I just checked out Sophie Houlden‘s The Linear RPG, and I have to admit that it’s pretty captivating.

On a path to...somewhere.

The basic premise of the game is that you are a pixelated stick figure walking along a flat path. The path is superimposed over text that scrolls up as you walk right, and down as you walk left. The text tells the story of the game, and, much like a typical RPG, it forces you to move forward to uncover new plot points and backwards to go over previous events.

As you walk down the path, the camera constantly twists around to give you a side-view of your character. Walking also simulates battles; every couple of steps your character will lose health and gain experience. When the experience bar fills up, it will reset with a new value for its goal, and the player’s maximum health will be increased. The path itself is also littered with nodes that serve as inns and restore the player’s health. The path always turns after a node, and the distances between the nodes (and the enemies that reign within) vary greatly.

This is a pretty accurate abstraction of the major aspects of console RPGs. But is it a nice, full game, or just a proof of concept?

Well, I personally really dig these outside-the-box takes on existing genre conventions, and although The Linear RPG is complete (as in it has a distinct beginning and ending), it’s not much more than a fun little experiment. The concept could be taken a step or two further, though, which is exactly what Marvelous Entertainment’s Yuusha 30 seems to be doing.