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It’s time for another Game of the Month! For those new to Evercade, Game of the Month is a programme where Evercade VS and Evercade EXP owners (along with VS-R, EXP-R and Alpha owners once those systems launch!) can download a new independently developed game for free every month between April and December. You can enjoy the full version of the game without limits right up until the next update, at which point it will be replaced with something completely new to try! Next year, all of the Game of the Month titles for this year, plus a few exclusive extras, will be published on the Indie Heroes Collection 4 cartridge, which will likely drop around February.
Game of the Month for July 2024 is Jane Austen’s 8-Bit Adventure, an 8-bit platformer inspired by one of the most famous and influential voices in English literature. Don’t worry if you’ve never read any of Austen’s work, because the game itself is simple to pick up and play, but if you are an Austen enthusiast you’ll find a lot to like here!
Jane Austen’s 8-Bit Adventure is the creation of Matthew Justice, a software engineer by trade who always wanted to make a video game. Having grown up with 8-bit home consoles, he decided to make his dream a reality by putting together a game for his favourite classic platform, but he wanted to base it around a theme that hadn’t been done before. Having grown to appreciate Austen’s work thanks to his wife’s enthusiasm for her novels, he decided to theme the game around the author. This, he decided, would allow him to work along with his wife and tap into her expertise in the area.
Writing in a lengthy post on the Jane Austen subreddit, Justice explained some of the challenges he encountered in development. “Given the constraints of making a game that runs on 1980s-era hardware,” he said, “we had to figure out how to blend specific 2D gameplay elements (running, jumping, collecting things) with Jane’s novels (which generally aren’t about running, jumping or collecting things!)”
Eventually, Justice and his wife settled on the concept that Austen herself would be the main character, and the setup for the game would be that she had somehow been pulled into an 8-bit video game’s world. “Since Jane was getting pulled into a retro video game world,” Justice noted, “any staples from either 1980s video games or Regency England were reasonable to include.” Hey, it’s no more ridiculous than any number of plots from video games that came out in the 1980s!
From this starting point came the narrative concept and overall structure of the game. Jane Austen’s 8-bit Adventure unfolds across six main levels, each corresponding to one of Austen’s novels. In each stage, Jane must locate four lost pages before confronting a boss: an antagonistic character from the book in question who is furious at Jane for how she portrayed them in the novel. Justice recruited his wife to write the dialogue for these confrontations, often basing the exchanges off actual quotes from the real novels. At times where that wasn’t possible, she simply made an effort to match the overall tone of the characters’ speech as depicted in the novels.
To further add to the sense of “authenticity”, Justice decided to base the game’s soundtrack on popular ballroom and country dancing themes from Austen’s era, then rearranged them for the 8-bit console’s sound chip. Listen out for Rakes of Rochester, the rather brilliantly named My Lord Byron’s Maggot, and The Salamanca Castanets. Elsewhere, Justice composed several original tracks for the game, including some specifically designed to sound like “video game music” and others aiming to more closely mimic the classic Regency vibe.
Jane Austen’s 8-Bit Adventure is easy to get started with. Control Jane with the D-Pad and press B to jump. Jane can pass through doors, read signs and talk to people by pushing Up on the D-Pad. The A button is a multi-purpose action button: early in the game, Jane equips herself with a quill, which can be used to attack, and as she completes stages she will unlock additional abilities, some of which require directional inputs alongside the button to use. All specialist controls are explained within the game itself, so pay attention to text boxes when they appear.
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Destroying candlesticks, vases and picnic baskets with her attacks rewards Jane with cups of tea (which power her special abilities) and hearts (which restore her health). In some stages you will find a red cup of coffee, which confers temporary invincibility on Jane.
As previously noted, your goal in each stage of Jane Austen’s 8-Bit Adventure is to track down four missing pages and then confront the boss. The boss is behind a door that is locked until you have recovered the pages, so if you find it early make sure to remember where it is. Other locked doors can be opened once Jane earns the “Locksmith” ability. The stages are non-linear, meaning you can explore them freely. Pay attention to how different rooms and floors connect to one another, explore thoroughly and watch out for some classic 8-bit platformer tricks and traps along the way!
If you find the game too easy or too hard, you can adjust the difficulty from the options menu on the title screen. On the normal difficulty, Jane has a maximum health value of 10. On Hard, she has 5 hit points; on Dire, she can take just one hit before being defeated. On Casual mode, meanwhile, Jane cannot be hurt by enemies — though she can still be hurt by traps and bottomless pits. If Jane is defeated, she’ll lose any progress she made since the last door she passed through, and return to that door. If you’ve made notable progress in a stage, it’s sometimes worth passing through a door just to create a “checkpoint” for yourself. You can, of course, also save your progress with the usual Evercade save game functions from the in-game menu, and there’s also a password system allowing you to pick up where you left off — just speak to the librarian to find out your current password.
And that’s everything you need to know to get started with Jane Austen’s 8-Bit Adventure. See you in 8-bit Regency England!
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To get started with Jane Austen’s 8-Bit Adventure and the Game of the Month programme for 2024, connect your Evercade VS or EXP to the Internet via the Network option in Settings, then perform a system update to the latest available firmware version.
When you’re all updated, you’re ready to go — start the game through the VS or EXP logo on the left of the main Evercade menu and make sure your bonnet is good and straight before you’re seen in public!
Note that we always recommend Evercade users keep their consoles up to date as a matter of course to ensure maximum compatibility with new cartridge releases and implement fixes to known issues. Please see the Evercade support pages for full patch notes; all new firmware updates are cumulative, so update once and you’ll see all the benefits.
Please note that saves from the Game of the Month edition of Jane Austen’s 8-Bit Adventure will not carry across to the Indie Heroes Collection 4 cartridge when that releases in February of 2025 (TBC).
Quelle: Blaze Entertainment