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chuckroSo, these three games all came from a $5 “Build Your Own” Fanatical bundle; I was interested in Beloved Rapture and picked up the other two for the bundle minimum. (I was recently commenting to my son that I look for about $1/hour as the mark of good value for video games. This set averaged out impressively well.)
DUNGEONS OF CHAOS – A clunky and pixelated tile-based open-world dungeon exploration game, clearly trying to invoke an old-fashioned Ultima or D&D Gold Box experience. You ask NPCs about their NAME and JOB and fight a zillion tactical grid-based battles as you slowly gain levels, train skills, and find a million pieces of marginally-better equipment. It’s not trying to be pretty, and past the basic tutorial exposition it’s not going to hold your hand: Blunder into something out of your depth and you’re back to your last save. What does this skill do? What do these numbers on the weapons mean? Eh, you’ll figure it out. The plot is as bare-bones as you’d expect; the kingdom was overrun by evil forces and you’re novices sent to safety on a distant island who need to get strong enough to retake it. I appreciate the decent autobattle settings, but the mouse-and-keyboard interface combination is clunky and, more importantly, it’s banking on your nostalgia for an era of crpgs that never won me in the first place.
Transcendence Legacy – Voidswept – An RPGMaker game made a lot of stock assets, about two amnesiac heroes in a post-Catastrophe world where civilization is in tatters and monsters are everywhere. Credit for having multiple difficulty levels and a full set of achievements; and there’s some strategy built into battles because enemies have elemental and weapon weakpoints. (You can also build you party somewhat—every character can use every weapon and spell, and you have 6 characters with which to build a party of 4, so you can specialize them early on.) You can only save at save points, which double as your fast-travel points (which means you can go to town and restock from any of them). It’s about 4 hours long and ends with going to fight God; I’m reminded of many KEMCO games in that it’s a perfectly cromulent but forgettable jrpg experience.
Beloved Rapture – An RPGMaker-style indie game that is about two men finding love while saving the kingdom from an evil cult, but first everyone needs to get over their deep issues with their parents and the backdrop of war and colonialism. It started with the problematic quirk that McAfee thought it was a virus and I needed to jump through hoops to rectify that. (It also randomly crashed a few times; after some more patches came through it got more stable but it still has random glitches like incorrect text boxes and characters climbing next to ladders rather than up them. Nothing game-breaking, though.) The pixel art is particularly good. The retro sensibilities are so strong that the level of gore and profanity when a town was destroyed was genuinely shocking; though that got old in later chapters. It’s honestly a bit overwritten and the cutscenes get talky and repetitive…especially since they should have…cut…the number of ellipses for emphasis…by about three-quarters. Also, for the 20 hours of gameplay relatively little happens: You spend more than half of that time scouring the overworld and towns for sidequests and secrets. Since this is a game with a flat level curve, plenty of missables, and mostly non-respawning encounters, you really want to do everything (but carefully, since there’s also effectively limited healing). I very much approved of their approach to Easy mode, which just restores your HP/MP to full after every battle, essentially removing the limited resource economy. Generally fun, absolutely my money’s worth, but I doubt I’ll ever go back to it.
Meanwhile, these three games were from a different $9 “Build Your Own” Fanatical bundle:
Sunrise’s Order – A Stardew-like for all the people who hate the “dealing with villagers” part of farming sims. You decide to quit your job and move to a deserted island where Amazon will air-drop packages you order online and you can fulfill internet “contracts” with the items you grow, forage, or craft. It was made by a two-person team and it shows; the animations are very simple and the graphics are “early-aughts Flash game” quality. That said, it’s got a decent game loop and how to unlock things is fairly intuitive. The fishing minigame is a rhythm game, which I thought was a cute innovation. The quests system is a little janky; I got the “craft a hammer” quest twice and had some more advanced quests sitting on my main screen from way too early. What this really reveals, though, is that as much as I like the Stardew game loop, I do eventually need some plot and NPC interaction to keep it going. There’s only so much chasing Achievements before I’m like, “...this feels a little pointless.” I got to the point of needing chickens, which requires building a farm plot and then building a coop on it and also building a silo (all of which need tons of gathered resources and to be unlocked by doing enough contracts) and also buying the chickens and I was like, “Look, if Marnie isn’t going to show up at my door demanding eggs, I’m not sure why I’m bothering here.” Six hours for my $3 was totally worth it, but that’s plenty for me.
Maze Mice – ARR picked out this one since I was getting the other two and had some fun with it; but it turned out I liked it even more. It’s a fancy version of Pac-Man with instant pause (enemies only move when you do) and a huge variety of power-ups. And interestingly, the stages aren’t endless: After 10 minutes a boss appears, and if you beat that (via damage-dealing powerups and collecting enough orbs) the stage ends and you get an achievement. Even if you don’t beat it, collecting points is what unlocks new powerups, new mice and new stages. My one complaint would be that the later stages don’t unlock fast enough—you’re basically grinding on a couple of stages (which, admittedly, has its place as a style of game). I found that the most useful powerups were Love (slowly restores health), Anti-Cheat (damages enemies in walls, which as fantastic against ghosts), and Catnip (flat-out kills several enemies after each cooldown; also fantastic against late-stage high-health ghosts). In general, if you can get XP bonus abilities early you should, and as more powerups unlock you need to think about synergy between them because you can only hold 4 weapons and 4 items. I ended up conquering this, getting every unlock and finding a combination of power-ups that made me invincible in one ridiculous run on Endless Mode. So this also got me 10+ hours of entertainment.
8-Bit Adventures 2 – Not quite 8-bit; really more 16-bit and a fairly standard jrpg: Following the events of the first game, which I don’t think I ever played, the three heroes vanquished the Dust and the Computer was able to restore the world. But now one of the heroes has gone missing and, as a young orphan they rescued, you’re off to help save him. It hits a bunch of tropes fairly early, including a sewer level and a mandatory stealth sequence. I give them credit that the plot keeps moving and the grinding isn’t atrocious; and the battle options are pretty varied. That said, the plot never really grabbed me enough to justify the length of the game (again, I suspect playing the first game would have made a difference) so after three hours I decided to cull it.
That said, each of these were absolutely worth $3 for the amount of enjoyment I got out of them.
Overall: Beloved Rapture is a decent indie jrpg experience and Maze Mice is shockingly fun; those are the standouts here.
DUNGEONS OF CHAOS – A clunky and pixelated tile-based open-world dungeon exploration game, clearly trying to invoke an old-fashioned Ultima or D&D Gold Box experience. You ask NPCs about their NAME and JOB and fight a zillion tactical grid-based battles as you slowly gain levels, train skills, and find a million pieces of marginally-better equipment. It’s not trying to be pretty, and past the basic tutorial exposition it’s not going to hold your hand: Blunder into something out of your depth and you’re back to your last save. What does this skill do? What do these numbers on the weapons mean? Eh, you’ll figure it out. The plot is as bare-bones as you’d expect; the kingdom was overrun by evil forces and you’re novices sent to safety on a distant island who need to get strong enough to retake it. I appreciate the decent autobattle settings, but the mouse-and-keyboard interface combination is clunky and, more importantly, it’s banking on your nostalgia for an era of crpgs that never won me in the first place.
Transcendence Legacy – Voidswept – An RPGMaker game made a lot of stock assets, about two amnesiac heroes in a post-Catastrophe world where civilization is in tatters and monsters are everywhere. Credit for having multiple difficulty levels and a full set of achievements; and there’s some strategy built into battles because enemies have elemental and weapon weakpoints. (You can also build you party somewhat—every character can use every weapon and spell, and you have 6 characters with which to build a party of 4, so you can specialize them early on.) You can only save at save points, which double as your fast-travel points (which means you can go to town and restock from any of them). It’s about 4 hours long and ends with going to fight God; I’m reminded of many KEMCO games in that it’s a perfectly cromulent but forgettable jrpg experience.
Beloved Rapture – An RPGMaker-style indie game that is about two men finding love while saving the kingdom from an evil cult, but first everyone needs to get over their deep issues with their parents and the backdrop of war and colonialism. It started with the problematic quirk that McAfee thought it was a virus and I needed to jump through hoops to rectify that. (It also randomly crashed a few times; after some more patches came through it got more stable but it still has random glitches like incorrect text boxes and characters climbing next to ladders rather than up them. Nothing game-breaking, though.) The pixel art is particularly good. The retro sensibilities are so strong that the level of gore and profanity when a town was destroyed was genuinely shocking; though that got old in later chapters. It’s honestly a bit overwritten and the cutscenes get talky and repetitive…especially since they should have…cut…the number of ellipses for emphasis…by about three-quarters. Also, for the 20 hours of gameplay relatively little happens: You spend more than half of that time scouring the overworld and towns for sidequests and secrets. Since this is a game with a flat level curve, plenty of missables, and mostly non-respawning encounters, you really want to do everything (but carefully, since there’s also effectively limited healing). I very much approved of their approach to Easy mode, which just restores your HP/MP to full after every battle, essentially removing the limited resource economy. Generally fun, absolutely my money’s worth, but I doubt I’ll ever go back to it.
Meanwhile, these three games were from a different $9 “Build Your Own” Fanatical bundle:
Sunrise’s Order – A Stardew-like for all the people who hate the “dealing with villagers” part of farming sims. You decide to quit your job and move to a deserted island where Amazon will air-drop packages you order online and you can fulfill internet “contracts” with the items you grow, forage, or craft. It was made by a two-person team and it shows; the animations are very simple and the graphics are “early-aughts Flash game” quality. That said, it’s got a decent game loop and how to unlock things is fairly intuitive. The fishing minigame is a rhythm game, which I thought was a cute innovation. The quests system is a little janky; I got the “craft a hammer” quest twice and had some more advanced quests sitting on my main screen from way too early. What this really reveals, though, is that as much as I like the Stardew game loop, I do eventually need some plot and NPC interaction to keep it going. There’s only so much chasing Achievements before I’m like, “...this feels a little pointless.” I got to the point of needing chickens, which requires building a farm plot and then building a coop on it and also building a silo (all of which need tons of gathered resources and to be unlocked by doing enough contracts) and also buying the chickens and I was like, “Look, if Marnie isn’t going to show up at my door demanding eggs, I’m not sure why I’m bothering here.” Six hours for my $3 was totally worth it, but that’s plenty for me.
Maze Mice – ARR picked out this one since I was getting the other two and had some fun with it; but it turned out I liked it even more. It’s a fancy version of Pac-Man with instant pause (enemies only move when you do) and a huge variety of power-ups. And interestingly, the stages aren’t endless: After 10 minutes a boss appears, and if you beat that (via damage-dealing powerups and collecting enough orbs) the stage ends and you get an achievement. Even if you don’t beat it, collecting points is what unlocks new powerups, new mice and new stages. My one complaint would be that the later stages don’t unlock fast enough—you’re basically grinding on a couple of stages (which, admittedly, has its place as a style of game). I found that the most useful powerups were Love (slowly restores health), Anti-Cheat (damages enemies in walls, which as fantastic against ghosts), and Catnip (flat-out kills several enemies after each cooldown; also fantastic against late-stage high-health ghosts). In general, if you can get XP bonus abilities early you should, and as more powerups unlock you need to think about synergy between them because you can only hold 4 weapons and 4 items. I ended up conquering this, getting every unlock and finding a combination of power-ups that made me invincible in one ridiculous run on Endless Mode. So this also got me 10+ hours of entertainment.
8-Bit Adventures 2 – Not quite 8-bit; really more 16-bit and a fairly standard jrpg: Following the events of the first game, which I don’t think I ever played, the three heroes vanquished the Dust and the Computer was able to restore the world. But now one of the heroes has gone missing and, as a young orphan they rescued, you’re off to help save him. It hits a bunch of tropes fairly early, including a sewer level and a mandatory stealth sequence. I give them credit that the plot keeps moving and the grinding isn’t atrocious; and the battle options are pretty varied. That said, the plot never really grabbed me enough to justify the length of the game (again, I suspect playing the first game would have made a difference) so after three hours I decided to cull it.
That said, each of these were absolutely worth $3 for the amount of enjoyment I got out of them.
Overall: Beloved Rapture is a decent indie jrpg experience and Maze Mice is shockingly fun; those are the standouts here.
