IGP’s Indie Stars of 2019: ‘Bad North’

It’s been a really strange year for me this year, and I guess that is going to reflect in my game of the year selection for 2019.

I use my brief time here at IGP trawling through itch.io and other corners of the internet – I tend to steer clear from anything that goes near a publisher, or even picks up awards prior to release. Yet this year, I’m picking Bad North – specifically the mobile version which released earlier this year.

Bad North is developed by Plausible Concept (that’s a small team of three), and the game has been published by Raw Fury – a boutique publisher – which would normally put it outside of my wheelhouse. In addition to all of that, it’s available on basically every format under the sun. That requires a level of connections and/or funding that most developers I normally champion can’t dream of.

But, Bad North is beautiful, it’s succinct, and it’s the perfect distillation of strategy. It delivers on so many notes: Its design is both minimalistic and incredibly smart – artist and designer Oskar Stalberg has a genius-tier relationship with procedural generation. Squad units are individually generated and pathfinding is entirely dynamic and on the fly.

I still remember playing Bad North for the first time, back at Gamescom 2017. At the time, the actual campaign wasn’t implemented; instead, you could play through skirmishes on a variety of generated maps. Nothing held each generation together, there was no persistence, and there weren’t even really leader characters as the current game holds. However, even back then, Bad North was an impressive technological feat, and made for a juicy play experience – characters were sucked up to the input, time slowed, the world glistened as it rotated, and combat was fast and furious.

All of those elements persist in the final version, but now it is complete with a run-based campaign with rogue-lite elements. Think of FTL or Crying Suns, but instead of escaping deadly aliens or rebels, you’re instead escaping a deadly wave of Viking invaders. While there’s no event system as you might find in other games of the type, there are instead upgrade trees, items to find, and new units to recruit as you try to outpace the marauders.

For me, all of the above, delivered in a distilled strategy experience where an island takes no more than five minutes to survive (but a rewarding campaign can spell hours of tension and edge-of-your-seat moments) is a perfect example of careful design genius made real with clever technology and developer dedication.

Bad North on mobile feels like the purest form of the purest game. Bad North: Jotunn Edition is my game of the year for 2019.

Bad North: Jotunn Edition is available now on the App Store, Google Play, Steam, Kartridge, GOG, Xbox One, PS4, and the Nintendo Switch.

About The Author

Dann Sullivan

After almost a decade of selling games, Dann decided to try his hand at writing about them instead. A few years in and he is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Big Boss Battle, where he and his team cover games of all shapes and sizes. When not in the role, he can often be found seeking out small, memorable game experiences.

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