Blaze Entertainment, the company behind the Evercade family of consoles, revealed in a blog that it is making the first episode of BioMenace Remastered, "Dr. Mangle’s Lab," free for all Evercade owners, with the full four-episode game set to appear on its next Indie Heroes Collection next year: Indie Heroes Collection 5.
BioMenace Remastered was released on Steam and GOG late last year and is a remaster of Apogee's 1993 platformer BioMenace, an MS-DOS game originally built on ID Software's "Keen Dreams" engine, created for Commander Keen. It sees players starring as the top CIA operative and action hero, Snake Logan, as they embark on a perilous mission to save a city (and its residents) from an evil scientist named Dr. Mangle.
The original game was primarily developed by one person, James Norwood (programming, level design, art), while this remastered version is the work of Nikolai “lethal_guitar” Wuttke-Hohendorf and his Rigel Gameworks studio, who previously worked with Blaze on the Duke Nukem 1+2 Remastered.
Among some of the fun changes made to the remastered version of the game were the addition of the ability to switch between the original graphics and new updated visuals (including widescreen support, smooth scrolling & movement), as well as tweaks to the difficulty to rebalance the experience, and the implementation of parallax scrolling backgrounds.
As Blaze's community executive, Pete Davison, states, the decision to release the first episode of BioMenace Remastered is intended as "a homage to BioMenace’s shareware roots." The original BioMenace was one of many games released by Apogee using the shareware model, where players could access a small slice of a game, for free, with the option to later buy the expanded "full" version, if they liked what they had played.
To grab the game, you simply need to update your respective console (Evercade EXP/EXP-R, VS/VS-R, or Alpha) to the latest firmware update via the System Menu, and then "navigate to the EXP, VS, or star logo (on Evercade Alpha) on the left side of the main menu." You'll be able to access the game from there.
As Davison explains, BioMenace Remastered is just one of the titles slated for inclusion in Indie Heroes Collection 5, scheduled for release in early 2027, with the other games to be announced in subsequent Game of the Month offers across the rest of this year.
Which games do you want to see included in Indie Heroes Collection 5? Let us know in the comments!