YIIK: A Postmodern RPG is a psychedelic indie Earthbound

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YIIK

I love an RPG set in the real actual world most of us live in. There's something deeply comforting about the way they make modern life more magically real, transforming it into a place featuring experience points and monsters, where you never, ever have to go the dentist or fill out a tax return. RPGs set in the real world are still so rare that they tend to be called 'Earthbound-inspired', and to be fair they often are to a large extent. This description fits pretty well with YIIK: A Postmodern RPG, but I can also detect a bit of Persona in there, a bit of indie beard, and it's shaping up to be as strange as you might expect.

Having more JRPG-style games on PC always feels like a Very Good Thing, particularly when they're this interesting, and they give rise to trailers as unusual as this one:

I mean, what's going on there? I've no idea. But I'm intrigued to know more. YIIK, developed by Ackk Studios and published by Ysbryd Games, is coming to PC later this year.

[Note: one of the game's producers, Cassandra Khaw, is a PC Gamer contributor.]

Tom Sykes
Tom Sykes

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.