La Mulana PC released!

The La Mulana remake is finally out! After localization problems caused the WiiWare version to be essentially cancelled, I didn't think it would ever come out. But La Mulana was released for the PC, DRM free, on the Playsta platform. The Playism platform is brand new, you can buy things from it using Paypal. It's focus is bringing English indie games to the Japanese speakers and bringing Japanese indie games to the English speakers. It's still rough around the edges, but I was able to purchase the game without any hassle.

La Mulana was originally a freeware PC game with MSX aesthetics, but with very rich gameplay. It's a metroidvania styled sidescroller, but with a lot more content and challenge than any metroidvania has ever dreamed of having. You play an Indiana Jones like hero exploring ancient ruins. There are tons of items/abilities to collect, enemies to fight, areas to explore, and puzzles to solve. You really have to explore and the puzzles are not trivial. It's a very, very great game that is a lot of fun to play. The remake not only updates the game's graphics to a modern 2D sidescroller look and remasters the music, but it also improves the game content. I strongly suggest taking a look at the project's blog and checking out what they've done.

I've been looking forward to playing this for a long time. The creators have been trying really hard to get the game released in English. Reading their blog and watching their videos really conveys the love and passion they have for this project. The game looks really great and you can tell they put in a lot of care and attention to make it. With obscure references and quirky humor abound, it's clear they enjoyed making this game. They've released this game DRM free and left all the game resources (sound/sprites/script) out in the open to be modded. Hopefully the game will come out on Steam someday, but I hope you'll purchase the game off Playism to reward the developers and also to play an awesome game. I think it's an indie title well worth supporting and I'd really like Nigiro to be successful.

(NOTE: If you do purchase the game and run Windows 7, make sure you run the installer and the game as Administrator. If you don't, you may have problems, especially with saving, depending on where you installed the game. Also, once you get the laptop in game, you can press F9 to go to the config menu and play around with different graphic filters as well as button layouts.)

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