• Liberated (formerly commercial) games
• Inspiration: Ultima series
• Role-Playing

Joyous Rebel is a fantasy role-playing game (RPG) with an isometric perspective, somewhat similar to the later Ultima games or their lookalikes in the style of Ultizurk III: The GuildMaster's Quest. The player takes on the role of the Guardian, who is essentially a bodyguard of the King of Light. The king lives on one of many islands that comprise the kingdom, and at the start of the game, the Guardian is off travelling by sea with mainlanders (foreigners). A storm approaches and destroys the Guardian's boat, so now the player must find another way back to the king. The game plays like many other RPGs of this kind, but is characterised by streamlined controls. There's only one action key for interacting with the game world, and two keys to switch from movement mode to attack or ranged attack mode. During dialogues with NPCs, the player still needs to type in keywords (as in many old-school RPGs), most of which are highlighted. Sometimes, characters will respond to non-highlighted words from what they have said previously, so read their responses carefully and try out different keywords as this might give you extra information. Joyous Rebel was originally sold as shareware, but on 21 February 1998 author Scott Haag made the full game available as freeware.

Description by MrFlibble

Instruction / comment

Use the arrow keys to move around. Press D followed by an arrow key to interact with the object or NPC in that direction. Press A to switch to attack mode, then "walk" into enemies with arrow keys to attack. Press S if you have a ranged weapon to use it. F opens the inventory to manipulate it.