Primorphosis Review (Three deaths in)
First Impressions:
Great dialogue and music, solid premise, overly large maps,
high difficulty controls (I’m really bad at ATB + the controls don’t match
MZ standard and aren’t listed), unavoidable combat.
Mini Essay:
Though I set myself a limit of 3 deaths I quite enjoyed the part I was able to
play, the dialogue was smooth and effective in setting the premise of the
game and personality of the characters, and the music was used very
effectively in highlighting gameplay.
I say the maps are needlessly large because I don’t feel like
walking down an unchanging empty hallway for 5-10 seconds between
anything else is a valuable use of time and space. The distribution of points
of interest is perhaps a little too consistent making them less interesting.
The sprite art is highly detailed but the base map tiles are extremely simple,
(I know its dirt from the dialogue but i couldn’t tell anything other than
“Its brown and maybe behind glass?” visually).
The enemy encounters are nigh unavoidable and I died before exploring the
mechanics fully in my third encouter in the first run (skill issue). Fighting
two enemies in one encounter, even when using skills, was basically a
player instakill (at least for me). Though I was able to escape from combat the
enemy runs really REALLY fast and I was immediately thrown back in combat
to die a pitiful death.
Death 2 came from the same encounter though I almost killed one of them this
time after using the tazer mechanic.
Death 3 was at the hands of the second type of mob (made it to another map
woohoo!). Overall the combat difficulty floor is far above me.
Great Game! Lots of Fun!