A good story or a good atmosphere in a game can make up for a lot. Bugs, bad gameplay, bad design decisions and so on and so forth. You usually expect to find good stories in adventure games in role playing games… but today i’ve play a game, a tower defense game no less, which had me hooked for 9 hours straight. Not because of nice 2D graphics or entertaining gameplay, no my friends, but for the story. I present you, Immortal Defence. So what makes it so special?

As said, the game is a tower defense-game to the core.  You have 100 levels in which you have to stop baddies from reaching the end by carefully placing towers or points as they are called in the game. The gameplay is entertaining enough, but we are here to talk about the real reason why this 40-something megabyte game managed to impress me.

When you enter the game and before each mission, you have a few rows of text with a character explaining why you are defending the path or maybe just offering insight.  In Immortal Defence you play as a human that had his consciousness lifted from his body into Pathspace in order to defend his homeworld against a hostile race. Ships use these Paths in order to cross vast regions of space, ala hypderdrive/warpdrive/whatever. I liked it from the start that it gave me a good reason to play the game and put it into context.

Although it seems generic, it’s amazing what it manages to achieve later on. While in Pathspace, our hero is immortal and the game capitalizes on that in the telling of the story. I could go into detail, but i’ll probably spoil something.. I’ll limit myself to saying that the game manages to touch on some themes which are quite interesting..  the relation of an immortal being with mortals, whether human concepts actually matter if you were a ‘god’, the misconceptions of history, both as the victorious writing it and the natural degradation of information and so much more if you were actually looking for it. This is the kind of game that even the accidental last level that was a “test level” in the 1.0 version, that was not ment to be played, but came in after the last “official” level, managed to inspire some kind of meaning in the overall plot.

And this game is a tower defense game.  Which has the story presented in a few rows of text before each mission. This is competing with the multimedia games nowadays utilizing millions of line of spoken text, gigantic cutscenes featuring full motion video and high definition media.

And it does a better job.

I find myself at a loss again, at how independent game makers manage to get such amazing quality in their games, and huge companies with millions of dollars in capital can’t pull out more then “aliens invade, big muscle hero kills them, optionally rescues female romantic-interest”.

I’m mindblown.

I really, really, really recommend you try out the game.. At the moment they have a “pay what you think it is worth” offer until January 1st and they accept Paypal, so you’d be a fool to pass it up. Just be sure to pay more then 0.31$ since that’s how much Paypal charges for donations. Initially i payed 1.31$. After i finished it, i threw another 15$ just out of respect for the developers. That’s how much i liked it.