Best Of Indie Games: The Fable of Eden
Game Pick: 'The Legend of Princess' (Joakim "Konjak" Sandberg, freeware)
Decription: "The Legend of Zelda" themed 2D Side Scroller

The screenshot posted on the RSS feed made me want to play this game instantaneously. Maybe it's because any sprite looking remotely like Link makes me think of "The Legend of Zelda" or "A Link to the Past" immediately and brings back great memories. Or maybe it's because of the big ghostly creature that has that certain type of evil "end boss" appearance to it...

Without a question this tiny one-level jump-and-shoot looks awesome and is dead on in copying the cute, cartoonish style of the Zelda series. At first I thought the game was way to easy as the impact radius of the sword seemed to be a little too big but midway through the game it surprised me by splitting into separate paths and confronting me with a highly challenging mirror mini-boss and a puzzle that involved one of those giant hands from "The Legend of Zelda" trying to prevent me from activating triggers.

Many elements from the original Nintendo games such as fairies, grappling hooks, boomerangs and your most favorite foes (Oktoroks, Zolas, etc.) have been incorporated and there are secret rooms as well as a limited number of continues depending on the amount of rupies collected. I found it astonishing how many different features the designer managed to place into a game that took me only about 40 minutes to complete. I also had to restart once because I started out with the wrong selection of weapons/items which made the gameplay extremely hard in some places. One word of advice: Go for the feathers and not for the whole chicken!!! Joakim Sandberg states that he "wanted to try out the item-system changing parts of the level slightly" creating a good example of how different weapon or tool selections can change the gameplay and the difficulty of a section.

Matching your weapons according to the situation and finding out the specific weaknesses of enemies has always been an important part of the Zelda series and seems to be one of the most powerful recipes for a great game (imagine "Mega Man" without multiple weapons or a modern FPS without this feature). Another recipe is certainly the creation of an amiable and exceptional main character along with an engaging as well as charming and fascinating game world. This little Indie Game succeeds in evoking some of the core elements of the Zelda series and shows that a character like Link can be ported into almost any type of game without losing his magic!

Indeed, comments like "Best game so far this year. Probably better then the last few zelda games.", "Wow Konjak! You did it again!" or "Now imagine how much better the infamous CDi Zelda games would have been if Konjak had a hand in them..." (on the download site http://www.indiegames.com/blog/2009/01/freeware_game_pick_the_legend.html) demonstrate just how much potential some Indie games and their engineers have. I was honestly blown away by the fact that this game was created by a single person especially when comparing it to some commercial busts from the last decade!