[h1]It's not very good...[/h1]
I like RPGmaker and RPGmaker style games, but really, it's just not very good, it's so obtuse for no reason, the translation is broken English which like, fair enough, translation is hard, but still it doesn't help, I got all the endings and achievements and now my only saves with the bathroom key it won't let me go in the bathroom, not for any real reason, just she doesn't want to for literally no reason
but let's move onto the most horrific offence of this game
the assault to the practice of pixel art
please understand, I'm a pixel artist, I've been doing pixel art for years, I love it, I have fun doing it, I adore the medium and think it's amazing
the person who created this game did not understand the most fundamental rules of pixel art, it reminds me of another game I played until coming to a point where the game was glitched so badly that it hard locked the entire rest of the game, skeler boy (by the way this game is full of bugs too but none I encountered which hard locked the game), what these games have in common is what's known as mixels, using pixels of a smaller size than the resolution of a sprite, or of the world, it's an incredibly amateur move to make
Your character is for some reason higher resolution than the sprites of all other characters, despite her being significantly smaller, and them being significantly larger, this results in not only ugly out of place designs, but the protagonist despite being a child, appearing more like a small old woman whose hair is thinning, and the other characters look like baby's first pixel art, like bad oversized mascot costumes, because they are just so much larger than you, but so much lower resolution, that's the effect that losing the detail has, other than it just being ugly, and that's not even close to the only uses of mixels, they are FREQUENT throughout the game, just in the world, for no good reason as far as I can tell, maybe they were all just ripped from elsewhere, free assets, I really don't know, but you need to keep your pixels consistent with this style, sure there are occasions that those rules can be bent or broken, but you need to understand them before you break them, they exist for a reason, and the creator of this game, at least at the time of it's creation, did not understand them
the gameplay is bland and unintuitive, it drags on, overstays it's welcome by a significant margin, whatever, the story feels underdeveloped, the epilogue doesn't make sense, cus where else is the kid gonna go? Why wouldn't you find her for ending 2? And when it comes to the shopkeep, and other characters, it feels like more was planned for them, or maybe they were just there to flesh out the world, but ultimately they serve no purpose, give you more to do once or twice when looking around (despite the game seemingly trying it's hardest to stop you from doing so), but that's about it, which is incredibly disappointing
so, in case you missed it, I did not enjoy this game, I was not a fan of it, I think it's obtuse, it's ugly, it's boring, it tries too hard to scare you, there's too much that's just there for no reason like a random tile to a "secret" room which spells out the entire core of the game, because nuance is dead apparently, even if I received this game for free I'd feel robbed
and yet despite my disdain for this game, I took a look at what the developer has coming up in the future at time of writing, and while I don't think it's anything groundbreaking, and I probably won't play it as it doesn't look like my sort of thing, the developer has clearly learned from this game at the very least in their art, I didn't notice any horrific mixels or anything in the trailer, and I want to recognise that their effort in learning and improving is paying off, and I genuinely hope to see some great things from them in the future, as this style of games has often been full of lazy, or bad titles, made by people on a whim, there are tons of great ones, don't misunderstand, but for every great there are 100 terrible games, and I'd love to see someone stick to this, perfect their craft, and potentially make something which is great, and has a big impact
it's rare that games like this make a splash in the larger more mainstream sphere of games, I mean undertale is the closest thing and just look at how that turned out, the fanbase has a constant looming cloud over it thanks to the history of it's incredibly toxic fanbase in the past (not that they aren't still toxic, it's just received more mainstream appreciation and isn't considered cringe to like it anymore), while a large impact is rare with games like these, I do want to see the developer grow and develop their skills, and one day make something great, a game I can spend money on and feel every penny was well spent, but for this game, sorry but just don't bother, it's not good
