Speak No Evil

First of all, an important forewarning. The game was unfinishable for me - a bug would, without fail, lock up the main character's movement forever at the end of the subway dungeon. There are also some parts where trying to do something the plot doesn't expect you to will freeze or break the game. This leaves the game with roughly 6-7 hours of gameplay and an unfinished story, on which merits it will be judged on here.

Speak no Evil markets itself as a battle-oriented, hard game that pulls no punches even in the name of fairness. It uses the RPG Maker 2k3 default battle system and is rather obviously inspired by the ever popular Shin Megami Tensei titles, especially apparent in the main point of focus, the elemental system. A weakness hit deals five times the damage of an usual hit, heavily rewarding using the elements to your advantage - too heavily, in fact. A normal battle (touch encountered in this game) can be over in a flash or an ungodly long slog just based on which elements your party composition brings to the fight. And if a player character ever gets hit by their weakness, it's instant lights out. Strangely enough this isn't as much a source of difficulty as it could be, as normal enemies rarely if ever use elemental attacks. In fact normal battles tend to be rather tame after the first stretch where you're intentionally outmatched because of plot reasons. Use weakness-hitting spells, try instant death on anything you can't hit the weakness of, heal, move on.



Where the game matches up to its tagline is the boss fights, where you basically -must- be wearing the correct equipment to deal with the boss's most dangerous moves before you even have a fighting chance. These fights can be fun if you're into a challenge and dying once to figure out the gimmick doesn't bother you, yet they're pretty far off from each other.

Despite the fact that the game largely encourages you to avoid encounters both plotwise and with the scaling exp system (which also makes just bypassing the boss fights by grinding impossible), some locales are so absolutely jam-packed with demons hopping around there's no choice but to carve a bloody path through them - which ends up working rather nicely as you tend to have just enough exp to take on the boss that way. One big minus is an utterly baffling design decision later on where you have to hunt down and fight 45 groups of normal battles before being allowed to proceed, going counter to these principles (they don't even give exp near the end anymore!) and just being a big timesink.

Dungeons themselves are various buildings and structures, refreshingly mostly realistic in design rather than obnoxious hellmazes. There are various lootboxes scattered around, but the random treasure system is rather ill-conceived and opening boxes of any color but green is never a good idea unless you're ready to reload your save. Anything but green has a chance of a result that hurts your party, and these punishments are extremely disproportionate compared to the meager rewards. Losing half your money? No thanks.



The plot itself deals with SUDDENLY, A DEMON INVASION and the main character mysteriously losing his voice at the same time. The basic structure is the silent protagonist (finally, one with a good excuse for it!) and his girlfriend meeting other survivors of the demon apocalypse, periodically having to face transformed people, known as Unspeakables.

While the first character you meet, grizzled cop Victor, is somewhat fleshed out and has some foreshadowing to his backstory, as the game goes on the game's writing and plot flow become increasingly more rushed and erratic, with the player being introduced to new apparently important characters and their strained motives out of nowhere with no buildup on regular basis. The writing becomes truly cringeworthy in the case of a certain man called Alejandro.

The graphics and music, while nothing exceptional, give the game its own unique atmosphere, one that did leave me wondering about the game world. The game has obvious potential but is painfully rushed and unfinished. While this review might seem negative, I was looking forward to progress while playing and the abrupt end due to bugginess was like a slap to the face. With more development time this could have been one of the last good games for Rm2k3.



Overall? I cannot recommend it due to its unfinished nature, but if you are curious about the game, it won't hurt you to check it out.

"See, I told you she was good for more than frying things!" - Tre, Speak no Evil