Spice Road is an upcoming indie game about a very spicy road. It's also about trading, economic simulation, empire-building, expansion, eighteenth-century alternate history, real-time strategy, and dudes with particularly luxurious sideburns. That's a lot of stuff to take in all at once, but developers Aartform Games have you covered with that most antiquated of things: a playable demo (direct link). If you enjoy buying, selling, building or expanding, you owe it to your clicking finger to take a look.
Spice Road's (surprisingly download-friendly) demo is quite slow to get started, while the game itself is labouring under some rather functional presentation - however it doesn't take too long for its inherent, slightly clunky charm to poke through. (Spice Road is still in beta, so there's plenty of time for things to change). It's a game with some considerable breadth, employing real-time strategy, 4X, town-building and trading elements, and mashing them together in a reassuringly approachable strategy melange. If the demo sits well with you, you can vote for the game on Steam Greenlight , or buy into the beta on the site .
Spicy trailer below.
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Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.
