Traveller's Hymn is a free open-world grid-based RPG, and it's out today
Looks lovely
Traveller's Hymn is a top-down, grid-based, open-world adventure game (and breathe), set in a dark fantasy land. The tileset is lovely, as are the little dialogue boxes and menus and the gentle bob of your backpack-ridden character as they walk. Basically, it looks like it's worth everyone's time, particularly because there's one big twist here - it's entirely free.
Developers Aquatic Ranger Studio were asked over on Xwitter why the game was free, considering people likely would've paid good money for something that looks so breezy. They said that it's their "first attempt at gamedev", and that "we've only spent 4 months on it because it started as an experimental project". Essentially, they felt like the game was good enough to publish, but the "contents are a bit lacking", so didn't want to charge for it.
The devs say the game clocks in roughly at "4-5 hours" and it'll see you explore, battle, and loot for some nice rewards. What's staggering is that there are over 20 unique locations, over 100 enemies and NPCs, and over 100 items. All from a three-person team in the space of a few months? Outrageous. Apparently there's also a hunger system but we can pretend that doesn't exist.
There aren't any plans outlined right now for further development, but presumably, they're going to see how it does and decide whether it's worth investing the time to turn it into an actual, full fledged release, perhaps over Steam early access. We'll just have to wait and see.
If you want to give it a try, Traveller's Hymn is out sometime today over on Steam.