Theseus

Theseus is a five minute long game made for a class, and apparently the developer's first game. The main problem it has is that for its length and simplicity, it still does suffer from quite a few flaws.

The story is pretty much non existent. As someone who has not heard of the story of Theseus before, and was too lazy to read the wikipedia page, I honestly had no idea what was going on in this game, and that I believe is pretty much its biggest flaw. All I got from this game was that some guy named Theseus defeated a minotaur that some people were afraid of.

Now the writing itself isn't bad for what it is. Despite not really providing any information as to what is going on, leaving you confused for the entire thing, there's actually some quirky NPC dialogue here and there. It does feel like an NES game that came from japan, and got translated very poorly due to character limitations, the main difference being that though most older games that came from japan were horribly paced because english did not allow as much being fitted in a text box as japanese did, those games were still understandable most of the time.



There's not really anything to see gameplay wise either. It's an adventure game, you talk to a few NPCs and battle one enemy and it ends. Nothing to critize about the gameplay itself, though I did consider the default rtp menu to be a stupid choice for this game, considering things in there that have any relevance whatsoever to the game are ''save'' and ''game end''. The main issue is the lack of polish. I came across a bug, being able to step into the darkness as shown in the image above, and also the fact that you can break the game by saying no to going with the guys at the temple.

Graphically, it's actually a good looking game for the most part. The tiles and character sprites are very nice and stylish. The soundtrack itself is decent too, and while not always looping too well, there were still some catchy tunes, mainly because I believe they were taken from some professional projects. Particularly, I'm 99% sure that the labyrinth song is a Legend of Zelda remix. My biggest problem here is that the font and windowskin being 2x2 clashed with the 3x3 tiles and characters. I'll also say that the default battle sound effects for pretty much any rpg maker is garbage, so replacing them would have been a good idea too.



In summary, Theseus is a very simple game made in 24 hours, and has some sweet graphics, but pretty much no story, as well as a lack of polish. I give it two olympian dudes (I don't even know who they are tbh) out of five.