Linus does not have a publicly available demo as of the time of this writing, and it came with some notes from the creator before I got started. Most important among them:
- The battles for this version weren't worked on too much, due to my battle coordinator being extremely busy for the last few months. This means that in the latter battles, there are some presentation issues (like new party members having odd face-sets, or enemies having the wrong icon in the turn order display). All of this will be fixed eventually.
- For now, I'm using Fire Emblem edits, and my lack of digital artistic ability shows in how badly some of them are edited. Eventually we'll have custom portraits.
- All of the music is placeholder, as my composer is still working on creating an original soundtrack for the game
The game is also intended to be more visual novel than RPG, which is something I haven't really delved too much into. I start to feel a little exhausted pressing enter to progress dialogue through cutscenes if I'm not given the occasional break to "play a game," as it were, so visual novels are not exactly my forte.
Anyway, the battles are pretty minimal and since it's clear there's a lot of work expected to be done on them still, I will go ahead and leave the commentary for them out of the review.
It's too bad the music is all placeholder as well, as I actually really liked it - even if it's placeholder, it certainly fits all the scenes extremely well. I'm looking forward to seeing what the original compositions do to change the mood and/or atmosphere of the game.
There's not exactly a whole lot of exploration to do, either - at least in the sense that it doesn't reward you with unique items or present you with puzzles to solve or anything. For the most part, exploration is just to admire the maps or perhaps find a few "odds and ends" NPCs to talk to to learn a little bit more about the story or the characters.
So... A lot of the things I would normally talk about in a review are not the point of Linus. This means I pretty much only have two major categories to go on: art and story.
Thankfully, these categories do not disappoint. Even if there's Fire Emblem edits currently acting as placeholders (a series I have not actually played, so I can't tell the difference, anyway) for busts and portraits, the whole game has an amazing level of custom design. It looks like every single map is parallaxed, and the amount of detail put into all the scenes is pretty impressive. It doesn't look like maps made with an RM engine - it looks like professional, studio-drawn maps you would've seen from something like Chrono Trigger.
There's a lot of extra sprite animations, too, which are always neat to see. I thought the "stab a dude through the throat" and "impale a dude from behind" ones were particularly good. Any time you see two sprites combined into a single spriteset and come off successfully done, it's a treat. Simpler things like Rousseau holding up the letter to read are cool, though.
The game has an extremely washed-out, hazy feel to its presentation, but it matches up with the gritty atmosphere quite well. There's a lot of grey-scale tinting, and the game is pretty perpetually played with a black ring around the borders of the screen, on top of the fog overlay. Since the majority of the demo takes place in the forest, too, there are a lot of earth tones - greens, browns, and reds - that lend to the raw nature of the artwork and setting.
In short, the game feels "gloomy" a lot of the time. This is actually a style I personally enjoy, too, so it was easier for me to get on board. I commented towards the end of my LP that "I would love if the story goes as dark as it's suggesting it's about to," because I was concerned that it would pull its punches and sort of "Hollywood" things up a bit. So, imagine my surprise when it really is as dark as it sets itself up to be. It's rare I play games that approach stories with this level of seriousness, without ever deviating to make fourth-wall-breaking jokes or provide some kind of comic relief, and it's actually extremely refreshing to see a story that takes itself so seriously.
Eugene, Vinz, and Andre are three scouts for the Summerland military, led by General Bastoche and ultimately serving the King Uriah. They are waging a losing and pretty one-sided war with the Greylanders, whose empress has demanded both Bastoche and Uriah's heads with promises of clemency and peace in return. The game opens following a particularly devastating battle, where the main characters begin to realize that this war is futile, and there is only one possible outcome if they stick by their military - death for all, without a noble cause to sacrifice themselves for. This is not a heroic last stand, it's an absolute slaughter.
So the three scouts make plans to desert. Along the way, there is a lot of political intrigue, double-crossing, backstabbing (sometimes literally), and a general sense that you never really know who you can trust and who's on whose side. While some of the surprises are foreshadowed strongly enough that you'll see them coming, it never feels cheap or Shyamalanian.
I don't want to talk too much more about the actual story, because, you know... Spoilers. But it's honestly extremely well-written. I think it helps that the game is presented as a visual novel, too - some of the subtleties of the plot and the characterization are things you wouldn't be able to get away with using the shorter cutscenes of a typical RPG. You really need these longer conversations and more detailed minutiae to truly take in everything the story has to offer. Not being distracted by crazy boss fights, min/maxing with your equipment, or inventory management, is also pretty key to making sure you're focused on the story at hand.
I don't think this story would work as a typical RPG, and perhaps that's the best evidence that the game's developers really know what they're doing. They made a deliberate choice to make a visual novel and they're using that format to great effect. It's not just a lot of cutscenes, it's a lot of
important cutscenes to learn about the characters, the setting, the circumstances... Everything.
I'm still not sure that visual novels, as a genre, are really a thing I will end up getting much into - but I have to say, as an initial foray into the format, I'm pretty impressed. Linus has one of the best stories I've seen in a game so far - not just an RM game, but in any game - and it's a shame I don't get to see this caliber of plot more often.
With the whole team working on it, I'm extremely curious to see what the fully fleshed out battle system, custom music, custom busts and character portraits, and all the replacements for the various placeholders or "things that need to be taken care of later" will end up being. I think this is a game whose completion I will look forward to more than most games I get my hands on.
