For nearly a quarter century, Spiderweb Software has been cranking out unabashedly old-school RPGs with excellent stories, characters, and universes to explore. When the husband and wife duo began bringing some of their titles from the Avadon and Avernum series to the iPad starting way back in 2011, they brought their legion of devout fans over from the desktop world and also found a brand new set of fans in the world of mobile gaming, both of which enjoyed being able to play such in-depth titles on the go. They kind of bounced back and forth releasing entries in the Avadon and Avernum series on the iPad, with the full Avadon trilogy becoming complete in the fall of 2016. Then in September of this past year, they announced that the final entry in the Avernum trilogy was also in the works and would arrive on both desktop and iPad in 2018. Titled Avernum: 3: Ruined World, the game launched on desktop last week and is slated to arrive on the iPad in the next month or so. Check out the official trailer.
I covered this previously, but I still think it’s worth noting that the Avernum series has a really interesting history. It is actually based on some of Spiderweb’s earliest work from the ’90s, the Exile trilogy. These were top-down dungeon crawler RPGs with simplistic 2D visuals and a whole lot of text. In the early 2000s, Spiderweb decided to reboot each entry in the trilogy under the new name Avernum which added a lot more features and improved visuals with a more Diablo-like isometric viewpoint. Then about ten years later, they rebooted the series again and completely remade all three games into what we know today: Avernum: Escape from the Pit, Avernum 2: Crystal Souls, and the just-released Avernum 3: Ruined World.
If you simply cannot wait for the iPad version of Avernum 3, you can find it on Steam, on GOG.com, on The Humble Store, or straight from the Spiderweb Software website. With the iPad version’s planned release of Q1 2018 we should be seeing that arrive before the end of March if all goes according to plan, and according to a teaser on Spiderweb’s website once the iPad version of Avernum 3 is shipped they’ll be starting on an entirely new game series. Exciting!
