Games, I talked about Fallen London, and how rich that game was with opportunities. Now, the game isn’t nearly as deep as its developers would have you believe, but there is still a lot you can do in it. Now, imagine a game where you truly can do just about whatever you, albeit within a certain preset structure, in this case being an explorer. That game would be Pioneers.
What is Pioneers?
Pioneers starts out with your character writing a letter to their father telling them that they’ve set out to become a world famous adventurer, only for your ship to wreck. You eventually make you way to a nearby town, and that’s when the game opens up. From there, you’re free to explore the town, travel to cities, put a crew together to explore for yourself, find treasures, buy a ship, whatever. Anything you can think you’d do as a world explorer in the 1500’s, you can pretty much do in this game.
Pioneers is one of those games that I sat down to play for just a few minutes to form an opinion about it and get some gameplay, and I ended up playing for over an hour by mistake. As of February 2017, developer Eigen Lenk is still working on the game, but it’s been slow going, especially with him working on other side projects. I’m not sure when, or even if, Pioneers will ever be finished, but even if it isn’t, it’s a hell of a lot of fun as it is now.
