Apogea. Alright, I’ve got no idea 🧜how to say it or what it means, but it’s an upcoming indie MMO, . It’s developed by a very small team, although the project was originally started by a solo developer. This game, which has an open playtest running for a few more days, is delightfully and miserably old school.
Apogea is a medieval MMORPG in the꧋ same vein as Tibia. It has a 🍎top-down isometric art style, with some forced PvP instances and enough grinding to hit the podium alongside Runescape. This game doesn’t hold your hand, and loading it up for the first time was a wave of nostalgia. I don’t know what I’m doing, where I’m going, or how anything works. It’s oddly charming.
You’re thrust into a Tolkien-inspired open-world and left to your own devicesꦫ. In classic fashion, you begin by picking up simple quests, like killing rats for a nearby homeowner, and slowly begin to collect your first bits of loot. A new sword, a ring, an amulet. Just like any other MMO, I’m sure there are already min-max strategies to level as quickly as possible, but Ap🦩ogea feels like a game designed for a slightly slower pace of life.
Yeah, I Understand Why No One Is Talking About It, But Still…
Apogea is a niche game in a niche genre. Its world is pol෴ished, and its graphics are beautiful, but it's still an isometric pixelated world. People expect more graphical fidelity from modern MMOs, so why would they play a new, old school MMO when the old school MMOs largely still exist? Oldꦇ School Runescape still regularly hits over 100,000 concurrent players, even if some of them are bots.
I won’t say old school again. Promise.
But Apogea is a little special. A lot of love and care have been poured into the world. It’s extremely cosy, in that sort of, ‘I just gotꦿ home from school and loaded up a game and it's raining outside,’ kind of way. The lighting, sound effects, a𒁏nd animation are all very sweet.
I’ve enjoyed grinding while killing goblins and rats, way more than I thought I would. The loot progression is satisfying, and even when I turned the game off, I felt myself drifting back towards it, even though my backlog is enormous. This sort of gear and grinding progression ꦚis why I thought I’d enjoy Brighter Shores, a similar MMO in an old style that ultimately wasn’t for me. I’ve been on the lookout for similar games ever since: while Runescape is excellent, it feels different to start in a world that’s totally new.
I managed to work my way up a f🔴ew levels to earn my first skills and, while combat begins as a fairly boring slog - you just stand still and attack enemies, a la Runescape - eventually things start to get a bit more interesting with higher-level mobs, more mobility, and a range of abilities that can be used in rotation. It gets surprisingly complex.
I was a little worried about the way PvP works in the game - basically the server becomes PvP for a short period of time every few hours (the exact values are still being tested, as far as I’m aware), and during that period, everyone can just kill everyone. While this sounds annoying, in reality it's quite easy to avoid. My only other concern with PvP is massive groups jumping on solo players and cutting them to shreds, but that seems l⛄ike a probl꧂em that plagues every MMO.
Apogea has had several closed tests over the past year, and while it’s apparently going to release before the end of 2025, there will likely be more opportunities to chec𝔉k out the game before it launches. I’d recommend taking a look, even if this isn’t your normal fare: the game manages to capture an atmosphere just perfectly, and sometimes that’s all it takes t꧙o get utterly hooked.
