Backpack Hero

Overall an excellent and very enjoyable game. Fun mechanics, interesting and engaging gameplay loop, and excellent music. It does, however, severely lack polish, which would preclude me from justifying paying full price for it. It still possesses a set of glaringly bad and consistent bugs that should have been noticeable enough to be caught during quality control. For example: - One of the main buildings in Story Mode is impossible to unlock properly without following a highly convoluted step-by-step process involving downloading Steam repos. - If you reload a save (for example, if you had to close the game in the middle of a run to deal with a bug) certain rooms become bugged or inaccessible in dungeons. - If you have too many effects that activate on Turn Start, and the enemy dies during its turn due to status effects like poison, the "Victory" screen can get stuck superimposed over the "Combat" screen, forcing you to close and re-open the game or abandon the run. - The Skip button doesn't work in the Credits even after watching the entire thing, so I had to close the game and re-open it to continue. This didn't severely hamper my enjoyment of the game but it did force me to use the Debug Mode pretty regularly. The ending is also very rushed and disappointing - the final boss is exceedingly easy, there's no special dungeon or events leading up to it, and it didn't even have a unique music track. The credits don't have unique music either. There was a noticeable point at which everything seemed to suddenly stop having effort put into it, and dialogue from the characters starts becoming short and strictly informational. It's a shame because this game has the potential to be up there alongside some of my favorite Indie games, but it just didn't receive the care and dedication it needed to be properly polished and given a final release.