A little over 7 years ago, developer Valorware brought their curious mobile RPG 9th Dawn to the iOS platform. The game had debuted on Android the previous year, and by the time the iOS version came about it brought with it all the improvements and new content that came from that early Android launch. 9th Dawn was kind of a bizarre game. It drew its inspiration from old-school CRPGs from the ’80s and early ’90s like Ultima, and like many games of that vintage, was unapologetically obtuse to new players. There was an absolutely massive open world to explore in 9th Dawn, and enough underlying systems to keep you busy for literal years, but the game did nothing to hold your hand when it came to where to go in this giant world or how to access those systems. Paradoxically, 9th Dawn was also incredibly approachable due to its dual-stick combat and movement system that felt right at home on the touchscreen as well as its nearly non-existent penalties for dying. This meant that even though you wouldn’t always know what the hell you were doing at any given time, it was pain free to just try stuff out and experiment without fear of losing hours of progress or permanently screwing things up. It wasn’t for everybody, but this strange combination somehow totally worked and made 9th Dawn an extremely satisfying game to poke and prod at for hours on end.

You can read plenty more about what made 9th Dawn tick as well the interesting history behind Valorware’...