Avernum: EftP works surprisingly well on Galaxy Tab S8+/Android 12

[CaveSquirrel]

I remember trying to play Avernum: Escape from the Pit purchased for Android in the Humble Mobile Bundle 11 on my phone and giving up, since the controls almost worked with the small screen, but not quite.

 

Now years later I got my hands on a Galaxy Tab S8+ tablet running Android 12, and I tried the game again to see if it would run. I must say that I'm positively surprised of how well it runs given the compatibility warning when starting it! (I had to change the downloaded file's extension from .zip to .apk, not sure why Humble gives you a .zip, but it installed fine afterwards.)

 

I went through part of the tutorial with zero glitch, and playing the game with the stylus is very nice since it obstructs the view much less than a finger. Not to mention the game looks good on this large screen.

 

The only bug I encountered is that the game freezes if you switch to another application, which is rather serious, but it seems to be rather good at autosaving, and at getting right back into the action when restarted. So I might try to do a full playthrough.

 

I know that Android was abandoned back then because the platform was hard to develop for and people probably weren't as willing to pay premium prices for games, but perhaps that has changed? Android has evolved quite a bit, AndroidL is coming to offer dedicated features for tablets, and Samsung tablets have quite the market share. Square Enix seems to manage charging premium prices for some nostalgic Final Fantasy titles on the Google Play store, and you have some old-school Fallout 1-style RPGs selling 10 000+ copies on the platform.

 

The game actually kept running well across versions too, which is more than can be said for the Windows/Steam version which has graphics glitches on certain graphics cards unless you find the alternate renderer .exe somewhere else, and therefore is pretty much abandoned as well.

 

All in all, I hope you can dust off the Android port of Avernum: EftP so suspend/resume works, and hopefully bring the rest of the trilogy to the platform. I know I'd be willing to buy them for around 15 US$ a pop.

[guptec]

I would also like to see it on my tab. Pushing through Exile would the best way to spend my commute.