[onan_barbarian]

I have a guarded respect for Jeff Vogel's games, but having played the Avernum series quite a bit, I'd say part of the trick here is being closer to "making the same game 22 times" (or the same 4 games 5.5 times each). Certainly Avernum feels like a rogue-like with a better story, better UI and a more solid gameplay mechanic. However, it never really rose much beyond that for me.

I'm glad he's doing what he's doing and doing well at it, but this is a very conservative approach to making games and IMO rather redundant with commercial game development. If I just want to trek around a big, semi-open world and do the same damn thing over and over building a character, there's a half-dozen Bethesda games that let me do it in 3D or approximately 3000 Roguelikes.

Generally the effort of playing an indie game to me is only rewarded when they show me something I haven't seen before - and there's real possibility in these kind of lo-fi games for emergent behaviors and cool gameplay that isn't being strangled by the huge content pipeline of a commercial game (where anything that happens has to be brilliantly animated and at least reasonably voiced by someone, making it unlikely that too many emergent 'surprises' can happen).