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Humble Sales Are Very Dangerous – Part Fourteen
Blossom Tales: The Sleeping King - Grampa tells his grandkids the story of Lily, a new recruit who manages to save the kingdom when the evil wizard Crocus casts a sleeping spell on the king and tries to take over the kingdom. (That narration conceit means occasionally you’ll get to supply the details about a miniboss or treasure room; and that grandpa reminds you where you were going whenever you resume the game.) A Zelda-like with a fairly “for advanced players” feel to it, especially from a platforming perspective. (The battles can seem hard, but enemies don’t take too many of your frankly absurd heart count with each hit, and you can carry lots of potions and revival flowers. The puzzles are tricky, but not unusually so if you’re familiar with block-pushing, step-on-the-squares, Simon, and standard Zelda item use.) There are only four real dungeons, but they’re very long; and the overworld is loaded down with secrets and sidequests. A playthrough without uncovering all the secrets took around 7 hours, so you get your money’s worth, but there are other Zelda-likes I think I recommend before this. It’s good, but not amazing.
Pillars of Dust - A retro-rpg by the folks who brought us Shadows of Adam; this one has a much more 8-bit feel and a big emphasis on poking every barrel, pot, bookcase and shrub looking for secrets. There are seven chapters total (and it tracks how many secrets you find in each one); three for each protagonist and then a final chapter. I played through three of the chapters obsessively checking every corner and crevice and getting intimately familiar with the “there’s nothing here” messages…and then I lost interest and left my save on my old laptop. My verdict is that this game calls for too much perfectionism for too little payoff. Oh, well. (I actually got this in the itch.io bundle, but it had been on my Steam watchlist and I tried to give it a fair shake.)
Artifact Adventure – I don’t think this was as good as the sequel, Artifact Adventure Gaiden. That was an action-rpg send-up of Game Boy games that gave you both the motivation and ability to free-roam and explore. This is a much more standard spin on 8-bit rpgs with a LOT of quirks. In theory you can free roam (and one of your options at the outset is an airship), but in practice you need to grind like crazy if you deviate from the obvious land route of available quests. Remember that 8-bit reference? Said quests are often obtuse and require a lot of blind searching; the random encounters vary wildly in difficulty; inventory is sharply limited; and healing spells are hard to come by. Actually, all spells are hard to come by, because the Artifacts you find in your quest can only go to one character and function as special abilities. I also made the mistake of taking a Monk, who is crazy-fragile and doesn’t deal better damage than other classes, even with the double-hit unarmed attack. I did something like half the quests and died a dozen times trying to finish a few others, then put my characters on a boat and watched the ending sequence.
SolSeraph – A spiritual successor to Actraiser; as a god you guide the people of the world to defeat monsters and build their civilization. This is half side-scrolling action-platformer, and half simulation / tower defense. Kinda surprisingly, the mouse and keyboard controls are pretty terrible (even for the simulation areas) and you really need to use a controller. That aside…it’s middling. The simulation aspects are rough; you need food to build houses and wood to build farms and people to staff everything, and it’s not always clear how much of what thing is currently “in use”. Also, “cleared” enemy bases still spawn monsters (presumably to keep the difficulty curve in the tower defense segments). The side-scrolling sections, on the other hand, are mildly better than Actraiser, but that’s saying very little because that game was known for its clunky platforming and unfair traps. They got too hard for me after the third level; I think the difficulty is dynamic to the order you do things in, and I ended up with both a boss battle and a new-stage entry sequence that I couldn’t clear. I’m glad I tried it, but I’m also okay not beating my head against it to try to finish it.
Pillars of Dust - A retro-rpg by the folks who brought us Shadows of Adam; this one has a much more 8-bit feel and a big emphasis on poking every barrel, pot, bookcase and shrub looking for secrets. There are seven chapters total (and it tracks how many secrets you find in each one); three for each protagonist and then a final chapter. I played through three of the chapters obsessively checking every corner and crevice and getting intimately familiar with the “there’s nothing here” messages…and then I lost interest and left my save on my old laptop. My verdict is that this game calls for too much perfectionism for too little payoff. Oh, well. (I actually got this in the itch.io bundle, but it had been on my Steam watchlist and I tried to give it a fair shake.)
Artifact Adventure – I don’t think this was as good as the sequel, Artifact Adventure Gaiden. That was an action-rpg send-up of Game Boy games that gave you both the motivation and ability to free-roam and explore. This is a much more standard spin on 8-bit rpgs with a LOT of quirks. In theory you can free roam (and one of your options at the outset is an airship), but in practice you need to grind like crazy if you deviate from the obvious land route of available quests. Remember that 8-bit reference? Said quests are often obtuse and require a lot of blind searching; the random encounters vary wildly in difficulty; inventory is sharply limited; and healing spells are hard to come by. Actually, all spells are hard to come by, because the Artifacts you find in your quest can only go to one character and function as special abilities. I also made the mistake of taking a Monk, who is crazy-fragile and doesn’t deal better damage than other classes, even with the double-hit unarmed attack. I did something like half the quests and died a dozen times trying to finish a few others, then put my characters on a boat and watched the ending sequence.
SolSeraph – A spiritual successor to Actraiser; as a god you guide the people of the world to defeat monsters and build their civilization. This is half side-scrolling action-platformer, and half simulation / tower defense. Kinda surprisingly, the mouse and keyboard controls are pretty terrible (even for the simulation areas) and you really need to use a controller. That aside…it’s middling. The simulation aspects are rough; you need food to build houses and wood to build farms and people to staff everything, and it’s not always clear how much of what thing is currently “in use”. Also, “cleared” enemy bases still spawn monsters (presumably to keep the difficulty curve in the tower defense segments). The side-scrolling sections, on the other hand, are mildly better than Actraiser, but that’s saying very little because that game was known for its clunky platforming and unfair traps. They got too hard for me after the third level; I think the difficulty is dynamic to the order you do things in, and I ended up with both a boss battle and a new-stage entry sequence that I couldn’t clear. I’m glad I tried it, but I’m also okay not beating my head against it to try to finish it.