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The Purr Of An Old Engine Straining...up hill, through snow and vicious shurikens that would try the patience of an angel.

"The Devil Can Cite Scripture For His Purposes"
Castle of the evil witch perfectly recreates the experience of playing Dark Souls ...for all the wrong reasons.
The HERO: Castle Of The Evil Witch struggles admirably, if gracelessly, against the hard limitations of the RPG Maker 2003 engine.

The HERO: Castle Of The Evil Witch, this game's proper title, which is light years ahead of the no capitals and no effort way the game's title was entered into RMN when it was submitted, is a far-cry from Dark Souls in almost every category: visuals, music, storytelling (in its every aspect), gameplay (in every sense), level design, COLLISION DETECTION, and so on. But in two areas specifically it reminded me poignantly of Dark Souls.

One: it is very, very, very, very difficult.
Two: it reveals hidden depth as you smash yourself face first into that difficulty again and again and again and again and again.....and again

When I commented on Sacred's review of this game, I had my fingers crossed that it hadn't been made with the new legal RM2k3 where I'm sure that numerous plugins offer various forms of pixel-based collision detection by now. But nope. This is the old rm2k3 that I remember from 2k3 and for that matter 2k4, 2k5, and 2k6, and so on, and SO ON (my god I got a lot of mileage out of that old boy).

I don't know for sure that richterw's first language is English, otherwise I'd call him a damn liar. Because this is not a puzzle game at all. I detect no adventure game elements either, making the purported genre of "Adventure Puzzle" completely inaccurate. This was my second biggest complaint about Castle of: outright deceit. The areas are even called puzzles, which is again, a total lie. Any puzzle solving is incidental. Getting past these levels requires fast reflexes and timing, not puzzle solving skills or logic.

What this is, is a mercilessly hard twitch action game. An example of a fair challenge of this kind might be Super Meat Boy or Kaizo Mario. The first of which I believe I've heard has very unforgiving but very fair collision detection, the latter of which has cutting edge at the time collision detection with flaws and eccentricities that are well known in the speedrunning and Mario communities.

The challenge in this game is anything but fair.

It's a good thing that this game has the prettiest game over screen I've ever seen in an RPG Maker game. Seriously, it is a work of fucking art. Which like I said, is good, because you will be seeing it A LOT. So much that it'll be seeing you.

I'd be remiss not to mention that the title screen, done in a similar style, is nearly as beautiful, which is, again, a good thing as because this is vanilla rm2k3 baby you know you're gonna be seeing that title screen after every time you see the game over screen. (And the title screen music is a super groovy MIDI of a jazzy soft rock easy listening JAM that I've listened to five times already without really getting tired of it! these parentheses compromise the "Music/Sounds section of this review")

The story is, on the surface at least, a zero-effort excuse plot. There is a chance, however small, that something much more artistically interesting and deeper is going on subtextually, beneath the surface (I don't want to spoil it, but it is related to those two screens that the creator knew you were going to spend a lot of time looking at because the game is so merciless).

The whole rest of this review is about the gameplay:

If you want to make a good twitch-action game in RPG Maker, the good news is, it is very possible. No one is going to make you use Unity or Game Maker. THIS was made in VX Ace and well...just fucking LOOK at it! Anaryu made a career of making mostly such games (actually as I recall he first became well known for what I think were more traditional RPGs but he , all of them were fantastic, and all of them well received.

But the caveat is that you cannot do it in O.G. RM2k3.

Now at this point, I could really just hand off the microphone to Darken, who laid this shit down seven years ago (it was know, khaleesi...).

I have played this game before, in various minigames and a few full length games. The fundamental problem is that the collision detection is tile based and the engine is not designed to carefully track exactly and precisely when a character moves onto a tile. The result is the following gameplay. You never move towards an enemy. You back off (the better games of this kind have a strafe toggle, The HERO does not) and you face the direction the enemy is coming and you spam the attack button like Bart Simpson punching at the air should Lisa just happen to walk into it. And because the AI is a joke, the enemies will march, one square tile at a time, into your windmilling bart simpson arms and be hit.

Because, the game is programmed so that you will take damage (and be knocked back, more on this later*) if the engine registers that you and an enemy are on the same tile on the map, something that, we've already established, the engine is not particularly good at doing with anything resembling precision or reliability. So, you have the arbitrary and highly variable time the game takes to move an enemy through the tile in front of you (a place where you can hit it, but it cannot hit you) and onto the tile you are on (damaging you, and knocking you backwards). Both of these processes are essentially the same: the engine is checking to see which event is on which title, something it is, for the third time, not what it is designed to do. Every time you spam the space bar, the game checks to see if an event is in the space directly in front of you. If it decides that one is, it puts damage on that enemy. An enemy walking into you is even simpler: if your map coordinates and that event's map coordinates are a match, you take damage.

Like many, many games before it, Castle compounds this problem by programming it so that when you are damaged by an event running into, you are knocked back or knocked in a random direction. In almost every action game ever, after taking damage, you become either invincible to damage or transparent to enemies for a few seconds afterwards. Not here, however. What that means, is that getting hit in these narrow confines will, like half of the time or more, knock you into another enemy. During this time you are paralyzed as the game runs its primitive event code triggered by the fact that your position X and Y were found to be the same as an enemy's position X and Y. In Castle as in pretty much every other 2k3 action game, this can and will mean that getting hit once means you are bounced between enemies until you die.

If this feels incredibly cheap, it's because it is. but it gets worse. Two objects in the engine that are both "solid" (the engine features "below", "same" and "above" as the three places that objects can be, using the player character sprite as the reference point: "solid" objects are set to same) cannot occupy the same tile at the same time (unless you're in test play and holding the Shift key that is). Since setting an event to damage you "On Touch" is even easier than running a lag-inducing parallel process continuously checking if the enemy's on the same tile as you via coordinates as variables, and since that trigger IIRC only registers properly when the events are on the "same" level/both solid, this means that the same event, in this game deadly shuriken deathblade things, can both damage you and act as a wall trapping you, leading quickly to you having another chance to appreciate that really lovely game over screen.

This means that if you are hitten by a flying death blade and knocked back against a wall, you are almost certainly fucked, if you don't have a lateral exit and even probably if you do, because you might not even regain actual control of your character long enough to move one tile left, with the game continuously juggling you between events that damage you for touching them. The death blade will just keep pushing against you until you are dead. If you move towards it, you take damage and don't get anywhere. Otherwise, it moves towards you and either kills you or bounces you onto another enemy that does.

In this game it is seven worse because it is further further compounded by the fact that if you punch a death blade, you take damage. In other words, it is possible to take damage from attacking during the one window it is safe to attack, when an enemy is just about to walk into the square in front of you you're punching continuously like Bart Simpson, you might still take damage without an enemy or deathblade even entering your square if a deathblade enters the square you are punching!

There were a few people that made good action games in RM2k3, SOMEHOW. But they were literally geniuses and their particular genius was applicable towards that kind of challenge.

I stopped playing The HERO: Castle of the Evil Witch on Puzzle 5 "Math", when while rapidly pushing the switches on the right, I got a game over for literally no reason I could see on the screen.

Needs some work.

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If you activate the wrong switch on puzzle five the game instantly kills you.
I wish we could like posts here lobo because I'd have liked that one.
Well, I went back and decided to take a second look at this game. The hit detection hasn't improved, but I have learned this game does in fact include puzzles.

You just have to get to stage 25 to reach them.

Edit: Also just managed to beat the game and it doesn't subvert expectations at all if you get the good ending. Though, I don't know what happens during the bad ending. I assume you arrive too late to save the princess and she burns in some lava or something.
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