PENELOPE

Hello people!
Today I played PENELOPE, a game by snekodawg made with RPG Maker 2003 and... drum roll... all custom made assets, graphics and music! Nice start indeed!
But what's the plot of Penelope?

Well the beginning isn't really original: we are Penelope, a tall anthropomorphic dog that is apparently mute (classic mute progagonist with amnesia heh!) and wears a sort of simple dress. Penelope wakes up inside a cave with no memories of her past, so she tries to leave the place and tries to find a way to restore her memories. Luckily there is a nearby village populated by various anthropomorphic animals, including another dog named Mead that will join her in this quest. A quest that leads them to a mysterious wizard recently arrived in town that claims to be able to help Penelope. For a price, of course! Oh yes, our two dogs will have to find three magical items, three orbs of time scattered around the world, luckily our wizard can provide some teleports to the various locations, but first our heroes will need to enlist a powerful mythical creature that will help them to face the hostile creatures that roam the lands.


Silver the (great) Wizard is the one that is sure to be able to help Penelope. Is this true? well we've to do his quests so play and see what happens...

PENELOPE is a story driven rpg adventure game in which we've to explore different locations and look for the items that the Wizard wants. It's not a very long adventure since it took me about 2 hours (more or less, it's hard to remember since rpgmaker2003 does not list the playtime, anyway it's surely less than three hours and more than one), and it's largely linear, except for the order of the first orbs that may be switched.
Ok, but what are we going to to in this game? Well exploring, solving some pretty easy tasks and puzzles and fight, of course (all these tasks happen from the prologue inside the cave).

Let's start from combat: there are NO random battles, all enemies are visible, some are avoidable and others aren't, like the obligatory boss fights. In this game there are NO experience levels, so grinding isn't possible, even if killing enemies (that goes from hostile humanoid dogs and fishes to feral "normal" dogs and other animals) always award money that can be used to buy consumables, armors and weapons at the various shops. In any case loot is rather generous, and combat encounters aren't that difficult, at least as soon as you get Nessie, a real powerhouse. Penelope is a rather medium character, while Mead seemed to be weaker, but he's also the healer of the team, so he's far from useless, and being both dogs they can also attack with bites, provoking bleeding damage.
For the rest the combat in this game is super-simple: there are no status effects and no items to cure them of course, just various healing items and some used to recover the points needed to use the special skills (Nessie does not even have special skills despite the 75 points, anyway he's really strong!).


Two dogs and the Loch Ness Monster fighting a sort of humanoid crow with a rifle? Well that's what is happening here! Bite!

Then we have exploration and puzzles. Exploration is pretty simple, you walk around and interact with items, pressing buttons and opening chests of loot, nothing really new. Puzzles require really simple math, doing small tasks or finding passwords, and the part that took me more time is surely the one in the archipelago, where you use Nessie to visit various islands, but due to the absence of a map or directions it's where I had to search a lot before I coulf "put together the pieces of the puzzle", so to speak!

Now, the graphics: the game has a really simple but cute graphic style that makes it stand out, the game starts in a dark grey cave, but soon you will be immersed in a colorful bizarre world populated by different talking animals like elks, cats, dogs and fishes, where many weird things happen. Mapping is pretty much goodeven if there are some little errors here and there, also sometimes it's not so clear which items are obstacles, for example the benches are NOT obstacles, while the dark green patches in the forest ARE roadblocks... and sometimes I found that some paths that were apparently passable (like because there was a bridge) were instead not practicable because one of these dark patches or the corner of a building roof blocked the path. Sigh. But ok nothing too bad, even if there are also some glitches/imprecision like some off moving water near the comedian's stage or the border on the lower part of the archipelago map. Like the chipset also the charsets , battlers and facesets are all original (even if to tell the truth there is the use of some RTP assets like the panorama) and pretty good, I especially liked the change of expression of one of the bosses once you beat him! Hilarious!
Music is all good, for some reason the first time I ran the game I could not heard it and the game was silent, except for the sounds effects (I do not know why!!!)... anyway nothing to say here, it's ok, and custom made.


The game includes some simple tasks and easy puzzles. There is some variety, so that's pretty good!

Final Verdict
PENELOPE is a cute short adventure set in a strange world that for some reason reminds to me of Adventure Time (there are strange cities, wizards and talking dogs there too!). The rpg elements are minimal, the game is pretty easy (except for wandering in the archipelago part, where you can get lost... but not too much, the place isn't very big) and the characters even wait before engaging a boss, indirectly warning the player to save (you can do that absolutely everywhere!) and getting ready for battle. Well here the only problem is that there are no inns, nor ways to rest, so you have to monitor your characters' status or you may start a battle with already badly wounded characters! Thankfully there are plenty of healing items, but I noticed that some battles (the first and last boss especially) drags a bit too much due to the damage sponge bosses, anyway it's true that I did not possess the (very expensive) endgame weapons... the ending is also quite abrupt, but well there aren't many things that I can criticize.

This game was made in six months and in my opinion, considering the good parts, the little flaws mentioned before and all the custom made assets, is quite GOOD. And GOOD here meand 4/5.
Well done!