Seems ambitious and could have been good. Need more polish. Also, why is the dev here in comments giving a 5/5 review to the game?
More of a visual novel than an actual game. Since the novel accommodates for all kinds of various combinations of actions and outcomes the possibilities for any playthrough's story are huge. If a certain character will play a minor roll or be something of a mayor character is up to you. Problems: 1. You will have to read a lot. Actual gameplay happens for around 5% of the time. Rest is reading dialogue and traversing the map. Personally I did not find the story or world interesting or well presented enough for the massive amount of reading to feel worthwhile. 2. The story feels a bit hollow. I prefer more linear well structured narratives. Rather one good and thought through story than an infinite array of cheap feeling ones. As a result of the "create the story as you go"-approach, I found it difficult to care about whatever happened. The characters were more portraits with stats than actual characters to me. 3. For a game with almost no gameplay it does its best to annoy you with various items and currencies. If the minigames played a larger role it would not be as bad but I didn't really feel like putting a lot of effort into the stats, skills, synergies, equipment, upgrading equipment, collecting currencies or stat bonuses. Design, music etc is great and the mini game is fun. If the game had focused more on this and less on monologue bombing me with info about events and characters I don't care about, I would have enjoyed it more.
Has a nice kind of raw and old school feel to it but all positives are outweighed by far by the lack of gameplay, poor controls, lack of almost any story or content, lack of anything. Pixelated walking simulator with a few puzzles. Think the developer could have made a nice game if he had put more effort into it. As is, I can't recommend it.
Great graphics and usually fun combat but with no other strengths the game feels incredibly hollow. Almost never cared or fet excited about anything that happened. "Rebuild your kingdom" = gather some gold during tedious backtracking side quests and spend it rebuilding a few rooms. You can't even decide in which order. Visiting a save point with arrow and potion refill, instead of refilling when saving (or running past), you have to watch a series of slow and annoying animations. It doesnt sound too bad but when you are hurt and have to refill your health it could easily take over half a minute, just pressing X and watching the slow and detailed animations of how Reggi refills a potion, drinks it, refills it again, refills arrows, saves. If the save shows up first, you may run a bit, find refills and either run back to save or continue and if you die, rewatch the animations. Pick up stuff from enemies. Instead of just picking things up, you are forced to watch slow and annoying animations of Reggi chopping away pieces from dead beetles etc etc. To gather loot from an encounter can easily take 30 seconds. Most loot is useless. Fall damage. Jumping from twice your height or so causes fall damage. Running to the same boss 3 or 4 times, you start feeling it. I often found myself just taking the fall damage as climbing down the same series of ladders just felt too time consuming and frustrating. Prepare to hear the same quirky lines of dialogue over and over for each boss you get stuck on. Why just not save that you have heard the line already and spare you the frustration? 40% of the game or so, you backtrack. Even during main story. Just feels so empty. Cute graphics. Some nice boss battles. Little else going for it. A lot of effort and love put into it but it was misdirected and went into creating annoying animations of Reggi slowly picking up an arrow. Could have spent that love on creating side quests that were not just "backtrack to X and kill X enemies".
the name of the goat is the name of the GOAT
I did not think that I would get as sucked into this as I did. Expecting to just pass some time with a janky indie shooter with a cat spirit and a little girl, I instead found myself more or less playing on until the end. It took me about 3 hours 20 minutes but did not feel too short. I got the same feeling finishing it that I get watching a very good movie. Some things were frustrating or a bit unpolished but none of them were game breaking. Examples: my controller refused to work with it, except for aiming and the pause button; entering some doors, the player character would spawn on the same door and instantly go back outside; once I got stuck in some textures and had to load the most recent autosave (it saves very often though). A few small annoyances like that. Difficult to describe the game more closely. Some kind of bizarre fever dream open world boss rush game, with floating cat spirits as loot. To heal, kill some little cute shadow trolls, watch tv with your cat or cuddle with sheep. I can see how I would not enjoy this if I had my defenses up. Starting out, I thought ey, this is stupid, when little Itta seemed barely upset about finding her dead family members. Shortly after, I got stuck in between some bushes and had to reload. Encountered a lot of weird NPCs and maybe if I had had a bad day I'd have said this game tries too hard to be weird. But continuing playing, I just found myself completely sucked in. Really recommend this game to anyone who just wants a fun, weird, challenging, mysterious, intense little game with great music.
Strong 4 or weak 5. Small town setting where something is just vaguely off. Story is told in a convincing less is more way and very slow burn and gradually developing. Impressive. Its been a year since i played it but it still pops up in my mind and i've gold myself i should drop a review. Just never managed to decide if its a 4+ or 5-.
Great graphics and concept. Marred by the controls and friendly unut AI. Especially when there are wooden barricades etc, your units will attack any random objects but not the enemy units. Some of the friendly units are very expensive and will stray of into traps etc in hunt for barricades to attack. Controls are horrendous but would be ok if the barricades etc were removed. Biggest difficulty in the game: how not to have your necromancer stand attacking a pile of wood while there are three enemy units within range. Dont understand how it did not occur to the devs that removing "neutral" objects would remove 80% or more of the problems wuth the controls are friendly unit AI. Cant overstate how tedious it is to have to clear a stage of crates etc ahead of an encounter, as you know that otherwise 1/3 your units will attack crates, 1/3 will run towards off screen crates and 1/3 will fight the enemy. Could have been a 3/5 game to kill a 30 min or so with now and then if only this small change was made. As for now the game is a disaster. Really interesting to see how such a small detail can completely wreck of a game. Get it on a giveaway if at all.
The game is riddled with bugs and poor design choices. - You will often clip through walls, doors, floors, platforms etc. Especially later in the game as you get more movement options. - Brags about different environments etc but everything plays more or less exactly the same. Enemies are reskinned. Doors are reskinned. Even the simple puzzle elements are reskinned. - Camera is all over the place. Zooming in, zooming out, panning left and right. It really is by far the wildest and most unpredictable camera I have encountered since the early Nintendo 64 days. At least they had an excuse. 3D was new etc etc. This is 2D. Very poor. - Platform, ladder, ledges etc grab detection is a disaster. You will find yourself unable to get off where you want, unable to get on where you want. - Controls are very floppy. - Checkpoint system is annoying. They often put the cutscenes before the checkpoint. Checkpoints dont save ongoing processes. Some specific enemies can be sent to prison using a teleporter. This is one of your main sources for credits to upgrade your gear with. Sending a prisoner in takes around 30 seconds of blinking and beeping because the developers wanted to be unique. If you continue playing and reach a cutscene the save will not register that the send in process is ongoing. You will need to manually go back and restart the 30 second send in process every time. It looks cool hurr durr but in the end it is just like everything else with this game: its made to look cool and make the trailer look interesting, its not made to be fun or interesting or engaging. The game is a turd with countless flaws but somehow looks great, has great soundtrack, great trailer. They forgot to put even a tiny amount of time on grab box detections when they worked on making the trailer look as cool hurr durr as possible. Avoid.
