Update [Tue 31st Jan, 2023 13:00 GMT]: Pyrdacor announced on Twitter yesterday (January 30th) that Ambermoon Advanced is now available to download. You can play the update to the game either on Amiga or on PC and Mac via Pyrdacor's C# remake. According to the developer, it represents the first 2 of 5 planned episodes bringing new content to the RPG.
Original Story [Fri 15th July, 2022 15:00 BST]: For those of you who grew up with an Amiga, you may remember 1993's Ambermoon, Thalion Software's role-playing sequel about a hero tasked with saving the land of Lyramion from the forces of evil.
The game mixed 2D sprites with revolutionary 3D graphics (for the time) and featured an impossibly large world, filled with plenty of dungeons, towns, and NPCs. Yet, in spite of these impressive features and its moderate success, the IP has been pretty much abandoned ever since Thalion went under in 1994, with the closest thing to a sequel being a spiritual successor for MS-DOS called Albion, from some of the original dev team.
In the absence of anything official, it appears that one fan has been busy keeping the memory of Ambermoon alive. The retro creator Pyrdacor has been hard at work making sure that new players can experience the classic game in as many ways as possible, with the latest of these being a brand-new Advanced Edition, which is scheduled to arrive for Amiga, PC, and Mac.
Pyrdacor announced this big, unofficial expansion over on his YouTube channel (as spotted by IndieRetroNews), and he promises a wealth of new features to tempt fans back to the game after all these years.
These include new doors to open and places to explore, a brand-new companion, more monsters and items, and improved performance in 3D areas. The trailer also features music from Matthias Steinwachs, the original composer of Ambermoon for Amiga, which you can listen to yourself below.
As for why he chose Ambermoon as opposed to other role-playing games, he tells Time Extension:
"Ambermoon was my first RPG and my first fantasy game. I didn't know that such things existed back then. It is full of carefully placed well-crafted details and if you know the technical backgrounds and limitations it is even more impressive.
"Its event driven design by the 17 year old Karsten Köper in the early 90s is one of the most amazing things I've seen in my career as a software engineer. It is simple but yet so powerful. And it is the reason why I was able to port this gem to modern systems in less than a year."