If you've been looking for a reason to get your Sega Game Gear out of storage, then you may be in luck, as the publisher 2Minds has revealed that it will soon be accepting pre-orders for a new narrative adventure game called The Sword of Stone for the retro handheld.
The Sword of Stone, from what we've been able to gather is a new homebrew game from the European developer cireza and was previously submitted as an entry for the SMS Power! coding competition earlier this year (where it came in fourth out of 18 entries).
The game sees players select from one of three characters, before embarking on an epic quest to stop a war between four kingdoms. It is presented from a top-down perspective similar to The Legend of Zelda, with players being able to explore small villages, dense forests, and sweltering deserts, but also includes a command menu letting you select how you want to interact with NPCs.
For instance, you can recruit certain characters to follow you and lend you their skills, or try to talk to the various monsters blocking your path instead of immediately resorting to violence.
According to an old forum post on the SMS Power website, the game was created using smsdevkit — a devkit for creating games for the Master System, Game Gear, SG-1000, and SC-3000. This is in addition to other tools like graphicsgale, bmp2tile, and DefleMask.
You can watch some footage of the demo below. We'll let you know when the store page for the game is finally live.