UNITY PLAYS YOUR GAME!

I've reached 3 hours and thirty minutes on LEARSON - Chapter One by ralphthefifth, and seeing as I'm not sure what to do next, I guess I'll call it here on the game and give my opinions.

This is an interesting game. It's extremely polished in many areas, and somewhat lacking in others. The good points are the mapping and the feeling of exploration, and the world seems to be very developed. The story itself has a lot of potential, but I'm personally not a huge fan of the "bad stuff keeps happening and happening and things get worse and worse" type of storyline, and so far, this game is turning in to that.

The mapping is fantastic, and makes exploring the world a lot of fun, except for one problem: While the developer has made the neat choice to allow you to jump to get past some obstacles (especially when you're playing the David character), where you can jump is completely arbitrary and you have to press the confirm button on the right tile to jump, and there's absolutely no indication on what tiles are jump-able.

Sometimes you can piece together where to jump just because there's no where else to go and you have to jump down, but other times, I was stopped in my tracks because there wasn't anywhere I could go, and I had to just push the button on all the tiles until I found the darn place that I was supposed to jump. This is really clunky and could be solved by having some sort of graphic indication of jump-spots.

While I personally didn't get into the story, I think it's still very well told, it's just not the sort of story I personally enjoy. I can see a lot of other people enjoying it, and it's above what you'll usually find in an RPG Maker game. Good work.

The characters are hit or miss, but some thought has been put into all of those that join your party, and their interactions are interesting.

The lowest point is the battle system. Let me start out by mentioning that battles generally occur less often than your typical RPG, and there's a lot more talking and solving going on. When battles do happen, though, they're often unbalanced and have some odd problems.

The biggest offender is the Poison status effect. When you get poisoned, there's no way to cure it, and it persists after battle. This means even after beating an enemy that poisons you, you'll be quickly reduced to 1 HP just from wandering around. Your only option is to find a heal point. And after healing, if you get poisoned again, you have to trek back to the heal point yet again.

There are Antidotes, but they cure Paralysis, not Poison. And buying them in the early game is kind of pointless, as you have a party of one for a while, so you couldn't use them when your paralyzed anyway.

With everything else seeming so polished, battle comes off seeming almost like an afterthought. There's one area where the enemies just mysteriously stop giving you EXP. And most enemies don't give you gold at all. And when you do get gold, you probably want to spend it, as the game took away all my gold on two different occasions.

All in all, this is a promising game, with a lot of cool story moments and a lot of polish (in every aspect except battle). It's pretty cool, even if it personally isn't my cup of tea. I think a lot of people will enjoy it.

I'll put some other notes I made while playing under a hide-tag here: