We’re still working on Dredmor, and that price post and distributor announcement is coming, I swear.

While you wait, though, why not take Inaria out for a spin? It costs the same amount as Dredmor will – $4.99 – and while it’s not a roguelike, I find myself instantly remembering what it was like to be… six, seven? … and playing Ultima: Quest of the Avatar on the original Nintendo Entertainment System, desperately wanting to make RPGs, and not just any RPGs but the RPGs I saw in my head. I suddenly remembered working with the DC Games RPG Toolkit – a very early, shareware toolkit for making Ultima-style games, sort of what RPG Maker might have been like if it was written in 1987 by a bunch of Europeans who had never even heard of Final Fantasy – and trying to shoehorn whatever I wanted to achieve – whatever that was! – into a program that was clearly not designed to accommodate my grand, nebulous vision.

The dark secret of retro gaming is that when you revisit these old, early giants of your youth, they’re never as good as you remember them being. They’re slow, sludgy, grindy, full of filler and stodge, and ultimately an exercise in patience and frustration that we all played because it was perfectly okay to play a game where you had to make maps with graph paper. This is where Inaria comes in: it’s the game we all remember playing, and not the game that we actually played with all of its faults and limitations.

For five dollars, you owe it to yourself to remember what it was like to be five. Me? I find myself remembering why I started doing this, which is a very easy thing to lose sight of when you’re working on a game and it feels like it will never end.

You can find Inaria at http://www.viridiangames.com/ and I hope you will give it a whirl. (Did I mention there’s chiptunes and dancing?)