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PalazzoFC

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A member registered Mar 26, 2024

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Played through this after having it recommended to me and found it stellar.

This particular take on the front row / back row system and all of the unique verbs surrounding it felt unlike any other RPG I've played, which saw its combat feeling fresh throughout. The game is wonderfully taut, with every encounter feeling important in its own way due to your limited resources and the potential danger of even the bottom-tier enemies - and especially due to the time system, which the game is balanced around excellently, and which makes every encounter, every bit of exploration, and every bit of rest feel meaningful.

The focus on limited upgrades rather than a traditional leveling system is great for the same reasons; the internal attack and the speed-up are both huge-feeling upgrades (with the internal attack's finicky positioning element making it satisfyingly specialized to set up). The way the characters all have extremely distinct, valuable roles right from the start - making it feel desperate if one goes down - is already great, and then the way the little customization you're allowed changes your relationship to each of them over the course of a run elevates it.

Loved feeling out the dungeon layouts combined with the time limit, and the extra of figuring out how to anticipate encounters and prepare for advantage against them or avoid them (reading other reviews, apparently fights are even more avoidable than I thought, which sounds awesome) - it took me about half of the first of my two attempts to realize the audio cue for the enemy detection ability.

The cutscenes and the tiny bits of characterization the party gets, wordlessly, are very well-done too.

Small aspect, but the gambling element of Guruntum's FV charging ability is fun; that you always want to charge it up but that doing so in a fight with more than two enemies is a risk since they could feasibly pull her into the fray and one-shot her - the push-pull design on all of her abilities is great but that in particular stood out to me as being really cool.

I really enjoyed figuring the final boss out, though she did trip me up a bit. Her immunity to the standard engage command and not the captain's full-field engage felt strange - I like the feeling of escalation there but trying that command was a last-ditch effort, and I didn't expect it to work - and had me wondering for a bit of time whether it was more of a puzzle boss and if there was some non-standard combat solution to the fight. Despite that, I had a lot of fun figuring out each step to the fight, having gotten to it with no healing items and something like 3/4 HP remaining.

I picked up the rancid candle earlier on but ended up dying afterwards, and went into the fight without it in the end - I really like the design of the fight still being fully doable without the candle (which I didn't realize the effect of until reading the comments here after finishing a playthrough), and that the candle, despite making the fight easier, still comes with a time and resource cost due to having to take a decently-sized detour in a dangerous area to get. Very smartly laid-out, and very taut.

Genuinely great game. I'm definitely going to look through more of your work and check it out.