Grey Alien Games is the definition of an outsider game developer. A husband-and-wife team based in rural Dorset, Jake Birkett and Helen Carmichael work alone with support from tiny publishers and overseas contractors. Jake isn't a refugee from AAA development, but a veteran of the unfashionable PC casual gaming scene of the last decade, when he churned out cheerful puzzle games for sites like Big Fish. They are also history nuts. Helen, who writes the scenarios, is a historian, while Jake collects coins. When making a game set in historical times, Jake likes to keep a coin from the period on his desk to turn over in his hand while he works. If you had to place them as characters in a contemporary sitcom, it would be The Detectorists, not Silicon Valley.
We should treasure developers like this, who work out of the loop and follow their own passions, because their games are like nothing else. Grey Alien had a minor hit a couple of years ago with Regency Solitaire, a relaxing, immaculate puzzle game that danced elegantly around a light-hearted pastiche of the novels of Jane Austen. I loved it. When they ported it from Big Fish to Steam, it found an unexpected audience there, and Grey Alien were persuaded to make something along the same lines but aimed more squarely at Steam's core gaming crowd.
The result is Shadowhand, which aims to blend the noble pastime of solitaire with the structure and systems of a role-playing game - rather like Puzzle Quest did for match-three puzzle games. It's definitely a more sophisticated game than Regency Solitaire, adding loot, equipment, character attributes and consumable items to the earlier game's arcade-style combos and recharging skills. It also introduces the wonderfully paradoxical concept of turn-based combat solitaire, which is where its RPG systems find purchase and it offers some tactical depth.
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