I would give this 3.5 stars, or "above average." The gameplay here is not well-balanced or deep enough for extensive play. There are also petty annoyances that creep in if you play it too often. But, it's great for breaks while working on a project. The premise is that you send a hero into a dungeon to fulfill a quest. A hero starts a quest at level one with no equipment. You add rooms to the dungeon and treasure amd enemies in the rooms. By defeating enemies, the character will collect leveled equipment and slightly improve their stats and fullfill whatever the objective of the quest is. The main point of the game is the combat, which is done by playing cards from your deck of abilities. Typically, the enemy plays a card, then you play one, and the cards are applied in that order. There are a few abilities unique to each character class (all obtained on level one), but most of the ability cards come from equipment. (This make all leveled characters play similarly, unfortunately.) This process is fairly fun in short doses, and I do recommend it if you are looking for casual turn-based combat. But, there are annoyances: 1. Classes become obsolete as you complete the easier quests. Characters have one one aspect of progression, which is random and can be either good or bad. 2. Bugs: Quests can become unsolvable due to card-draw randomness. The game tends to freeze on long quests. 3. Certain classes are very fragile, and loading screens are very long, so you may be in for a long series of 1. getting killed in one hit, 2. being taunted by the narrator, 3. sitting through a loading screen 4. I found that there was one class that outperformed all other classes for almost all quest types. This killed the sense of fun for me. I wish the game were better balanced. But, the game IS strangely addictive. There are a huge assortment of enemies, and all the classes have a lot of flavor. It's...just fun to discover all the content.
This is a character-centered action game with a little bit of each of a variety of mechanics. It is NOT an orb-collecting platformer, if you immediately thought of Spyro or Jak & Daxter. It is more like Ratchet and Clank without the guns and with a tiny, tiny budget What is good: the writing is sparse, but good. The design is cool. The music and sound are okay. There's a positive theme; I would feel good about giving this to any kid, but the writing is good enough for anyone, not just kids. What is bad: Polish. It needs less motion blur, clearer maps, fewer platforms that look jumpable but aren't. Difficulty Settings. There is a "kid" difficulty level, but timing is still precise (dodging bombs, "stealth"), and the enemies still hit hard in this setting. It isn't a solo game for young children, and I don't think tweens, who could handle the difficulty, will like its complete lack of edginess. MOAR Mechanics. There are a few rail-grinding sections which have mushy controls and bad cameras. "Stealth." Sound-based puzzles that have sounds that play on top of each other. Maps. You don't spend enough time in the areas to learn the routes, but there is no map (well, there is one that conveys nothing useful). You can have the sidekick point out the way, but he might as well have been a quest arrow. Who will like it: I liked it for light relaxation. It's short, it isn't tedious or offensive, and it's very colorful with fun designs. You might also want to play it with a grade-school buddy, which could be a lot of fun.
I recently played Wind Waker for the first time with a very nostalgic friend who wanted me to experience it. Playing Oceanhorn afterwards, it amuses me that this game does a rather good job of being how she _remembered_ Wind Waker. Actually playing Wind Waker: "Okay, eventually we'll get an item that makes boat travel a lot faster..." "Um, I guess this is one of the filler dungeons, but most of them are really good...well, some are." "The art looked really great back then. Look at all the bright colors..." I think if you are a Zelda fan, you will like this game a lot because it improves on a lot of the grind areas. It's not quite as good in that it is mostly a copy, but it doesn't do anything worse than Wind Waker, necessarily. It does greatly improve on voice acting... For Zelda haters: you won't like it. Your character can't jump, the combat is simple and constant, you just keep playing to win eventually, most of the content is optional collection/exploring stuff, you play as a child (why does anyone trust stretched-collar boy with their destiny?), the environmental world-building is crap (there are three people in this town, and the only woman is elderly)...all the stuff you probably hate about Zelda games. I'm giving it 4/5 for "above average Zelda clone," but I personally found it tedious.
It seems like almost every game on GOG is given a low rating by the community. This one is sitting at three stars, currently, which I assumed I could ignore. However, now that I've played it, yes, it is a 3-star game, a confusing mix of great and poor storytelling, giving an overall "average" impression. However, I don't think the average rating gives a sense of how much a roller coaster this game is. Okay, first of all, there's the literal motion sickness. Sometimes you are walking, teetering around, bobbing and swaying, which is bad. Sometimes you are in a moving car and expected to look outside, which is worse. But the worst thing is all the YANKING of the camera. Ugh...I barely made it through the game. I'm still not sure if I'm going to be sick. The story...? Despite the stripping away of nearly every narrative convention, this game does manage to somewhat tell a story, which is an impressive feat. But the narrative is tattered and thin. It's under two hours long, but twice during the story, the protagonist gets drunk/high, and all sense goes flying out the window. And sleeps six times and has weird dreams. That does not leave much time for stuff that definitely happened. The story has a beginning--"there was this FBI agent"--but after that, you are on your own. The game basically says, "Here's some nonsense to sort through. Good luck!" The story really earns those averaged 3 stars. If you like weirdness to think about and don't mind the camera movement, you may like this game? I...do not, so it's hard to know how to recommend it. If it appeals, I suggest you pull up a let's play video in full screen and make sure you don't get sick before buying. Bonus nitpick section: game forces you the protagonist to throw away a new tube of lipstick; that hurt me deep in my miserly soul. That stuff is expensive!
In a world of terrifying monsters, one woman's goal is to kill, gut, and cook them all! This game features a bit of platforming, a bit of match three, and a bit of light rpg (just in terms of loadouts for skills and equipment). Everything is very quick and snappy. The main character, Mina, is in an Iron Chef-style competition, where she must hunt monsters to match the theme ingredient and preferences of the judges. Hunting and cooking are both part of a timed match. You use your skill loadout to attack monsters roaming in one of four-to-five areas. You can arrange your "cooking" loadout to give bonuses for things like hunting all monster types, getting all the part types from a monster type (they are random drops), getting a large number of ingredients, etc. Once you are ready to cook, you carry the ingredients between stations where you can, e.g., "stir" to match three "taste gems" to upgrade them, "debone" by removing gems, "slow cook" to upgrade fragile ingredients, etc. The matches are about 3-7 minutes apiece, bracketed by story bits and a selection of mini games. The campaign is *just* long enough to give a small taste of all the mechanics. I was surprised that there are so many good mechanics used so sparingly. There's no grinding at all! You will have to be picky with the coins you have, as you have no chance to replace them if you regret a purchase. The story is also lean and trim. Things are going on with all the background characters, who each seem to have their own off-screen plot. The campaign takes about 3-5 hours. There is no endless mode, and you only sometimes have access to "practice" areas. There is a daily cook-off, which, on GOG, compares only you to yourself on the leaderboard. Complaints: the game is keyboard or controller only, no mouse; I don't like the animation as much as that in the original demo video; in desperate need of a few cheap expansions. Game source: Kickstarter backer
Random generation just means more game to play and more fun, right? Eh....usually, it is not so clear-cut. I have come to immediately ignore any game that advertises "roguelike elements" personally, and if you are that way, I urge you not to lump this, very good, game in with those bad experiences. This game, instead of using a fast respawn rate to justify unpolished and unbalanced chaoticity, has well-placed random elements, just enough to keep things interesting without sacrificing story or strategy. This game has a lot of interesting classes, some of which you have to unlock by exploration, which is part of the interesting worldbuilding. The campaign is not random, but quests consist of doing more exploration and combat, so their presence is not intrusive in repeated games. Combat is technically turn-based, but you can speed through the turns or slow down at will. The game is very combat oriented with hardly any roleplay; fortunately the combat is a lot of fun. A word about difficulty: classes are not equal in difficulty, and in general, you will unlock harder classes to try as you play. You can also select between permadeath, limited lives, and unlimited lives. A permadeath run is amazingly doable compared to most roguelikes, and the game is even fair enough to be fun with this turned on. You do have to be _very_ patient, as the automove feature is not smart enough to avoid some deathtraps. If you don't want to do permadeath, the game will not punish you for it, either, which is refreshing. Two things that caused me to knock off a star. This game is available for free, which is fine. What is not fine is that this paid version of the game available on GOG still contains advertisements asking you to consider buying the game. I really think the dev should take the time to remove those. Also, since someone has to say it, the art is...subpar, especially the loading screens. The game art itself (tiles and sprites) is not bad enough to be distracting.
