In December of 2016, developer Behold Studios announced Galaxy of Pen & Paper ($3.99), a space-themed take on their quirky cult hit RPG Knights of Pen & Paper. For a brief history lesson, Behold released Knights of Pen & Paper in the fall of 2012 and it offered up a charming take on RPGs that was filled with all sorts of in-jokes and references to RPGs and the world of video games in general. This revolved around the game’s unique premise of having you control a party of people who are playing a tabletop RPG; it was literally a game-within-a-game and it was a delight. The following summer Behold teamed up with developer Paradox to flesh out the game with a ton of new content, which they called the “+1 Edition" update.
The original Knights of Pen & Paper continued to amass quite a fan base, but when it came time to develop a sequel Behold was busy on other projects and with Paradox now in control of the Knights of Pen & Paper IP they tapped Kyy Games to create Knights of Pen & Paper 2. While the sequel did a lot of things right, it also lacked the heart of the original and didn’t include quite enough new ideas to evolve the concept. It was not as well-received as the first game. That brings us to Galaxy of Pen & Paper which Behold was once again behind the helm of and fans hoped would be a return to form for the series.
Galaxy of Pen & Paper launched on mobile and desktop in July of last year, and while it certainly was a return to form in terms of heart and humor, it was also filled with enough bugs to be something of a let down. Over the next few months Behold released a series of updates hoping to tighten up the experience of Galaxy of Pen & Paper, and they were largely successful, but it felt like it might have been too little too late in the fast-paced world of the App Store. Now a bit over a year after its release and Behold is giving the “+1" treatment to Galaxy of Pen & Paper thanks to a new update released today. Here’s the details:
– 6 new playable classes: Sniper, Cyborg, Smuggler, Scientist, and two secrets.
– New planets and biomes to explore: Laboratory, Old Tokeeo, Snow, Surreal, and many more!
– 2 new player Races that could change your entire party: Reptoid and Mechan!
– 5 new roleplayers that you can invite to play the game with you: Munchkin, Tragedian, Provider, Explorer and Anarchist.
– Tons of new quests, new NPCs, new bosses, new skills, new legendary items and artifacts!
– Improved balancing and unlocking experience with character Skills.
– Improved event system: now it considers your current quest and the place where you’re travelling to.
– A new Achievement, performance improvement and… a lot of bug fixes!
– Many and many hours of gameplay!
Is this enough of a new fresh coat of pain to pull back in fans that were disappointed with the game’s initial release last year? Perhaps! And really, who could be mad at free additional content for any game. While it maybe wasn’t quite as polished as players hoped when it first released, we still enjoyed Galaxy of Pen & Paper quite a bit in our review. And as I said earlier there were a lot of post-release updates that fixed up a lot of the game’s issues, so in our opinion Galaxy of Pen & Paper was already a great little game. This huge new update looks to really take things to the next level, a real +1 as they say, so if this game didn’t quite do it for you on release now would be a good time to check out the updated version and give it a reevaluation.
