(edit: thanks to Adam_B and rhamorim for the link assist/reminder.)
Despite this game currently being in Early Access, thanks to Rhamorim’s mention, I tried the demo and was very impressed. For any fans of 16-bit era action RPGs (e.g. Zelda, Secret of Mana, etc.), this is worth a look. In addition to being fun, I enjoyed reading some of the dev interactions via their blogs and am amazed this game was built on HTML5.
I’m generally not a fan of Early Access, but if I wasn’t in-between jobs (grr), I would buy this immediately.
I have played a bit while it was in Early Access and loved it, so much that I decided to stop playing to have the full experience when it came out. I don’t expect the first few hours to be much different, and so my initial impression stands, but I’ll try to post my impressions every now and then here as they come. ;)
This is 25% off for $15 now during the holiday sale. I didn’t realize it was an old school action RPG which are pretty few and far in between plus the demo was so snappy. For an HTML 5 game I sure couldn’t tell. Granted the graphics are laughably old school with all the performance advantages that entails but I really appreciated how fast you could speed through dialogues and areas if it was being repeated.
What really sold me was the explosive combat videos with all the different combat options and builds. I love upgrading paths for twin stick shooter games. I don’t like bullet dodging hell though so we will have to see how long I can keep playing it.
60+ hours in and I can say this is an amazing evolution of the Secret of Mana games. I was worried about the difficulty since my action gaming skills and patience has declined over the years but the story and game play were enough to keep me struggling until I got over the boss fights. Which are all wonderfully varied in mechanisms and tactics.
They even have a fairly well done tower defense game as a small side quest.
Now I am over leveled enough most things are pretty easy, but that was a very conscious choice on my part. Each new area has an enormous set of maps with almost every screen having some secret you can see but can’t obviously get to. Figuring each of these out with out googling will mean you are naturally over leveled, or you can skip it and proceed through much faster (as long as you git gud).
The game is pretty evenly split between puzzles and fighting, with the puzzles being very well done. My gold standard for puzzles is if I get frustrated enough to look up the solution. So far I haven’t had to for a single one, though I sometimes feel like I cheated on some or did something exceptional. To me that just means they did a very good job with the design.
Big thumbs up, even if it just dies in the later quarter of the game I can say I got my monies worth awhile ago.
