Celebrate the new year with this article covering "Jami's Undercity", a cool action/RPG about rescuing your vampire boyfriend from demon hunters. And the RPG engine is actually good???
Excerpt:
If you're familiar with any of BlueMagus's many releases, Jami's Undercity seems like a perfect fit. BlueMagus liked his serious stories, gloomy settings, and ambiguous morals. How much of Jami's Undercity comes from Jami's ideas and how much is BlueMagus's makes it hard to say whether this is a shared style or BlueMagus's sense of aesthetics boldly showing themselves off on top of whatever game Jami imagined. Regardless of how the efforts were split in creating the world, the end result is a game that feels very thematically cohesive.
Jami's Undercity is set in a world of the occult. It's a world of vampires, demons, werewolves, and those mean religious orders that want to destroy them. It's something along the lines of the recently covered Bloodlines, but set in modern times (and codified as 1998 in a later revision). While I do love the many sword and sorcery focused ZZT fantasy games out there, I can't help but be drawn in to any world that uses a modern setting like this. BlueMagus's ability to take the real world and apply fantasy tropes to it begins here, with the game predating the New York City subway setting of Deep December by roughly a year for the original release. It's a setting that manages to include vampires, witches, and the like while also having computer consoles, firearms, and high-rises.