• Title: Styrateg
• Developer: Rake in Grass
• Platforms: Windows, Mac
• Price: $9.95

Styrateg, by Rake in Grass, is a bit of a classic. I remember seeing this game on sale under the RPG moniker well before I had even realized there was such a thing as “indie RPGs.” Styrateg was, quite literally, the first indie RPG I was ever exposed to. The funny thing is, until I sat down and did this review, I wasn’t sure that it was actually an RPG.

Styrateg is very much in the vein of the early 90s war simulations I knew as a kid, before real-time gameplay had fully sunk its fangs into the neck of strategy gaming. The combat system in Styrateg is pure turn-based, hex-based strategy of a sort that we just don’t see anymore.

A quick history lesson: many people below a certain age probably won’t know this, but RTSs used to be a novelty. It was turn-based strategy titles that dominated strategy gaming in the early 90s. The Empire series began in 1987, and Civilization was released in 1991. For my part, I remember spending innumerable hours replaying the Battle of Agincourt in Empire II: The Art of War back in middle school. Dune II, the archetypal RTS that set the stage for the genre, first appeared in 1992; Command and Conquer, in 1995. Total Annihilation appeared in 1997. Starcraft, which decisively turned the strategy market toward real-time gameplay for good, wasn’t released until 1998.

Anyway, now that you officially think I’m older than dirt, let’s talk about the combat in Styrateg. Your units come in one of four basic flavors: fighter, horseman, witch and monk. Movement will feel familiar to anyone who has played a Heroes of Might and Magic game; unlike HoMM, however, all of the actual fighting in Styrateg happens on the main map. Characters can be moved in any order. An action point system governs individual character turns, which allows some flexibility during the fighting. Different types of terrain also have dramatically different movement costs, which means that you can protect your flanks with smart positioning. This is important, since you spend most of the game without very many units under your command.

This has all the makings of a strong combat system, but there are a few areas where it falls short. Enemy AI is a weak point. The baddies don’t do a very good job of picking targets for their attacks, and slow-moving enemies can be easily trapped on the far side of a mountain range while you pelt them with fireballs. It is also possible to move back and forth with a mage, sniping enemies with a maximum-range fireball once per turn as they sit there in puzzlement. Maybe the bandits are lazy. Maybe that plague-bearer found a really nice parking spot, and it’s not giving it up for anything. It’s fun to think of reasons why the enemies won’t either advance or retreat out of long-distance attack range; it’s less fun to actually fight against it. Given that spells only cost AP (which regenerates fully every turn), you could use this to essentially break the game if you wanted to.

But that’s only if you wanted to. No one’s making you use the exploit, after all. A bigger problem with Styrateg’s combat system stems not from AI issues, but from matters of design. The combat system, though not based on Dungeons and Dragons, suffers from one of its biggest flaws: it is overly randomized. Attacks frequently miss–but more importantly, when they do hit, the damage they do is hugely unpredictable. Only half a dozen maps into the game, attacks can (and will) deal anywhere from 1 to 17 damage against the exact same target, with no discernible rhyme or reason. Combined with the relatively sparse information you’re provided on enemy unit stats, this renders combat much more of a blind crapshoot than it needs to be.

Developers Rake in Grass say that Styrateg involves “strategy and RPG mixed gameplay.” In a sense, that’s true. You control individual characters, they have equipment, they gain experience and levels, and you can accept and complete quests. However, even with all of that, Styrateg just barely qualifies as an RPG.

"God damn it, Cedric--we're in the middle of a battle. Stop stacking helms on top of each other!"

Styrateg features very minimal exploration, for one thing. The game progresses straight through a linear sequence of timed battle scenarios. You can’t return to earlier areas or pick alternate routes. In fact, unless you turn off the game’s optional time limit, you can’t even stick around the map you’re already on for very long. It’s just one map after another after another.

Although most of the battlefields have one to two optional quests and/or hidden items, the maps are fairly confined. Anything hidden in the maps is hidden purely by virtue of the fog of war–once you see everything, you’ve seen everything.

Even between maps, there is a certain pervading sameness that hurts the game’s sense of progression. With rare exceptions, you’ll be seeing the same items over and over again. Character portraits and graphics are reused as well.

The illusion of progress is also hurt a bit by the fact that equipment can be stacked in strange and nonsensical ways. One of my fighters, Cedric, ended up wearing two helms for his armor. It sounds nit-picky to say, but this sort of thing makes it difficult to pretend that you’re actually equipping your characters with physical objects bearing physical properties. One gets the sense that one is merely swapping out interchangeable bonuses in an array.

I hope you like narration, because this is how the entire game's story is told.

There isn’t much dialog in Styrateg; its rather minimal story is driven almost entirely by exposition. It feels a bit like having to periodically read a story book in the middle of battle. With the exception of your hero, you get little sense that your units are actual characters–not that your hero gets much development, either. You do at least get the opportunity to pick your hero’s name and class at the start of the game, though, so there’s that.

Styrateg features pleasant 2D graphics and some really nice music from Psalteria and Krless. The soundtrack gives me the feeling of being at a Renaissance festival; it’s quite enjoyable, even if it lends the game a much lighter tone than its authors probably intended. Also neat is the game’s map editor, which allows you to create your own campaigns and play those created by others. (I wasn’t able to actually find any custom Styrateg campaigns floating around on the internet, unfortunately.)

I’ve expounded at length before on what I think makes an RPG an RPG, so I won’t recite that whole thing again here. Suffice it to say that there are certain qualities that all RPGs have in common, and this one pulls an Indy Hat Roll to squeeze itself in at the margins. Styrateg has persistent characters and leveling, but the game is so linear, its exploration so threadbare, and its story and characters so bare-bones, that it ends up feeling like a pure fantasy strategy game anyway.

The Verdict: 2.5/5. Styrateg is a lightweight confection, enjoyable in short bursts but lacking in depth and content. The game is recommended for those who want some old school turn-based strategy and the absolute minimum of definitional RPG elements.

• Title: Age of Fear: The Undead King
• Developer: Leszek Sliwko
• Platforms: Windows, Mac, Linux
• Price: $14.99

Age of Fear is much newer than Styrateg. I’d seen it mentioned before, but it wasn’t until developer Leszek Sliwko emailed me with a review code and the promise of “indie fantasy turn-based strategy” that the game really caught my attention. (What can I say: oftentimes the direct approach is the best approach.)

Like Styrateg, Age of Fear: The Undead King is an unapologetically old-school turn-based strategy game, one which plays like one of those turn-based war simulations. However, Age of Fear dispenses with randomized damage, and brings free movement into the mix for good measure. You can think of it is as something like what Myth: The Fallen Lords would have played like had it been 2D and turn-based with a top-down camera.

Age of Fear’s trick is in unshackling all of its characters from the tyranny of grids and hexes. I was a little concerned when I first heard that the game did this (free movement crippled Nippon Ichi’s ill-conceived Phantom Brave), but Leszek has managed to make it work. It’s easy to see the limits of each character’s movement, including enemies’, and the game’s hand-painted battle backgrounds contain enough texture and unique features that you can recall the limits of different characters’ movement range with a little study.

By the standards of turn-based RPG combat, Age of Fear is quite good. Battles are satisfying tactical affairs, requiring patience and planning. Positioning is of paramount importance in Age of Fear. Characters block other characters (including friendly units), and archers cannot move and fire in the same turn. Thus, you’ll need to spend some time planning your formations and deciding how far to advance before engaging enemies. As you might expect, you’ll want to keep your ranged units well out of the enemy’s reach, but even your melee units aren’t the hardiest. The game provides money to replace fallen soldiers in between battles, but it pays to keep as many characters alive as possible.

Although Age of Fear’s combat is solid, it could stand a few more features to spice things up. I would have especially liked to see terrain effects and directional damage. AoF does a good job of continually introducing new unit and enemy types to keep things from stagnating, but the system itself needs just a couple more variables to really make the most of its free movement fundamentals.

On a pure useability level, it would have also been nice to have the option of clicking an enemy to leave its movement range visible on the screen while panning around and mousing over other characters. You can always click one of your own characters to leave up its move range and then mouse over the enemies, of course, but sometimes you just want to know who can move where while staying out of a particular enemy’s way.

"No way am I moving into that tree's shadow. You can forget it, General."

Further, although the character movement system is pretty slick, it’s not perfect. Move your units too close to each other, and suddenly they’ll be prevented from moving them around one another. There is also sometimes a disconnect between the terrain you see onscreen and the areas that the game decides are moveable, with invisible boundaries that are impossible to predict simply from studying the map.

You may have noticed that I’ve only been talking about Age of Fear’s combat so far. Frankly, that’s because combat is most of the game. Age of Fear is a lot like Styrateg in that way. Age of Fear is relentlessly linear, its story entirely scripted. Your actions have no noticeable effect on the game besides advancing you to the next battlefield in better or worse shape. Age of Fear has a reasonably well-written story, but as with Styrateg, you will inevitably feel like you’re reading a book in between battles rather than playing the role yourself.

Age of Fear makes slightly better use of its linear episodic nature than Styrateg, however, allowing you to replay each battle you’ve completed as a quick skirmish (where you can play as the bad guys!)

Despite all of the structural similarities between Age of Fear and Styrateg, Age of Fear falls a little short of clawing its way into the RPG tent. Age of Fear features smaller maps than Styrateg and no fog of war, so there isn’t even a minimalist exploration element to the game. Age of Fear features no items or equipment. There is no leveling of individual characters, and all characters are effectively clones of other characters of the same class. This includes your hero, whose name and class are not customizable.

Despite its lack of leveling mechanics, Age of Fear actually does feature a (very limited) form of character advancement: once a character reaches a certain amount of experience points, it may “evolve” into a more advanced version of its unit type. All units of the same type are still identical, however, and therefore this doesn’t quite achieve the core RPG characteristic of letting you shape your characters over the course of the game.

Now, all of this isn’t to say that Age of Fear is a bad game; far from it. Age of Fear is well-designed and enjoyable. It just isn’t an RPG. In addition to its single player modes, Age of Fear supports both hotseat and computer-to-computer multiplayer games against friends and strangers. If you ever find yourself jonesing for a little turn-based fantasy strategy, you could do far worse.

The Verdict: 3.5/5. Age of Fear is an innovative fantasy tactics game with a unique free-movement system and competent enemy AI. It isn’t an RPG, but people with a penchant for turn-based fantasy combat will certainly find something to enjoy here.

Guest Review by Tof Eklund

Winter Wolves’ Planet Stronghold is a hybrid dating sim and RPG, combining elements of two distinctively Japanese genres (visual novel and old-school jRPG) with high-res graphics and an art style that is more influenced by western comics than by manga. It’s a natural synergy, in many ways, as both genres are “turn based,” use many of the same art assets, and the stat, skill, and equipment management of the RPG side “compensates” for the lack of crunchy system in most visual novels.

"I'm hit! Dupont, lay down some cover fire! Lafleur, aim for its stomach-maw! Rumi, healing, STAT! Oh, and after we wax these BEMs, would you like to go for coffee?"

The obvious question is whether the whole is more than the sum of its parts, both for Planet Stronghold and for this kind of hybrid genre as a whole. Planet Stronghold isn’t the first of its kind, as many RPGs have romantic subplots, and there are other games focused on this very combination (the Cute Knight games come to mind) but it is a high production-value release from an established indie games company.

To answer the other obvious question, no, Planet Stronghold is not sexually explicit. Romance is a large part of the game, and there are some reasonably hot “reward” images, but there’s no nudity or explicit sex.

The bread-and-butter of Celso Riva’s company (Winter Wolves/Tycoon Games) is visual novels, and many of the game’s best moments come out of taking RPG concepts and importing them into visual novel / dating sim genre. One of these is that you can choose your sex and character class. This is commonplace in RPGs but rare in the visual novel genre, where the protagonist’s sex (and personality) are generally predefined to a much greater degree than in any other genre of game. Choice of sex is more than nominal, as Joshua and Lisa Nelson are slightly different in personality, as well as completely different in appearance and in their potential love interests.

You can’t visit the Planet Stronghold forums without running into comparisons to the Mass Effect games, but the development of relationships (friendly and very friendly) is the dominant rather than secondary theme in Planet Stronghold. It’s also more even handed, presenting male as well as female eye candy, rather than following Mass Effect‘s habit of fixating on its female character’s pronounced posteriors while hiding its men in armored spacesuits.

Equal-opportunity jumpsuits: here, Lisa Nelson and Tom Shatz strut their stuff in painted-on costumes.

Planet Stronghold is also more egalitarian when it comes to gay and lesbian pairings. Mass Effect 1 & 2 feature only straight and lesbian pairings, but no gay men (Mass Effect 3 belatedly corrects this “oversight”) but Joshua and Lisa each have three potential partners, one of which is same-sex, and Joshua’s potential gay lover is possibly the prettiest character in a game full of beautiful people (and I’m speaking as someone who is generally more attracted to women).

The roster of potential relationships is completely different depending on whether you play as Joshua or Lisa, which adds to the replay value of the game. The characters represent a diverse, multi-ethnic cast, with a range of backgrounds and opinions. In general, the characterization is good, though it does fall back on existing archetypes (and occasionally cliches, like the strong woman breaking down and weeping).

You have a relationship meter with every major character in the game, whether they’re a potential love interest or not, and the decisions you make as the group’s commander will generally be popular with some of your crew and not with others. That adds an interesting wrinkle to the RPG (where characters in your party generally go along happily with whatever you decide to do), and to the dating sim (where such decisions are generally one-on-one or a choice between two love interests).

The game glosses over the fact that your romantic possibilities are all with your subordinates (or, in one case, your superior), perhaps not wanting to deal with the problems such power differentials present.

The RPG side of the game isn’t skimpy, presenting four character classes, a bevy of skills and equipment, and no “random” combat, just set-piece battles, many of which can be avoided (at the price of skipping out on scarce XP) if the player wants.

In fact, the RPG side of the game may be too developed, with so many things to keep track of that it can be a distraction from the dating sim aspect of the game. Keeping track of healing items feels like an unnecessary chore, as they’re periodically replenished at the base.

If you need someone who can explain quantum mechanics while performing brain surgery, Jacob Miles is your man. But if you want his brainy butt to survive, you're better off putting skill points into Armor use than giving him time to work on his third Doctorate.

The game’s most appealing RPG feature may also be its Achilles heel: there are a lot of skills in the game, and any character can advance in any of them, but with skill points doled out in small quantities at level-up (and a neat but intentionally limited on-base training option), developing weak skills is a waste, and putting points into non-combat skills reaps comparatively small rewards, as most of those skills are only used for rare skill checks.

Combat itself is well thought-out, but hardly flawless. Limiting the amount of combat discourages grinding and makes individual battles more important (there is a half-hidden source of unlimited combat for those determined to power-level and break the game’s balance). One of the nicer bits of the system is that each member of your squad/party has an “aggro” rating. I’ve seen this MMORPG-inspired system in other jRPGs, but it feels right here, where soldiers can auto-fire to attract enemy attention (call it “suppression fire”), leaving your scouts (snipers) free to get in kill shots.

The game’s psionic system is double edged: it does a good job of encouraging you to de-buff enemies by making all psionic powers have a chance of success that is based mostly on the user’s power and skill. The only automatic-success powers are the healing and “resurrection” abilities. The problem this creates is that it makes the most reliable use of psi powers healing, which drags out battles and flattens out the strategic possibilites.

In the end, there are better dating sims and better RPGs out there, but as someone who’d like to see more character development and romance in games, I’m encouraged by this fusion of soft lighting and crunchy system. Planet Stronghold‘s combination of the visual novel and jRPG styles is somewhat uneven, but it strikes me as a worthy endeavor.

Winter Wolves is doubling-down on their bet that the dating sim / RPG has legs, with a somewhat racier expansion, Planet Stronghold: Warzone, in progress. Their second hybrid game, Loren: Amazon Princess (paging Xena fans!) is just out, and a third game, called Undead Lily, is in the works.

The Verdict: 3.5/5. Planet Stronghold is enjoyable in itself, but it is most remarkable as a step toward bringing the visual novel and RPG genres together. It has its rough edges, and its biggest draw (that combination) is also its biggest drawback, as it won’t be sufficiently one or the other for some players. It will be interesting to see what Winter Wolves does with the expansion and other hybrid projects.

Tof Eklund teaches Writing for Games in Full Sail University’s Creative Writing MFA program. This review is part of The Sex and Romance in Games Project.

 Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon is a first-person dungeon delver by Rampant Games with an unusual focus on comedy and characterization. It lacks polish in a few areas, but FK:TSoSD is such an enjoyable (and unique) game that it’s impossible not to recommend it.

More than anything, Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon reminds me of the old Might and Magic games. You spend your time wandering around, exploring, accepting (and completing) quests, fighting things in turn-based battles and gathering loot.

As in classics such as Might and Magic IV: Clouds of Xeen, you start the game with a pre-generated party of characters. And just like in those games, combat is a turn-based affair where you issue commands on a character-by-character basis. You don’t get the option to roll up new characters, unfortunately, but you can effectively convert your existing characters to different classes through careful point allocation upon leveling up.

There’s a reason you have to use the four starting characters the game gives you. It’s central to the thing that really makes Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon stand out relative to its forbears–the writing. Writing is generally an afterthought in games like this. Your party is typically populated by mutes who, but for their individual classes and stats, would be all but interchangeable. Not so in FK:TSoSD!

It isn’t that the writing is funny (although it frequently is); it’s that the characters are believable and likeable. There is some strong characterization at work here, with relationships consistently revealed (and complicated) through onscreen interaction. Much of the game’s amusement comes from a stable of deliberately silly quests, and your characters’ fourth-wall-breakingly genre savvy commentary on what happens during those quests. Your characters remark on genre tropes, on their own classes and abilities, and sometimes even on the actual player. If your characters all die, they comment on that, too. RPG veterans, in particular, will get a real kick out of the dialog here in a Dead Alewives sort of way.

Frayed Knights works as more than RPG satire, however. It’s a solid, enjoyable first-person dungeon delver in its own right, with loads of quests to undertake as your fledgling adventuring group tries, Rodney Dangerfield-like, to amass some respect.

Frayed Knights occupies a strange twilight dimension between real-time and turn-based. Enemy groups patrol wilderness areas and dungeons in real time. Your movement occurs in real time as well. However, combat is turn-based, as are most other in-game actions (like searching or lock-picking).

I'm not saying that Jay should have named this guy Sarcopho Gus. Actually, wait, yes I am.

Movement in Frayed Knights is untethered to a grid, which makes exploring town and other non-dungeon areas far more enjoyable than it is in older games of this type. 360 degrees of freedom helps the town feel like an actual town, rather than a dungeon sans monsters. Free movement also works well within dungeons. Paired with visible monster patrols, it adds a certain frenetic quality to the exploration that you won’t find in the earlier Wizardry or Might and Magic games. In dungeons, I often felt pressured to get to “safe areas” where monsters weren’t patrolling, which is something I haven’t felt outside of true real-time dungeon-delvers like Eye of the Beholder or Stonekeep.

Speaking of patrols, it’s also nice to be able to actually see parties of monsters patrolling the dungeons ahead of time, rather than always getting thrown into random encounters beyond your control. (That said, the game does still have plenty of random encounters, most often tied to turn-based actions like searching and resting, but sometimes triggered during exploration.)

There are downsides to this approach, however. The real-time free-form movement system means that there is no proper ranged combat to soften up enemies before they reach melee range. It’s a small thing, but given the obvious gameplay inspiration Jay Barnson took from Might and Magic and Wizardry, it’s a little disappointing to see it missing here. It also complicates actions like searching and sidestepping monsters–I’ll talk about that more below.

I can’t be too sad about the loss of ranged attacks, as the battles in Frayed Knights are pretty good as-is. Jay Barnson has gone out of his way to create a system that is both elegantly simple in its structure, yet complex in practice. Both you and your enemies are arranged into melee and ranged rows, with only characters in the melee rows accessible to either side’s melee attacks. Characters have a sizable selection of spells available to them, with a wide variety of buffs and status effects at your disposal pretty much from the get-go. Enemies get access to buffs and status effect spells too, and they aren’t shy about using them. (I managed to get half my party poisoned and put to sleep before I’d even left the first village.) Combined with the constant need to manage character Endurance (more on that below), combat is just complex and challenging enough to be entertaining. I only seldom felt like I could sail through encounters just spamming the “Attack” command.

I would actually compare the battles here to some of the fights which occur in Dragon Quest VIII, in that so many of them depend upon the intelligent use of buffs, de-buffs and status effects. That said, Frayed Knights is a game that sees itself very much in the lineage of Dungeons & Dragons, so you have much more randomization to deal with in terms of the effect of attacks and spells than you would in Dragon Quest. I’m not normally a fan of heavy randomization, but in this case it works in the game’s favor, since you’re given so many tools to manage your risk.

Speaking of tools to manage risk, I would be remiss if I didn’t talk about drama stars at least a little bit here. Drama stars are Frayed Knights’ flagship gameplay innovation. If Frayed Knights were a Square Enix game, there would be a bullet point on the box that reads “Featuring the brand new Drama Star system!”

“Okay, fine Craig: drama stars,” you say. “That’s fabulous. What the hell is a drama star?” Allow me to explain. Any time you do anything in the game–get a new quest, open a door, disarm a trap, fight a battle, and so on–the game awards you drama points, which start to fill up one of three little stars at the top of the screen. You can fill up the stars up to three times each, transitioning them from bronze to silver to gold. Whenever you want, you can click a drama star to unleash its power in the form of one of a few special abilities.

Now, here’s the catch: drama points do not survive a load. If you save the game, quit, and then later Continue your saved game, it’ll keep your drama; but if you are playing and something bad happens and you decide to Load a save, then you can kiss all of your drama points goodbye. So you’re encouraged to keep playing even when bad things happen, because hitting the Load button will–quite literally–suck all the drama out of the situation. It’s both a clever metaphor and a clever mechanic to discourage save scumming.

While I really do love the idea of drama stars, I don’t think they’re as effective as they could be in FK:TSoSD. Their powers are just too weak relative to the effort involved in acquiring them. In my experience, there are two major situations where RPG players reliably engage in save scumming: (1) where choices made in branching dialog lead to permanent negative consequences; and (2) where they get creamed in combat and don’t have the means to cheaply heal their characters back up. Pretty much nothing can dissuade a player from scumming in scenario 1, so we don’t need to worry about that.

Scenario 2 is another story, though. Fully recovering your party from even a single tough battle in FK:TSoSD can require a trip all the way back to town to rest in the inn, which is (let’s be honest) a pain in the butt. If things really go that badly in a battle, the easiest option is to load (i.e. save scum)–unless, of course, the drama stars provide a viable alternative. But they don’t. Unless you’ve got more drama saved up than NBC on the eve of a Jerry Springer marathon, you’ll be lucky if you have enough drama points to resurrect a single dead character.

This actually ties into another issue. It’s obvious that Jay Barnson put a lot of thought into the systems of this game (I mean, just read the Strategy Guide), and by and large I think he succeeded. But I do have one big beef with the game’s core design: maximum Endurance erosion.

What am I talking about? In Frayed Knights, character actions in combat (and sometimes, outside of it) all rely on a single renewable resource called Endurance. Attacking uses it up. Special abilities use it up. Spellcasting uses it up, too: every spell has an Endurance cost rather than a mana or magic point cost. Characters, in turn, regenerate Endurance by resting. This provides a nice resource management mechanic to every battle, and forces you to make choices outside of combat as well. Oftentimes, you’ll find that you need to rest in a dangerous area in order to recover Endurance, thereby risking further attack. This is all good stuff: resource management, risk/reward–two of the many techniques a good game designer uses to keep things engaging.

But here is where things start to go off the rails a little. As you go through an area, using up Endurance and resting to recover it, your characters’ maximum Endurance will start dropping. The more Endurance a character burns through, the more that character’s maximum Endurance dips, lowering the ceiling on how much Endurance you can recover. There are only a few ways to reverse the effects of maximum Endurance erosion: (1) use up a Liquid Nap potion, an item which the game gives you a handful of at the start of the game, but which are available thereafter only at great expense; (2) make the long, slow, painful trek all the way back to the inn and pay to sleep; or (3) use up a drama star, which probably won’t even restore your Endurance to its normal maximum.

As you can probably tell, I do not like the Endurance erosion mechanic. I understand why it’s in the game: Jay doesn’t want you to be able to immediately reverse the consequences of triggering traps by just taking a nap. What’s more, repeat visits to the inn enforce economic costs on players who make poor decisions, or engage in a lot of unnecessary combat, and then just rest constantly as a way of dodging the consequences. It also makes sense from a narrative stand-point: your characters need to sleep every now and then, and they’re not going to get very good rest pitching camp in the middle of a dungeon, where they are at constant risk of being ambushed and killed.

But we all know that just because something is realistic, that doesn’t mean it’s fun, right? Besides, Frayed Knights already has this covered; your characters face risks resting (or, for that matter, even just moving around) in a dungeon. They’re likely to get attacked. Triggering a trap or grinding through lots of battles therefore puts them in danger even if they could theoretically recover both full health and full Endurance through resting afterwards.

"You will experience a great adventure...in bed."

Meanwhile, maximum Endurance erosion basically forces me into making a lousy choice at the end of every dungeon (or oftentimes, right in the middle of one), when my characters are exhausted from slogging through battles. I must either (a) face the most difficult fight(s) of the dungeon with half the maximum Endurance my characters normally have, or (b) drag my party all the way back through the dungeon and back to town, spend 25 silver to sleep, then go back through the whole freakin’ dungeon again just to get back to where I was. The battles in this game are not trivial, and as such, it pays to go for the second option if you don’t want to get TPK’d. And it’s the only option that makes sense, given the maximum Endurance erosion rule. But dear God, it’s boring. I don’t want to play a Sleep Quality Simulator; I want to explore dungeons. And every minute I’m spending trudging across the countryside to get to to the inn is a minute I’m not exploring dungeons.

While writing this section of the review, I wondered to myself: “What if there was a way to incentivize conservation of Endurance without requiring players to constantly go back and forth to the inn?” And then I started playing back through Might and Magic IV. It turns out that they’d hit on a near-perfect solution way back in 1992: food. In Might and Magic IV, players can carry up to 10 days worth of food at a time, and can fully recover health and mana by sleeping. Sleeping causes 8 hours to pass; passing time means food used up. When players run out of food, they have to return to an inn to buy more rations or start suffering disastrous health effects. This system has all the virtues of hitting players with an economic cost for resting too much, but requires players to spend far less time trudging back and forth to inns. Frayed Knights would benefit a great deal from something like that. (Alternatively, I’d settle for just adding a “fast travel back to the inn” button.)

While I’m picking nits, I might as well talk about the other notable design issue Frayed Knights has: the interface. It works well enough for the most part, but there are a variety of small irritations that I wish had been cleaned up prior to the game’s release. Like bird poop on the windshield of a brand new sports car, they distract from what is otherwise a very good experience.

Some of you may have read my rant about how to improve turn-based RPG combat systems. In my view, FK:TSoSD needs a little work on virtue 2 as it relates to its combat interface. Visual indicators are stretched a little thin here. The game has a grand total of three icons that it uses to show the existence of status effects: a flexing arm, a ball-and-chain, and a human silhouette surrounded by blue arcs of electricity. It took me an unreasonably long time to work out that these stood for “a buff,” “a de-buff” and “something affecting a character’s ability to move or act.” (Don’t judge: if you got poisoned and a ball-and-chain suddenly appeared on you, you’d be confused too.)

These aren’t even used consistently: when your characters fall asleep in combat, their portraits change and the word “Asleep” appears over them. If you put an enemy to sleep, however, the enemy picks up the “electricity man” symbol. For all other paralytic abilities, though, both you and the enemies use the “electricity man” symbol. Also, blinded characters get the electricity symbol. Why? I haven’t a clue. I guess what I’m saying is, art assets are expensive, but it couldn’t have been that much for an image of a green bottle with a skull on it, some sunglasses and a picture of ZZZ’s.

Interface issues extend beyond combat. For instance, it’s never really clear exactly how far a monster patrol’s “sight” radius extends, which leads to exciting moments like hiding out near a monster’s patrol path, sure it’s going to pass you by, only to end up in a combat encounter you neither wanted nor expected. It’s like ignoring a call from your mother-in-law only to walk out the front door and find her standing on your stoop.

Expect to see this a LOT.

Searching suffers from similar problems. When you search, it isn’t really clear how far that search extends. You can no longer go space by space to search an area as you could in grid-based games, because there are no defined spaces. So you’re put in the unenviable position of having to guess how far to move before searching again, weighing the chances of blowing way past the bounds of your last search against the tedium (and risk) of performing unnecessary searches. A simple user-interface element showing the outer radius of a search would have fixed this problem easily.

Other interface issues: the Journal features buttons placed literally underneath other buttons, and casting spells can require up to four clicks just to select the right target for a friendly heal or buff. There are hotkeys for much of this stuff, which helps, but there aren’t any for selecting targets or navigating sub-menus. This means that even for spells that are in your characters’ Quick-Cast slots, you’ll have to use the mouse to cast.

None of this stuff is game-breaking, but it does slow things down and hurt the game’s flow. Some of you may remember the copious amounts of crap I gave to Dubloon for its horrendous control scheme; Frayed Knights is not even remotely on the same level, but I feel its interface issues are still worth mentioning. After all, the interface is the means by which the player interacts with a game; it is literally the one thing the player spends all of his or her time using. For that same reason, interface is one of those elements of a game that quickly becomes invisible to the developer, and issues can slip through the cracks. Hopefully, some of this stuff can be tightened up in a patch.

"Hi! I'm Evelyn, and this is my friend Nightmare Fuel."

Frayed Knights’ graphics remind me a little of games from the Unreal Tournament era in terms of poly count, lighting and complexity. There are frequent particle effects in combat (and sometimes in the environment itself, such as Ardin Village with its frighteningly huge pollen). Frayed Knights isn’t going to win any awards for visuals, but aside from a sometimes-noticeable variation in asset style and quality, there’s nothing really all that objectionable to get in the way of the game.

Musically, Frayed Knights is a mixed bag. Combat triggers one of two high quality songs that lend some drama without calling too much attention to themselves. The outdoor music, however, has a throwback MIDI sound to it that I found rather grating. Oddly, the music that plays in the Temple of Pokmor Xang appears to lift a motif from the Aladdin soundtrack. And so on. I mostly played the game with the sound off; your mileage may vary.

The Verdict: 4/5. Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon succeeds both as satire and as a proper dungeon-delver in its own right. With great characters, enjoyable writing and solid combat, I’m more than willing to overlook some interface issues, the odd mismatched asset, and the need for frequent trips to the inn. Frayed Knights is well-made, fun, and entirely unique. If you enjoyed the old Might and Magic or Wizardry games, I’d strongly recommend snatching this one up.

You will jump into the dreams of people you meet and can exit the way you came in or jump into the dream of another person you meet or person within your party. This allows a lot of back and forth into different landscapes, something you will need to do to advance farther in certain realms. You won’t be worrying about random monsters though, they appear on the screen for you to avoid or confront depending on you.

An interesting aspect that adds some difficulty to the game is the lack of a healing item inventory. Within the dreams you will find food of all sorts that will heal your party. Certain characters more than others depending on the food type. The true kicker is once you pick it up it is used immediately and removed from the map. So you need to use them sparingly and make sure it is the right item for the character needing healed most. There is a bit of a safety net as far as healing goes. You can use a fairy that appears near where you start, at a cost. If she heals your party the dreamworlds will react and make the game more difficult. So using her can be more headache than help.

Additionally, here’s an interview Adam Ames of TruePCGaming did with Indinera (the owner of Aldorlea Games). They don’t talk too much about the game itself there, though Indinera does mention that Dreamscape is more puzzle-focused than his usual fare.

This comes in the form of a top-down, old-school RPG, reminiscent of Nintendo classics, as you wander pixel lands, visit pixel towns, and conquer pixel caves, all in the search of heroic deeds. And while it’s undoubtedly a spoof, it also remembers to be a coherent, detailed RPG in its own right. The variety of monsters to fight alone is utterly extraordinary. However far through the game I may be, and I’ve been playing for many hours, I’ve encountered literally hundreds of unique enemies, each with particular fighting styles, their own mini-bios, animations, and a special look for when Cthulhu turns them insane.

CStW, in other words, is a traditional jRPG. Interestingly, it functions a bit like Deadly Sin 2 in that random battles eventually cut off. Rather than letting the player find and deactivate a monster node, however, each screen has a custom cap on the maximum number of random encounters you can get. Once that cap is reached, they stop entirely. Personally, I like DS2′s approach better, but it’s good that they thought to limit the random battle grind at all.

Zeboyd is offering the game bundled with their previous effort, Breath of Death VII, on Gamersgate for a trifling $3. More details on getting the game here. Meanwhile, here’s a trailer so you can see what this game looks like in action:

Guest Review by Tof Eklund

Monster’s Den and its sequel Monster’s Den: Book of Dread are pure hack-and-slash. As Book of Dread is half-sequel, half updated version (it includes the
original dungeon in Monster’s Den in it), this review effectively covers both games. The Monster’s Den games incorporate old-school front and back row turn-based combat as well as the sort of magic equipment, skills, and shopping we’ve come to expect since Diablo. Story in these games is intentionally nominal (you’re exploring a dungeon to rid it of evil, whaddayawant?) and exploration is simplified to a nicety, so it all comes down to inventory management and combat.

The Book of Dread is part of a RPG sub-genre intended to be picked up and put down easily, the “lunch break” CRPG. This genre’s most celebrated title is Desktop Dungeons and its archetype is probably Fastcrawl. Desktop Dungeons is very puzzle-like in its balance, with emphasis on careful exploration in a vaguely “Minesweepery” way, and while exploration is less important in Fastcrawl, that game still features locks, traps and puzzles. Monster’s Den falls at the other extreme, using its map mostly to allow the player to pick his or her battles and eschewing puzzles in favor of randomized combat and treasure.

The original Monster’s Den came out a year after Fastcrawl and may have helped kill that game by being more convenient (Flash) and less expensive (free). Perhaps the most important part of the game is selecting the characters that form your party at the beginning of the game. Figuring out how you want to combine the skills of different classes is half the fun of the game. Unlike some Flash RPGS (the Sonny games, for example), there is no Diablo II-style skill tree so you can get the skill you want most as soon as you hit level 2. Book of Dread increases the number of classes from 5 to 7 (on Kongregate – only 6 on other sites) and enables some new strategies.

Combat can be pretty intense, though focusing on one strategy tends to trump flexibility with the exception of a few skills and items that are much more effective against specific enemies (the Cleric’s Smite skill v.s. Undead, for example). Each level of the dungeon (in both dungeons) will have only monsters of one type, so knowing when to put Smite back in your Cleric’s skill set is a no-brainer.

The boss fights (1 per level) remain relatively interesting as a chance to buff up with pre-combat bonus potions and an increased chance of having to fight with a cog or two missing from your war machine.

This game’s weakness is a common one to RPGs – repetitiousness. Once one has maximized one’s equipment for a particular strategy, there’s little reason to vary it, and the lack of story means there’s no new plot to unlock. Worse, the items and monsters cycle: it doesn’t take long to see that you’re only getting the same kinds of equipment with higher bonuses, and fighting the same monsters with higher stats.

Taken to an extreme, this sort of gameplay becomes either slow and animation heavy, as with Adventure Quest and its free cousins, or automatic, as with the parodic Progress Quest or the bizarrely irony-free Infinite
Tower RPG. Book of Dread plays quickly and offers a nice range of options for customizing the difficulty and feel of the game – the “no energy regeneration in combat” option makes the game play in a very different way, but also renders a number of skills useless in a decidedly uneven way.

Daniel Stradwick deserves kudos for these games, which he created single-handed, and “Book of Dread” has remained one of the most popular games on Kongregate as it offers a satisfying hack and slash experience in a free game. I prefer my RPGs have strong, interesting stories, but here the lack of plot means that there’s little reason not to abandon a game when the grinding gets stale, and not having a story is better than having a hackneyed cliche of a story.

The game option I’m most likely to return to is the “hopeless siege” scenario as it gives you a party of 10th level characters and a single trip to the store with a decent war chest before sending endless waves of monsters at you with no chance to recover (eliminating the already marginalized exploration mechanic entirely).

Stradwick has collaborated on a Dragon Age tie-in Flash RPG and has two more Monster’s Den games in the works (the ambitious Godfall and an interim game using the Godfall engine called Chronicles). You can find info and links here. We’ll see if Godfall ups the ante in an interesting way, preferably with tiered addition of new game elements and a significant plot. Of course, if it does, it will almost certainly have to sacrifice some of the “pick up and play” appeal of the existing games.

Verdict: 3/5. Monster’s Den: Book of Dread comes out of the gate stong, setting reasonable goals, and hitting them with precision for the first half hour to an hour of play. After that, however, the lack of new elements (same monsters, same skills, same equipment) drags the game down. It’s a good “lunchbreak” hack and slash, but lacks staying power.

If this sounds like a relationship sim, well, it basically is, except that it’s apparently more about exploring and traversing a non-linear narrative with multiple endings than it is about time allocation and grinding for stat points.

Here’s a choice quote from the review:

Highly unconventional gameplay hiding behind a conventional facade, an occasional lack of polish to the system, and the game’s queer themes make it a labor of love. I can’t image what a pitch meeting with a publisher would be like for this title –- though I think there might be more of an audience for this sort of game than the conventional wisdom would dictate.

I’d post a screenshot, but you already know what RPG Maker assets look like. If you’re curious, you can nab the game free-of-charge right here.

Arvale: Treasure of Memories, Episode 1 is a jRPG by Jaybot7 (Jason Surguine) originally released back in 2009. Created in RPG Maker and using mostly default RPG Maker assets, Arvale is a short game with a silly atmosphere and some amusing dialog. However, the issues with this game’s mechanics are no joke.

Let me tell you a little bit about the world of Arvale. It’s made up of four elements: Fire, Water, Earth, and Everything Else. (No, really. Everything Else is an element.)

As you might have gathered, Arvale is an extremely silly game. If you are like me and enjoy silly things, this aspect of Arvale will probably appeal to you. Admittedly, Arvale’s characters are all one-note caricatures. However, the dialog is written cleverly enough that I found myself chuckling on more than one occasion as I played through the game.

The plot, meanwhile, is a new spin on an old trope. When the game starts, you learn that the protagonist has saved the world already. He is now just a gardener with a head injury (which, conveniently, prevents him from remembering any of his prior exploits).

I’ve played plenty of RPGs in my day, and this is the first time I can think of where a game has used this particular setup. The main character’s memory loss becomes the basis for a great many jokes. Unfortunately, however, the biggest joke is on the player. There is no Great Quest. It’s been finished already. All that’s left are mundane, workaday quests. In any other RPG, this could have served as a poignant commentary on modern life. But here, it’s mostly just used to set up jokes and fourth-wall-breaking interactions with the game’s faceless narrator.

Not that this is bad, of course. There’s plenty to like in a game that refuses to take itself seriously. But make no mistake: this is no Space Funeral. While Arvale teases the player with funny dialog and self-parody during the game’s exploration portions, the rest of the game isn’t in on the joke.

This isn’t because of anything deliberate the author did. Rather, it’s a crime of omission: the developer simply didn’t adjust the game’s mechanics to fit the feel of the game. You never get to–for example–cast an Everything Else spell. Combat in Arvale is in no way silly, funny, or parodic. To the contrary: it is both grueling and obnoxiously frequent. Arvale uses a cookie-cutter Final Fantasy-style turn-based battle system, and due to poor balancing, routine battles are far more frustrating than they ought to be.

Consider the rats. Rats are the very first enemies you fight in the game (along with slimes). Rats can chain together stun attacks, pummeling you at length while you sit helplessly. And you have no one else in your party at this point, so being stunned means you lose your next turn, at which point you can get stunned again, ad infinitum. So there you are, comatose, round after round, being chewed on like your dog’s favorite stuffed weasel. Rats also deal a surprisingly large amount of damage when you’re first starting out. Did I mention that they are the first enemies in the freaking game?

Specters belong to the second enemy mob you meet in the game, and they are even worse. When you first encounter them, they will kill you with three regular attacks. Three! Meanwhile, they take five or six of your attacks to defeat. You are, again, still a one-person party at this point.

Now, difficult battles are not a bad thing in and of themselves. I certainly wouldn’t be griping if Arvale were a game where you face difficult battles but have a wide variety of tactics at your disposal to eke out victory against long odds.

As you might have gathered, this is not the case. You begin the game with only a single character, no spells or special attacks, and two usable item types: Weak Potions and Antidotes. That is it. Accordingly, there is only one viable tactic to survive the early battles: spam potions. And I don’t mean potions made out of canned meats.

Battles become a tedious exercise in alternating between selecting “Attack” and “Item > Weak Potion.” Weak Potions, in turn, are fairly expensive for most of the game, which means that you’ll be spending a sizable portion of your earnings buying them between battles just so you can keep going.

The only reliable way to improve your battles-to-potions-you-have-to-drink ratio, in turn, is to grind. So you fight lots of battles and use up potions so you can afford more potions and eventually grow stronger so you won’t have to use as many potions. This is every bit as fun as it sounds.

The combat difficulty doesn’t make sense from a narrative perspective, either. I think it’s high time that game developers recognized that losing one’s memory is not a level reset button. A legendary hero should not be at risk for getting his butt kicked by slimes and rats, regardless of whether he has lost his conscious recall of past events. His prior exploits should have imbued him with physical conditioning and muscle memory that would make him very difficult for low-level monsters to kill, whether he remembers specific techniques or not.

But no. Instead, we get the RPG equivalent of Hulk Hogan coming out of retirement and getting pinned by a 5-year-old girl. Except it’s actually worse than that. Imagine that instead of just becoming buff and good at wrestling, Hulk Hogan collected weapons and armor with every match he won, which he could then use in subsequent matches. By the time he became a wrestling champion, he’d be walking around in titanium plate mail getup and wielding a Ludicrously Gigantic Claymore of Ass-Kicking +20.

In Arvale, you haven’t magically lost all of your Hero equipment along with your memory, but the equipment has somehow become worthless. Your Hero sword/spear/mace are only slightly more effective than a garden spade, and less effective than a rusty sword. That’s not hyperbole–you can actually buy a rusty sword, and your attack power will go up when you equip it. Duncan could probably deal more damage with a sharp reprimand than he could with his old “hero” gear. Considering how often the game lampshades itself, I’m a little surprised that the developer let such obvious implausibilities slip through the cracks.

But this is nit-picking. Ultimately, the narrative inconsistencies in Arvale aren’t the part that really hurts. Did you think I was done complaining about the game’s balancing issues? I hope not, because if you did, you are about to be disappointed. This game is about as well-balanced as W.C. Fields during Mardi Gras.

Consider the third boss fight. You will find a life potion right before this fight, and presumably it will be useful, because at this point you’ve got a second character in your party. Um, yeah. Not exactly. The third boss spends 70% of his time spamming “damage everyone” attacks at the beginning of each turn, and the life potion brings your characters back to life with 1 hit point. Which means that if you bring someone back to life in this fight, they are almost certainly going to be killed immediately afterward, and the other character is going to take an extra round’s worth of damage for their trouble.

There are innumerable other examples of this sort of sloppy execution in the game’s combat balancing: enemies who “double attack” yet deal the exact same damage as a single normal attack, enemies who inexplicably drain 2-3 times the health as the number that pops up onscreen, and so on.

Magic is another sore point. Most jRPGs rely on a selection of spells with varying effects on different monsters in order to provide a semblance of tactical variety. Arvale does not. With very few exceptions, spells in Arvale are useless. Even the most basic spells cost 20 magic points or more to cast–in exchange, they both heal less damage than potions and deal less damage than attacking.

There is only one type of enemy in the game that takes noticeably more damage from spells than it does from regular attacks, but your spells are so expensive that you are far more likely to run out of magic points than you are to actually succeed in killing the thing.

The only two spells in the game that are routinely useful are Quick Draw and Temptation Dance–the first primarily for boss battles, the second solely for regular encounters.

“But Craig,” you are probably thinking, “all jRPGs have kind of a crappy, poorly-balanced combat system that is more annoying to deal with than it is fun.” This is true, but there are degrees. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king; and the guy who just straight-up doesn’t have a head is the janitor. Arvale, unfortunately, is the janitor.

Still, I wouldn’t spend so much time ragging on Arvale’s mediocre combat system if it weren’t for the high random encounter rate. You are going to be fighting these dull battles constantly. Especially in the dungeons.

Arvale’s dungeons are generally fairly short and linear, without much in the way of puzzles. They also end, universally, with a HP/MP restoration pool situated right before a boss. Because of these two facts, you never have any reason to fight any enemies until you’re at the very end and can hang out at the recovery pool. Then, of course, you’ll need to spend time grinding to make up for the fact that you spent the entire trip through the dungeon walking a few steps, being attacked, running away, walking a few more steps, being attacked, running away, and so on. I never thought I would resent a game for regularly providing me with HP/MP recovery points, but Arvale somehow pulls it off.

Around this point in the review, most reviewers would point out that Arvale is quite short, and that it is not a free game. I don’t generally like this approach. Purchasing a game is not like choosing the brand of dish soap that will last you the longest. If you enjoy a game and its price tag is within your budget, then you should purchase it, even if some other RPG you played in the past had a larger ratio of hours-of-playtime to dollars spent.

That said, this first episode of Arvale is extremely short. I finished it in just over three hours, completing what I believe was every side quest the game had to offer. Five dollars is cheap for an RPG, but you don’t get a lot of RPG for your buck here. (Interestingly, there are actually two free Arvale prequels, advertised as containing “over 20 hours of gameplay” and “over 40 hours of gameplay,” respectively.)

The Verdict: 1/5. Arvale’s light-hearted tone and sense of humor are fun, but the core game is tedious–and you’re going to be spending far more of your time with the latter than the former.

Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale is a Japanese indie RPG originally developed and released by EasyGameStation in 2007, now localized and re-released in English by Carpe Fulgur. The gist is that you play a young girl forced to pay off her late father’s mortgage on the house by converting it into one of those ubiquitous jRPG item shops. Recettear is creative, endlessly entertaining, and above all, truly and painfully addictive.

Recettear feels a lot like a Nippon Ichi game. In case you don’t know what that means, it’s a compliment. The cut scenes remind one strongly of Disgaea, and the setting has an unmistakable La Pucelle flavor to it. Recettear’s engine and game presentation have a Disgaea vibe too, with randomly generated dungeons, menu-based travel and animated 2D sprites interacting in a colorful, low-poly 3D environment.

Mostly, though, it’s the cut scenes. Recettear’s characters are well-crafted, consistent, and comical, with interactions that range from the merely amusing to the downright hilarious. Recettear is not afraid to mock its central cast, self-parody, or name-drop Adam Smith when the moment calls for it. And it all works very, very well. Carpe Fulgur really did a splendid job on localization.

In spite of some qualities it shares with Nippon Ichi titles, make no mistake: Recettear is no tactical RPG. Properly categorized, Recettear probably belongs somewhere in the realm of shop management sim. You do some delving into randomly generated dungeons using hired adventurers, but dungeon exploration is more of an action RPG mini-game than it is a fully fleshed-out game mechanic. The core gameplay here is in managing your shop.

In my view, however, this doesn’t disqualify it as an RPG. In a sense, Recettear is simply an action RPG that–moreso even than usual–is all about the loot. It’s like Diablo taken to its logical extreme, with weak, shallow dungeon-delving and deep, complex options for how to manage and sell the loot that you find there. Except that in Recettear, you don’t technically even need to set foot in a dungeon: you can make a profit buying low and selling high from the marketplace, from the guild, or even off your own customers.

This is important, because the dungeon-diving portion of the game is less than stellar. Though randomly generated, every level feels very similar, with differing assortments of enemies and occasional (admittedly, well-done) bosses providing the only real variety. Though enemies are predictable, it can sometimes be very difficult to avoid taking damage from them. Take rock-throwing gnolls, for example. Unlike the octoroks of the old 2D Zeldas, these creatures don’t throw anything until they see you, meaning that there is no noise warning you of their presence while they are offscreen. Worse, they can see you when they’re offscreen, and throw rocks at you. Which means that you will sometimes be walking down a hallway and randomly get smacked in the face with a rock, leaving you to infer that there are some gnolls hanging out in the next room.

This would all be fine, except that dungeons are uniformly barren of health potions or heart containers. You have no way of recovering hit points inside the dungeon unless you level up or drink a rare and expensive health potion brought in with you from outside. Once you reach zero hit points, you will lose every piece of loot you’ve accumulated to that point except for one. You can’t just cut your losses and exit the dungeon when you’re hurt, either. Your only two options are a) get to the next dungeon exit (they appear on every fifth floor) or b) die.

Even this would be okay, since you will eventually get so used to fighting these creatures that you can almost always avoid taking damage. But then, even on a successful run, the reward rarely justifies the time expenditure. The items you accumulate are seldom worth all that much money, meaning that your haul will consist of low-value items whose margin of sale will still be roughly equivalent to what you could have accomplished by simply buying higher value items yourself at the marketplace or the guild, and you will have spent two time blocks accumulating them instead of one.

Luckily, you can choose to just focus on managing your shop. This is the fun part (in my view, though others may disagree). Every day is split into four periods: morning, noon, evening, and night. In any given period, you can open the store to customers, go out into town to dig around for stock, or visit the adventurer’s guild.

You have a goal to reach every week paying off your father’s bad loan. To this end, you need to buy low and sell high, fill special orders, and improve your store’s selection of high-end goods. You can also earn a good (or bad) reputation based on how you treat your customers, though it isn’t immediately apparent what effect this has on the game.

Recettear’s buying and selling mechanics center around haggling. Your customers each have a hidden bottom line–that is, a percentage mark-up that they are willing to accept on all purchases they make and a percentage price cut they are willing to accept when selling the store their goods. It’s your job to figure out (mostly through trial and error) which characters are cheapskates and which ones you can make a killing on. There is also a small amount of leeway in each character’s bottom line based on how excited they are about a given item, which you can infer from their dialog.

The system works well, though certain aspects of the haggling system are a little wonky. Characters will sometimes walk into your store, sell you a good for 42% of its base value, then return later and repurchase that same good at 130% of its base value while wearing a giant, amnesiac grin on their faces.

Also strange is the fact that you get more haggling leeway with a character after you’ve built up trust with her–which is to say, you can haggle longer before she stomps off in frustration. It sounds intuitive, but it produces counterintuitive results. The player ends up having more room to experiment only after she’s long since figured out a character’s bottom line. It’s a bit like taking an exam and then being handed a cheat sheet on your way out of the building.

These are quibbles, though–none of these things detracts from the joy of squeezing your customers for every last drop of currency they possess. On the whole, Recettear’s design is elegant and well-balanced. Making each payment on your father’s loans feels challenging, yet it is always doable with smart play. If you fail, the game retcons it with an all just a dream, but lets you keep your progress and try again. The upshot is that you can never, ever get stuck in an unwinnable position playing Recettear, no matter how slow you are to catch on to its mechanics. Once the game ends, you’ll want to keep playing: and in what is perhaps the smartest design choice in the whole game, the creators let you.

The verdict: 4.5/5. Recettear is charming, addictive, and astoundingly well-designed. You will begin playing this compulsively. Do yourself a favor and download the demo immediately.

Eschalon Book II is the second game in the Eschalon series by Basilisk Games. Eschalon is an isometric, nonlinear wRPG reminiscent of Fallout and Baldur’s Gate. It does almost everything well, but there are a few areas where the game fails to live up to its promise.

Let’s talk about the things Eschalon does well. First of all, Eschalon is beautiful. The visuals all hang together perfectly, the scenery is vivid and lush, and all sorts of neat little environmental details really help the world come alive. Plus, everything you would expect to be animated is animated. (I’m looking at you, Avernum.)

Eschalon’s music is also very well-produced and atmospheric. It’s generally pretty unobtrusive, which is nice, since you’ll be hearing it a lot. On the other hand, it’s not very memorable.

The Eschalon game engine is simply superb. Everything is turn-based, but if you keep moving, it looks positively real-time. Hunger, thirst, gradually degrading equipment, changing weather and day/night cycles make you constantly aware of the passage of time. Eschalon feels like a survival game at times–it’s thrilling to play an RPG where your character faces a real risk of starvation if you don’t plan ahead. Darkness has noticeable effects on visibility and on your ability to successfully hit things in combat. You’ll need to stock up on torches to get much done underground or late at night.

The engine plays to Eschalon’s strengths: namely, exploration and loot collection. The world of Eschalon is huge, and once you get Cartography, if you’re anything like me, you’ll find yourself compulsively traversing the wilderness in an attempt to simply map it all. I found myself wanting to put extra points into Cartography even when I didn’t really need to, simply because of how satisfying it was to watch the mini-map fill up with color.

The world of Eschalon contains many unmarked secrets. Wandering around, I often found myself stumbling across hidden caves, obelisks, bandit camps, and nests of unfriendly wildlife, to say nothing of abandoned chests full of loot. Occasionally, I would be led back to one of these places with a side quest later in the game, which I actually found disappointing: it was much more satisfying to find something no one else knew about, even in the fiction of the game world.

I have only two complaints about the exploration and survival aspects of Eschalon. The first is small but not insignificant: you can only view your Cartography maps as an auto-scrolling mini-map for the current area. You cannot create your own world map, or even pan the auto-map for whatever area you are in. This rarely has any impact on the gameplay, but it does make it hard for the player to look back on his or her mapping handiwork, which in turn cuts down on the satisfaction of having explored vast swathes of wilderness.

My second complaint is the fact that the main character evidently suffers from some kind of food-related learning disability. He is unable to recognize a potato or a cabbage without outside help. You literally have to take him to a magic store and pay money in order for the store clerk to tell him that the potato he is holding is a potato. Even worse, you can’t just tell him to eat the damn potato without identifying it, and once it’s been identified and eaten, he won’t recognize any new potatoes if you happen to find another one.

The only way your character is going to recognize staple foods is if you create him with a high Intelligence score. But the only characters who actually use Intelligence for much of anything are wizards. Which leads me to conclude that it is an act of magic in the world of Eschalon to know what a cabbage is.

Intelligence snafus aside, character creation in Eschalon is robust. Characters are eminently customizable, with a half dozen races, religions, and classes. There is also a full array of skills to choose from ranging from weapon skills to foraging, schools of magic to lock picking, dodging to cartography. Each religion functions like a Fallout perk, in that it comes with one advantage and one disadvantage (though you can always opt for Agnostic, which confers no advantages or disadvantages). Players who like tinkering with character stats will delight in the large array of options at their disposal here.

There is only one thing conspicuously missing from the skill list: pick-pocketing. There are so many chests scattered around the world that this doesn’t matter much for purposes of making money, but there are certain instances where it matters quite a lot for purposes of good role-playing. A good thief character ought to be able to simply lift items off of NPCs rather than having to bargain with them (or kill them).

Eschalon is competently written, with pleasant if rather unremarkable prose. NPCs you meet in the game will converse with you via dialog trees. However, there is an unfortunate paucity of memorable characters and dialog alternatives to color your interactions with them.

You have no Charisma or Personality stat, so there are rarely more than one or two ways a conversation can go. Most conversation trees give you two branches at a time: one “I’m ending this conversation” branch, and one “I’m continuing this conversation” branch. That’s mostly it. Consequently, the hand that guides conversations forward never manages to stay out of sight. You will always know that you are talking with a “Give a Side Quest” or “Advance the Plot” marionette. For a game so plainly about exploration, the inability to meaningfully explore other characters is a major oversight.

This stinginess with dialog options extends to the quests. Just to be clear: the non-dialog-driven quests in Eschalon are nicely non-linear, with multiple ways of achieving the same objective. Entering Port Kuudad, for instance, can be accomplished in a wide variety of different ways, few of them immediately apparent when you first arrive at the outer gates.

But once you start talking to NPCs, all this non-linearity goes out the window. Eschalon reprises one of the problems that plagued the original Baldur’s Gate: encounters that always devolve into fights no matter what you say or do.

Worse, quest-related dialog in Eschalon only supports one objective at a time, leaving you no room to manipulate the characters you’re dealing with. The game, in fact, affirmatively forbids you the opportunity to say one thing and do another. If you say you’re going to do something in conversation with a character, the game will oftentimes actually rewrite the quest in your quest book so that you can only complete the quest in that fashion. You cannot tell a lie. It’s like you’re playing Lil’ George Washington.

While I found the linearity of in-game dialog disappointing, it wasn’t bad enough to sabotage my enjoyment of the game. That honor was reserved for something else entirely: the learning curve. I played the game on Normal with default game settings. I played four different games this way, each with a different character. My conclusion? Eschalon Book II is balls-hard for the uninitiated. I’m talking billiard balls dipped in titanium.

To begin with, it is surprisingly easy to create an utterly useless character. I started off trying for a Cleric, typically a versatile, well-balanced character in wRPG tradition. “Yeah!” I said to myself. “A good melee fighter with healing spells–I’ll be self-sufficient and powerful in no time!”

Um, yeah. I began the game, left my cottage, and was promptly attacked by a giant rat. He immediately bit me, transmitting some sort of loathsome disease. Troll Syphilis or something like that. It cut two of my primary combat stats down by 50%. “Okay,” I thought, “I’m a priest. This will be easy to deal with. Where is my Cure Disease spell?”

Um, yeah. I had none. I didn’t even have a healing spell. All I had was something called Flesh Boil, which just sounded like a particularly nasty symptom of Troll Syphilis. So with my combat skills down lower than Verne Troyer doing the limbo, I only barely managed to survive the very first encounter in the game. I made it to town, slept, and bought some healing magic. “Okay–now I can heal myself. I’m a legit cleric. Time to try combat again.” It wasn’t long before I started fighting some black molds and needed healing. “Great!” I thought.  “Time to invoke the divine powers of healing!”

Um, yeah. You don’t get divine powers. In Eschalon, “healers” are basically just crummy wizards. I was carrying a sword, and the somatic requirements of my healing spell meant that I needed to have my hands free. So in other words, my disease-ridden “healer” couldn’t even use a basic healing spell on himself without disarming in the middle of a crowd of monsters.  I decided at that point that he actually deserved to die, and I left him to the care of the black molds.

My fighter fared substantially better. At first. But by the time I reached the second town, the quests required me to take down monsters way beyond my poor fighter’s ability to kill. I took a job to kill a sentinel plant, which looks like a giant spiky corn stalk. I figured I would walk in with my sword and walk out with creamed corn, but no: instead, the corn creamed me. I just kept swinging and swinging and missing and missing. (How does a corn stalk dodge a sword?) And then I was dead.

There is a continuum in game battle systems between luck and skill, randomness and determinism. Chess is 100% deterministic, the outcome of a match 100% decided by player skill. Games like Fire Emblem add randomness into the equation, turning the proceedings into a game of risk management. There can be a lot of strategy in risk management. But there have to be enough mechanisms under player control to stack the odds in his/her favor.

Most games with randomized hit/miss/damage accomplish this feat by giving the player a party to control. Eschalon’s cousins Baldur’s Gate and Arcanum do this. Avernum does it too. You have different characters with different abilities, and smart positioning and use of their respective strengths will usually triumph over bad luck.

Eschalon does not have this going for it. You are one character. Tactics consist primarily of using different combat stances and deciding when to use potions or run away. But for the most part, whatever your character’s hit percentage is, that’s it. You’re stuck with that and whatever the dice give you. And unfortunately, the way the game is balanced, characters spend so much time missing, they should be on the back of a milk carton.

I just know people are going to show up here and comment that I suck at combat in Eschalon. I mean, okay, I did die over and over again. But there’s nothing to suck at. Oh, sure, maybe I could have given my character a bow to take ranged potshots with. But that would have been a minimum of three skill points I’d need to take away from my sword skill, and even with me pouring all of my offensive skill points into swords, I could barely hit anything for the first 10 hours of the game. It would have just been me accidentally hitting cows and passerby with arrows, then drawing my sword in time to start a fresh batch of missing everything I swung at.

Wizards don’t get off easy, either. Their spells always hit, which is a godsend, but the early spells don’t deal much damage unless you jack up their level (and associated mana cost). And once enemies close the distance with a wizard, it’s time for the bookie to pack up and go home, because that fight is over with. Absolutely ensuring that wizards die constantly is the fact that it is nearly impossible to use hit-and-run tactics in Eschalon. This isn’t Fallout, where your move distance is determined by your character’s speed. For every space you move, enemies move one space. You can jack your character’s speed up to 30, and this will still hold true. (I checked.) So enemies will always maintain distance with you when you run away, unless you manage to interpose some obstacles to mess with the game’s pathfinding AI.

I finally managed a playable character with my second fighter, a blunt weapon user named Bash-ette. I rolled as close to straight 14s as I could get, then poured every single point I could into two stats and two skills: Strength and Dexterity, Blunt Weapons and Light Armor. I found and completed every single side quest I could in the initial area, leveling up and pumping all of my new points into those four skills and stats. I was level 6 by the time I made it to Everdale. I was just barely able to survive the quests in that area.

I now believe that I could create a non-combat-centric character and survive–maybe even do well. But it took about 20 hours of play time for me to figure out how that could possibly work (hint: run away from everything, save up your money, and try to get into Port Kuudad so you can buy combat training and complete all those quests you skipped from earlier). This will appeal to some people: this is a game that rewards patience and repeated playthroughs. This will turn off others: it takes a long time to reach a level of familiarity with the game world that permits even a single successful playthrough.

The verdict: 4/5. Eschalon Book II is enthusiastically recommended for patient players who don’t mind dying all the time while they figure out how to survive in the game, and cautiously recommended for others who don’t mind playing on easy.