Entering late and loud, ignoring your enquiries about where it was last week, the Gaming Crowdfunding Weekly slumps into the last free desk in the classroom and spends the lesson scratching an incomplete Cerne Abbas giant into the top with its protractor. This week: Blackmore tries to snatch back the magic of that one good Mega CD adventure game, Labyrinth threatens to leave a string of weak David Bowie references in its wake, Darkest Dungeon’s name is the only remotely weak thing about it and the Book of Unwritten Tales 2 is asking for more ink.

Know of a game or game-related project on Kickstarter, Indiegogo or any other platform that you’d like to see featured? Please email us with a tip!

Previously featured campaigns

• There’s only a few hours left to back La Mulana 2, which has passed its target and swooshed past a couple of curry related stretch goals. ReVen achieved an HD stretch goal, but won’t be celebrating with spicy food. Kingdom Come: Deliverance found impressive momentum and shot past stretch goals all the way up to £1,000,000
• Sierra Ops looks set to claim at least three quarters of its target when the timer stops in a matter of days.
• Successfully funded an age ago, Project Rain World achieved a Linux port goal with grace. Olympia Rising‘s road to funding was a lot slower, but it was saved by some last minute interest
• To The Death and Cradle have fallen far from their targets
• Space Pioneer, Sweet Escape and Waves: Arena Tactics have a fair bit of time on the clock, but are in desperate need of funding and exposure. Savage has less time, but just needs one last thousand dollar push…

In progress

Blackmore

Goal: $200,000
Deadline: 12 March 2014
Outlook: One quarter of the way there, needs to find a second wind

Blackmore is a particularly name-heavy pitch which gives us an interesting starting point, but probably isn’t showing us enough tangible work yet. Personnel-wise you’re getting Policenauts and Snatcher’s designer Satoshi Yoshioka, music by Motoaki Furukawa (Gradius and the above adventure games) and voice actor David Hayter.

Heading up the project is Jeremy Blaustein, whose translation and voice direction talents defined the feel of Metal Gear Solid, the entire Silent Hill series, and of course, Snatcher, his maiden project that this steampunk ‘Japanese adventure’ is trying to return to. You can imagine how all these ingredients could come together to make a great game, but really, the pitch should be doing that for you.

Labyrinth

Goal: £50,000
Deadline: 18 March 2014
Outlook: Yet to take off

Labyrinth‘s in-engine video reel provides glimpses of an interestingly rendered, if overly brown dungeon environment that ultimately leaves you with too little detail about what you’re pledging for. I’m all for ambulatory adventure experiences, but the gameplay here is essentially undefined. The pitch mentions puzzles and traps but doesn’t show anything of them – later mentions of “keyholes hidden behind bricks [and] searching through piles of dirt for clues” don’t exactly bode particularly well.

Funded (still in progress)

Darkest Dungeon

Goal: $75,000
Deadline: 14 March 2014
Outlook: 20 days to go, has already doubled its target

Perfect pitches are pretty easy to find by just looking at the numbers: if you’re ten days in and nearing three times your goal, you probably did something right. Not that you’ll be looking at the numbers with Darkest Dungeon. This gothic roguelike RPG, with its thick lineart and sullen-eyed characters, is immediately eye-catching, and short gifs are expertly used throughout.

The art (and an atmospheric soundtrack, also showcased on the page) is all in service of the game’s psychological spin – the headline feature is an ‘Affliction System’ – your characters will be paranoid, abusive, fearful or just plain irrational. A big part of the dungeon crawling will be managing this characterisation layer, which sounds fantastic. Definitely my pick of the week, not that this column actually has a pick of the week.

The Book of Unwritten Tales 2

Goal: $65,000
Deadline: 23 March 2014
Outlook: 30 days to go, well into stretch goal territory

Sequel to a critically acclaimed point and click adventure game? Please collect your instant crowdfunding prize money. I’m not going to pretend that I’ve played the original, but I can see that there’s enough praise out there for its writing that I should have given it a go by now.

Aside from being another quickly funded, well demonstrated pitch, it’s also notable that KING Art Games have already been through the Kickstarter process with Battle Worlds: Kronos. As safe a pledge as you can make, really.