itch.io

Rosham Prison

First Impressions:

Rock Paper Scissors. MZ3D. Simple and Effective. What a Twist.

Mini Essay:

To begin with the sound track is fire! Mild spoiler -- that elevator music is just criminal lol. -- It was just the right amount of hype and eerie to level up the atmosphere.

Yours is the first game where the audio was balanced enough that I could play it without changing the SE to 20%.

The menu UI is clean and simple with everything it needed to accomplish provided.

I’m very impressed by the way you created tells for pixel characters.

The narrative is also clean and simple but given depth by the information fetch quests.

When I was getting closer to the ending my reactions went, “I saw that coming.”, “Whoa, a twist.”, “Whoa! A BIGGER twist!” I do love the illusion of choice.

The concept of life or death Rock Paper Scissors is something I’ve seen before but this is very well designed to work with the enviroment provided.

That said (this is probably a me thing) the movement style and dark square hallways made me a bit dizzy. I also get dizzy playing vanilla mincraft. If you make an upgraded or edited version I would consider making the map sizes a bit smaller to increase the tension and also for more ease of navigation. 

Upgrading the mouse camera control can also help with this. The maps being so large with dark halls in the distance and very little visible variation made pathing less straighforward than the gameplay, or maybe too straightforward since turning was more difficult.

Great Game, Super Fun and Replayable.

underGROWTH

known bug from changing team formation so I didn’t change the formation.

First Impressions:

Definetly RPGMaker in a good way, Character Creator, Unique Biomes, Lots of Space, Cool Party Managemant System. 

Mini Essay:

Full screen with music, the title screen looks more like its for a generic RPG than this specific game. Also the volume is astronomical, everything had to be turn down by a minimum of 30% before I could think again. Really appreciated the maual progression on the intro text.

The quest system feels like a random draw from the potential quests available other than the quests given by talking to NPC’s. Reminds me of Monster Hunter a bit other than not being able to return to the map once cleared. The combat system is cool, I really appreciate the initiative system, speed system, and that the turns aren’t timed along with the initiative system. That said there are so many effects going on I started getting a bit dizzy and I had to reload a couple of times when my whole party was stunlocked, near instakilling my mages and healers. Also I didn’t change my party lineup but the priestess after dying was randomly turned into a soldier dude while the other dead party member revived?

The soundtrack was good and the soud effects were excellent. Yours was the first game with smashable pots, barrels, and chest that could be picked instead of simply opened. The footstep sounds syncronized with the steps to a magnificent degree.

The story is interesting and I’d love to see more of it, the little bits of lore that could be picked up created a setting I was excited for and enjoyed exploring. A couple of the dialogue option boxes in the sections where you get to choose a response were dipped below the physical edge of my computer screen so I was unable to read them.

Also I don’t know if it was purposeful or not but unlike the other maps with mobs the Myconid village can’t be left before giving in to demands or fully clearing the map sending you back to the throne.

Very Fun Game, I already replayed it. Waiting for more!

60 Feet Underground

First Impressions:

Short, sweet, EPIC. Super replayable.

Mini Essay:

The cover design is awesome to begin with, super effective shape language and very clear central idea.

The story is a classic time loop (although maybe I should have let it loop a bit more), find the reason, stop the tragedy. Multiple choices for dialogue and interactions. When I’m in less of a time crunch I will absolutely play more. Maybe I’ll even get to see the sea of suits in loop seven you mentioned was an “error”. 

The character art and graphics were all perfectly aligned to the story and style. The music guided the urgency nicely, though I’m a bit dissapointed there was no music on the title screen.

The Menu did everything it needed to but the Save sound is extremely loud.

I said I’d write a one page review but I was so into the game I forgot to take any notes after “Ooh, timeloop” XD. 

Let’s see, the escaltors, stairs, ticket stands, and help buttons were all very easy to understand and interact with. The footsetp sounds were appreciated. And the train motion both entering the station and in the train car were remarkably smooth. 

The illusion of choice in the narrative as well as the ability to actually make choices that change the branching path you walk that day are fun. Seeing the consequences of taking different actions in a timeloop is always a good time.

10/10 Will Play Again. Thanks for the fantastic game!

Sanguine Roses

“What’s that! Looks suspicious!”-my PC

First Impressions: 

Stunning Artwork, Unique Gameplay, Chilling Narrative,  Not RPGMaker, Classy Card Combat System, Great Music

Mini Essay:

When I started playing I thought this was an RPGMaker game and was impressed by how smooth the movement was, it’s still very impressive how fluid the motion of all the sprites and map are but more understandable as something not made in RM.

In the first playthrough not only was I unable to read the starting text I also gave up on the run partway through because I was terribly lost. The lack of maps and menu screen and even the ability to save or exit the game from within the game were contributeing  factors to what was almost the end of my experience, but the reviews and comments I had seen convinced me to give SR a second chance. I’m very glad I did.

This time, after a snack break, I started a new game prepared to read the narrative. The storyline is gripping! The writing of the grusome scenes was visceral and set my hair on end. (I’m pretty sure the second and third to last text blocks of the intro are dupes). The jarring crash sound effects at the beggining appear to only be used twice in the whole game and feel a little out of place but the rest of the sound design was on point.

The music was extremely fitting and in the second playthrough a joy to listen to. In the first I ended up with a little bit of sound fatigue from hearing the same thing too many times. Although the pathing is fairly intuitive when considering the phrase “Up and Out” It was less clear in casual passing. 

The combat was really fun, I’ve been searching for games with similar combat systems and the interactive environment in combat was chefs kiss! 

Thanks for the Great Game!

Hello All! 

Thurapy on the Toasty discord found a game breaking bug in my game that I knew how to fix so I'm posting a link to the "one less bug" version here. https://vy11ins.itch.io/the-awakening-of-apocrypha-calypso 

I changed one plug-in command from "Remove Layer" to "Create Layer" to change the opacity to 0.

Hopefully there's no more big bugs to squash! If there is any other game breaking bug I might update the linked unsearchable edition of the game above for the sake of not crashing the game.

Oriana: Delvehollow (Dev request: Don’t be gentle)

First Impressions:

Classic Platformer. Beautiful Pixel Art. Budding Narrative. Great Sountrack. Wonderful SFX. Buttery but Poorly Explained Controls. Moderate to High Skill Requirement (unmet by me)

Mini Essay:

The title screen is lovely but very small. Font readability is middling. The story starts extremely vague with a small hint of an introduction to the concept in the early levels that double as a tutorial. The pacing is fantastic for people who are good at platformers. Whereas I pretty much died at every possible pitfall due to my, frankly, hilariously bad skill at the genre. For what it’s worth, what I did manage to play was intriguing and built smoothly on the previous narrative bites after passing levels. No saves other than autosave on a new map might be a common part of platformers but it also sets a hard minimum for skill requirements that apparently I don’t meet TT.

The SE is terribly balanced and nearly blew out my eardrums pre mmanual volume adjustment to 20%.

Having the Menu key between the Jump and Dash controls was cruel. I can attribute at least 10 deaths to this kind of miss-click. The double jump might have been unlocked automatically but if not for my flawed grasp of essential platformer controls I would have been stuck much earlier in my attempted playthrough.

The dash function is not really explained and took some button mashing to understand how to vertically climb ( I became really good at that part at least TT).

Sadly after the Mom’s story from the library narrative blurb I was skill locked from progressing. After the first 10 or so deaths I set a 15 minute timer to try to beat that level before giving up and moving to the next game. I reached the second of the green orbs perhaps twice... the death count on that screen in the time I attempted to beat the level comes to a grand total of around 93 so you can’t say I didn’t try. And yes, Skill Issue. Sweaty palms and acheing fingers aside, this genre of game is one I am truly not built to play.

Great Game, reccomended for fans of platformers and people with healthy joints.

Thank you so much! Honestly the last day of the Jam I made half the game and was also very confused XD!

Hello All! 

Thurapy on the Toasty discord found a game breaking bug in my game that I knew how to fix so I'm posting a link to the "one less bug" version here. https://vy11ins.itch.io/the-awakening-of-apocrypha-calypso 

I changed one plug-in command from "Remove Layer" to "Create Layer" to change the opacity to 0.

Hopefully there's no more big bugs to squash! If there is any other game breaking bug I might update the linked unsearchable edition of the game above for the sake of not crashing the game.

Swords of Wartales- Beneath Glimmerscar

Misplaced the game files for a minute because I was looking for “Swords of War Tales” based on the easily readable cover text and not “Beneath Glimmerscar” the web game title proper and name on the file.

First Impressions:

Beautiful Art, Incredible Music, Wonderful Voice Acting, Moving Storyline.

Mini Essay:

This is a game I’d call a Visual Novel. A very narrative driven short story that was beautifully executed with a hauting conclusion and just a dash of main story promotion.

 The art is a classic anime style for the character portraits with no shading, probably due to time constraints, which conflicts just slightly with the highly polished design of the narrating Bardess who is almost certainly an asset used in the main game.

The gameplay is smooth save for the sfx being mind blastingly loud. After turning them down to 20% it was in balance with the rest of the stellar audio, sadly this made it hard to hear the final narration of the Bardess.

The attack animations were quite large compared to the battler sprites and the scale of the enemies to the scale of the people based on the noncombat sprites was a bit off.

As a side story from the main story it was not lacking in narrative depth at all, though some portions of the narrative were repeated verbatim in differnet cutscenes. Additionally the pacing of the voice over, though beautiful, felt like it was holding back the story as there were no visual accomplaniment to compliment the depth of spoken word. The speed made me a bit antsy. My biggest pet peeve in literature is redundant narration. The lines at the beggining saying “Shall we begin then? Wonderful, lets begin then.” unnessecarily ruffle my feathers. If the wording changed to not have the same words in a different order or cut one of those lines that would be fantastic! (Also there’s a part of the credits too big to read.)

The replayability value is the same as reading a good short story, if you love the story you’ll love the game!

Dungeon Dispatch Review (One Long Life)

Unrelated to the gameplay I have now developed a dislike of .rar files.

Thanks for helping me open the game XD.

First Impressions: 

Very Classic Pixel Art JRPG  both in style and sound design. 

Straightforward gameplay and theme. Pixel JRPG comfort food.

Mini Essay:

The gameplay is exactly how it looks. When I only saw screenshots I was 

concerned with the layout of the rooms being too square and samey, however 

the variety of paths made to these little square rooms instead transforms to a solid stylistic choice. The color management is also well done. All the colors in the art have a subtle warm tone giving the game an uplifting and hopeful vibe.

The storyline is a bit more on the rough side. Due to the font choice my eyes kept going out of focus when reading the opening scrolling dialogue. While this is a classic JRPG tool for exposition dumps, large bodies of scrolling text are also a very heavy way to start a game. Especially with a font that has even slightly lower readability.

That said the little god voice introduction to the central idea of Dungeon Dispatch is both light hearted and well executed.  The new map blurbs go a long way.

I don’t know if it’s common in old style RPGs to have no item description, still have no idea what half of the consumables do.

The combat system is both slow and fast at the same time. The art and animations are super solid and cohesive. The mechanics are .~*clean*~. and easy to understand. Your mastery of level design is praiseworthy. 

My only gripe is more with the genre than this game in particular, enemies often feel quite “grindy” when it can take 10 or more rounds for a single instance of combat. Although I can’t remeber the specific person or blog I read this advice from, early game enemies are better off taking around 2 rounds of combat to defeat at most.

Monsters guarding some of the chests are a nice touch but many of the chests appear to either be empty or don’t show thier drops. This can be an easy fix if you turn “Chest Rewards” in to a common event in RPGMaker, either eventing a drop table or  making multiple CE so you don’t have to change the text and rewards of several dozen chests manually. Overleveled to the point of 0 player damage by the second environment, I started zoming out in combat and just spamming attack. If/When you update this game maybe reduce the duration of combat encounters, they really drag on. Also floor doors dissapear during combat.  Plus the 3rd boss walks into a wall and locks the game (game end?)

Great Game.  10/10 would play again. 

I was able to run past some in round 3 but if the player gets noticed the enemy is faster than my sprinting. Still super fun though!

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!