In continuing with smaller, more frequent batches, we've just Greenlit six more games.

These titles were selected on the same criteria we have been using in the past: Votes in Greenlight give us a hugely valuable point of data in gauging community interest along with external factors such as press reviews, crowd-funding successes, performance on other platforms, and awards and contests to help form a more complete picture of community interest in each title.

Here are the latest titles advancing through Steam Greenlight, and being offered worldwide distribution via Steam.

• Bleed
• Game Dev Tycoon
• The Legend
• Legends of Eisenwald
• RIOT
• Stardew Valley

As with past batches, these titles will be released independently in the weeks or months ahead, as they complete development and integrate with any of the Steamworks features they are interested in utilizing.

Keep up the voting and help your favorite games get the attention they deserve. Also, be sure to join the Steam Greenlight Official Group for the latest news and announcements.

Anvil of Dawn, a classic DOS-era dungeon crawler with first-person perspective, sprite graphics, a vast and rich world to explore, and dozens of hours of great and motivating gameplay, is available on GOG.com for only $5.99

Every fantasy land needs a hero, it seems. There's always an evil entity of some sort that menaces the realm and its people. Surprisingly, the people never stand up to it. They prefer to wait for a group of adventurers, or even just one champion who knows the importance of wearing leg armor around archers. Inevitably someone comes to the rescue and saves the realm one spider-infested cellar at a time. Schematic as it may sound, we love to relive those adventures over and over again. Even if one dungeon looks pretty much the same as any other, you still get this rush of excitement when making your first steps on its dusty floor. It's not about originality of the concept. It's about the involving gameplay, that lets you forget about the world around you. Here's a perfect game to do just that!

Anvil of Dawn has everything you ever loved about 1990s role-playing games. It presents you with a large and diverse gameworld, full of monsters and enemies to slay, riches and powerful items to loot, quests to carry out, weapons to wield, spells to cast, and an evil overlord to challenge. It was praised for its great pacing allowing to keep the gamer entertained and intrigued, always presenting him with something new to do and achieve. The imaginative sprite-based graphics, solid gameplay mechanics, and many classic gameplay ideas make this title a shining example of well executed cRPG design that makes us call its period "the good old times". Highly recommended!

“Call it respect for the audience or call it old-school gamer mentality but we’re honestly not hand-holding people through a bunch of training on the mechanics,” he said. “Once upon a time, there was fun in exploring and experimenting. We hope to give players enough info to get them rolling and understanding the basics.”

Watching the team’s alpha gameplay demo made it clear that combat will take an open-ended approach. There is great scope to adapt to threats the way you feel is best. Do you take a frontal assault approach and stick your team to cover, or do you try hacking and using alternate routes to gain the upper hand?

The possibilities are vast, and Weisman explained that by combining skills and character types you can really hit your enemies hard, “Our mindset is that you don’t need to balance your team’s skills but there are certainly benefits in doing so. For example, a Street Samurai might have a decent chance of hitting an enemy but if the enemy were slowed by a spell, he would be at a greater advantage.

“Then a Decker might be able to hack the building’s defences and take control of their weapon turrets allowing a Rigger to manoeuvre his drone into an alcove to retrieve a lab specimen while taking minimal damage.”

While the gameplay mechanics are complex, Weisman’s team wanted to ensure there was a strong ‘around the table’ vibe flowing throughout Shadowrun Returns, as a way of capturing the pen and paper vibe of tabletop role-playing. I asked him if it was a tricky aesthetic to capture in a game setting.

“As for the ‘around the table vibe’ that we’ve talked about – that’s something we’ve played with and yes, it’s tricky,” he confirmed. “For awhile, we toyed with the voice of the Game Master talking directly to you and telling you to do a skill check. We also thought about showing dice rolls.

“Ultimately, we decided that it would be interesting but not necessarily compelling or immersive. However, when we release our editor, player-GMs can try this type of experiment out for themselves. Who knows, they may hit on the right way to do it.”

[...] “We approached the design of the story and individual runs the way we used to approach our tabletop gaming sessions by asking, What is the player trying to do here? How will players learn the info they need to learn? What obstacles/resistance/puzzles would be fun here?

“Yes, it’s tricky and it’s challenging, and it’s different from how a lot of computer role-playing games approach development. But from the beginning, we weren’t trying to create a standard CRPG with the look and feel of Shadowrun. We were trying to make a tactical-RPG that felt like the Shadowrun tabletop game, influenced by the SNES and SEGA games”.

Monks in Eternity are different than you might expect. There are no restrictions on armor and weapons – you could wear plate and use a sword, if you wanted to, and the talent system is flexible enough so you could build a great monk that specialized in that gear. But at the core of this class is a little rule about how monks take damage. You see, when a monk gets hit, only part of the damage is inflicted on him or her immediately. The rest is redirected to a Wound, which is an effect that causes damage over time (called a DoT effect) to the monk. That slowly-ticking Wound would only seem to be delaying the inevitable result except for one thing: the monk can get rid of that Wound by using special attacks.

The monk gets all kinds of cool special attacks that do extra effects beyond simply damage and, as a side effect, also eliminate his Wounds. Some of their special attacks include:

• Torment’s Reach - this ability increases the range of melee attacks by 200% for a short duration. Enemies between the monk and his or her target are also attacked. Costs 1 Wound to activate.

• Turning Wheel - if the monk suffers from a DoT effect (including Wounds ticking down), he or she adds a proportional fire bonus to his or her melee damage. This is a passive ability which works automatically whenever the monk has any DoT effect.

• Clarity of Agony - when used, this ability cuts the duration of hostile status effects in half. It lasts for a brief amount of time, halving both incoming effects and ones that are currently on the monk. Costs 2 Wounds.

Each of these attacks makes monks stronger in battle, and many also consume their Wounds, hopefully before those Wounds have done the damage the monks were originally supposed to take.

And as monks level up, they get more than just these special attacks. They can gain room for more Wounds, so they can have more of them at once to use at the same time for an extraordinarily powerful attack or use them across multiple special attacks. Monks can also change how their Wounds function. For example, they can choose to have their Wounds do less damage at the start and more at the end, so getting rid of them faster is advantageous. Monks can also choose to do their damage sequentially, letting the monk build up a lot of Wounds to fuel a crazy powerful ability and not take much damage for doing so.

So as a monk, your goal is simple: you want to take damage, so you get Wounds, so you can perform extraordinary attacks. But remember when I mentioned the monk in plate mail using a sword? Sure, you can do that, but that plate armor will inhibit your ability to get Wounds, which means you don't get as many special attacks. And unarmed attacks are among the fastest types of attacks, so a weaponless monk can get rid of his Wounds faster than any armed monk, so he will suffer very little of their damage-over-time effects. That's like having extra hit points for free! FOR FREE! Who wouldn't want that?!

This is why you see a lot of unarmed and unarmored monks running around. Not because the rules say you can't use those items, but because in most situations it's one of the best ways to play. An unencumbered monk can be a terror on the battlefield, a nightmare that just won't seem to die, no matter how hard he gets hit. Blows that seem like they should kill him only serve to make him stronger.