"Trouble Inspector and Discboy Search For A Vaguely Defined Lizard" is a short RPG developed by awe_famsquad using RPG Maker 2003 that was created for Muffle's 1 Dungeon RPG Jam that was held back in March of 2022. This event gave developers a month to create a game that was comprised of a single dungeon that needed to somehow incorporate a lizard into the game as well as include at least one boss fight and be over ten minutes in length. And this game definitely meets all of those requirements. Though I don't think this game succeeded in every area the developer was going for. Though, I suppose I'll explain that comment in a bit since I want to talk about the game's story first.

Story
Summary

You play as Trouble Inspector and Discboy who are climbing the Tower of Inconvenience in order to acquire a vaguely defined lizard. Apparently this lizard will help them cover their rent. So if they don't get before their greatest rival they'll be left out on the streets. So it's time to beat up a bunch of monsters in order to get that lizard before our rival does.

Greatest Strength/Weakness

It's pretty clear that were not meant to take this game all that seriously from the get go. Unfortunately this comedic aspect of the game is a bit on the iffy side in my opinion. As a result this game's greatest narrative strength can also be a major weakness as well. It also doesn't help that one of the funniest bits in the game is meant to be when the tower challenges you to answer a bunch of questions on a game show so the tower has more time to finish the last area.



A section that just had me begging for the game to put me out of my misery. After all, why would I want to spend time answering questions when the final boss is close?

Gameplay

On the gameplay front this project runs a pretty tight ship with most of the bosses being challenging and forcing the player to expend resources in order to keep themselves alive. Though oddly enough this game appears to deploy the default combat system that comes with the engine with a few minor tweaks. For starters the game starts in passive mode so combat ends up feeling more like the conditional turn-based combat system in "Final Fantasy X".

The game also features set encounters that are activated by the player interacting with them. A nice touch that helps elevate this game. That's because you can judge what's roughly behind enemies to deem if fighting them has any value. Though you'll probably want to confront most enemies in this game and hit them with analyze since you'll suffer during the game show portion of the game if you aren't familiar with the lore surrounding the various creatures in this game.

Graphics & Sound

On the graphical side of things the game is entirely custom as far as I can tell and is designed to look like a game created for the ZX Spectrum. For those not in the know the ZX Spectrum was a 8-bit home computer that was developed and marketed by Sinclair Research that was largely dedicated to playing rather simple video games since the machine itself was meant to be as cheap as possible. And it's probably one of the few gaming systems to ever use audio cassettes for storing games. At any rate this means the game has a very simple, but charming look since it's trying to capture the look of a gaming computer that was released all the way back in April of 1982.



On the sound side of things the game definitely makes use a combination of the RTP as well as songs that are used so often by others that they feel like they are part of the RTP. As such this game doesn't stand out that much as far as the background music goes, but at the same time I don't have any complaints about it either.

Conclusion

"Trouble Inspector and Discboy Search For A Vaguely Defined Lizard" is a pretty solid little RPG. While I think the comedic aspects of the story are a bit of a mixed bag. The boss fights on the other hand are pretty solid and manage to hit a pretty good balance between the bosses being both meaty enough to endure the players attacks while also hitting hard enough that the player will need to utilize the items they've found to stay alive. Even most of the trash mobs in this game aren't a complete write-off. Though I don't know if I'll play this one again since I really don't want to subject myself to the game show again.