Hey, more games. In addition to these, I also tried
Bleak and
Boss Fighter, which both looked kind of promising, but I couldn't get them to work for whatever reason.
Fhenerur (0.5/5):
This is another by-the-books RPG with way too many random encounters and a story that's been drained of all its pathos despite having subject matter that should invoke it. You'll spend the first ten or fifteen minutes exploring the way-more-than-necessary towns before you begin your quest for revenge. You only have one character in your party, and his only abilities are physical attacks, so battles are necessarily simplistic. You also might want to stock up on antidotes, as there are a couple of mobs that poison and you have no reliable means to heal it. I made it to the end of the game, which requires going through an overly long dungeon, only to be told that I didn't do a side quest somewhere and had to backtrack and complete it first, which was enough for me to put it down. On the plus side, the dialogue is unintentionally hilarious. What sound does a dog make? If you said "bup," you're probably the developer of this game.
Random (0/5):
Random operates on the bizarre premise that your face has been stolen and you have to run through a cave and steal the facial features off of people that you run into. Battles consist of a little combo system with no limits on player turns, so you can hit enemies as often as it takes to burn through the animation for each attack. What this generally means, though, is that you'll probably just trade hits with the enemy--maybe occasionally you'll get a second hit in. The gimmick is weird rather than engaging, and the difficulty ramps up significantly from the first floor to the second, so this ended up being a grind-a-thon that I didn't want to participate in.
Regalia Alpha (2/5):
This was a sidescroller in which you play the only player character in an MMO that can still move, as everyone else has been glitched into place. The ground situation has an annoying side effect of having dialogue delivered as if it were typed messages in a general chat in an MMO, meaning the dialogue is banal and irritating. This was an action game, though, so I can forgive any issues with the story if the gameplay is awesome. There are some interesting ideas at play here; you begin with several abilities with a range of utility, but you lose them over the course of the game. However, these abilities weren't fully utilized. The ice ability, for instance, fires up and down on its third hit, but you never run into any enemies that this would be useful on, so it ends up being an ineffectual melee hit. The character also stops moving when they attack, so combat feels very rigid; I think this might have been an attempt to more closely feel like an MMO, but MMO combat tends to be awful, and without other players, small-term goals, or long-term progression, an MMO doesn't work. There's also a major lack of enemy variety--you'll essentially fight two enemy types; they have variants, but that doesn't change how you engage them. There's also a boss, who has to be beaten in a way the game hasn't taught you up until that point, which felt bizarre; why set up mechanics when you don't test them with a final challenge? The graphics were gorgeous, though, and the actual movement felt fluid and fun. The gameplay, though, was too rigid to be enjoyable; expect hit-trading instead of dodging.
Spirit Realm (0/5):
This is an action/platformer that has a number of glaring issues. The game is set in a world that's suspended in mid-air; falling means starting back at the beginning, and your sword has the unusual mechanic of making you charge forward, meaning that while you're getting used to the game, you can expect to fall off a lot. There are a few interesting ideas, such as the bow and arrow that fires a projectile and lets you walk on the platform that trails behind it. Gameplay's still pretty clunky, though. I cheesed my way past the first two bosses and got stuck on the third; there's no reliable way to heal, and reloading the game doesn't recover life, so I got to that boss with just a sliver of health, and the combat's too clunky to really want to master. Sound effects and art are pretty garish, but I have a feeling that the developer is pretty young, so it's neat to see him making his own assets. The music was, according to the developer, recorded from his mom playing a keyboard, and it shows; you can hear the crappy preset drum track and the recording is too quiet and a little watery. The narrative is a collect-the-elements plot line, and dialogue is delivered in a slow, choppy way that will aggravate.
The Postman (2.5/5):
The Postman is a detective game, and I use the term "game" loosely. It begins with an oddball premise about how there are a number of gods in the universe that dictate various things, including the banal, and you happen to play the god of missing letters, so your original goal is to just find a letter and return it to its rightful owner. From there, though, the game turns into a basic murder/mystery. After you get past the ground situation, the narrative doesn't surprise or offer much intrigue; it's a plot that you've seen before. The characters, though, feel genuine, and the dialogue is pretty engaging--mainly because the main character has an outside perspective on humanity. The gameplay, though, is virtually nonexistent; the player talks to several NPCs and is given subjects to talk about, which will slowly reveal more subjects. Since this is part of the detective genre, this style of dialogue was fine, but the game basically ended up playing itself; I wasn't even able to guess the murderer or determine their motives or methods--the game did that for me. So, as a game it felt like the player was removed from it, and as a movie, the plot did little to break out of the well-trodden detective genre. The game does look great, though, and the dialogue might make this a worthwhile game to try if you can forgive its problems.
The One That Got Away (0/5):
The premise of this game attracted me to it; apparently, the developer came across a dead (or maybe dying) man and wasn't able to help, which made him feel terrible, so he made a game about coping with the resulting mental trauma. I guess this is an art game, so there could have been something that was deeper than what I experienced, but, whenever I run into that question, it makes me wonder if I'm stupid or if the developer just didn't clearly convey something--and I tend to think I'm not stupid. Basically, gameplay consists of making a triangle run into other triangles. Once you run into all the triangles, you'll here a recorded message of the developer talking about his experience. The gameplay really felt separate from the narrative and wasn't engaging, and, though I'm sure this was a cathartic experience for the developer, why he entered this game into a contest is a mystery.
