St. Nifflas drops indie platformer Saira under the tree

I’m about a week late with the news on this one, but Nifflas has released another game, titled Saira. Why should you care? Because Nifflas’ games — particularly Knytt Stories — are among the most popular and well-received indie titles to date. If there were a “New Classics” department of indie gaming (and maybe there is), Nifflas would surely be one of its founding members.

Saira was self-released on Nifflas’ website a few weeks ago: it’s a 2D puzzle-platformer that runs on Windows 2000 and later. Here’s a description, straight from the horse’s mouth: “Saira teleported herself to Mars, but when she reached the planet all other humans in the galaxy had mysteriously disappeared. Now, how does something like that happen?”

The the full game costs $17, but here’s the kicker: an extra $2 buys you a free license of the game to share with a friend. If you find some like-minded broskis, you could save yourself some cash by splitting the costs. Or you could just give it to your best friend — ’tis the season after all.

Here’s the interesting bit, though: Saira started out as Project Q and was supposed to be published by Nicalis, who have been busy buying the rights to PC indie games and bringing them to WiiWare. The only problem is that, while Nicalis has announced several games, none of them have actually been published, and some of them (particularly Cave Story) are years overdue. I don’t want my doom and gloom to dampen your holiday cheer, but Saira jumping ship doesn’t bode well for Nicalis. I wonder if Night Sky, also ostensibly published by the company, will share a similar fate.

[Headline shamelessly lifted from a tangentially related TinyCartridge post about Cave Story]