The Pyramid

Hello! I have some time now to play games other than my own so I wanted to check out some other rpgmaker games! This one caught my attention since it seems to focus on difficult combat and I usually prefer gameplay over story anyway especially with indie stuff. The description claims that it requires a "near perfect playthrough to complete" so let's check it out!

On hitting start the game immediately puts you on this map and waits for your input.


If you hit forward you're met with an option to choose your class but you can also just walk around the invisible event tile and go to the right. In fact, the game almost encourages this because immediately on your right you find a "secret stash" containing leather armor. If you bypass the invisible tile then you're stuck as the default "Swordsman" class but if you do walk into it then the game also lets you pick between "Sorcerer" "Knight" and "Bandit".

STORY
You'll find three NPCs inside of a tent (that also has a rain effect inside) who join you and offer some minimal exposition to the story. There's a priest who says "we will be the ones to Save proper society" and a hunter who seems to imply that all four of us are stuck in some sort of time loop. You can choose to not take any of these guys along and instead take their gear but I have no idea what benefit that gives if any.

There's an NPC named "narrator" that stands next to The Pryamid's entrance but he doesn't offer much more in terms of story. If you ask him what this place is he wonders why you would ask that and then says it's "full of evil" and that you have to defeat it.


SOUND
RTP sounds, LOTS of wind, and absolutely no music. Go play spotify I guess.


GAMEPLAY
The game consists of long hallways with touch encounter mobs that vaguely move towards you. You can ignore all of them and go to the obvious stationary boss blocking the door. If you do decide to fight the mobs you get no rewards except a few G, some fights just giving 1.

There was one point where I beat a mob and got a message saying "that one had gold!" but as there are no shops (at least as far as I played which was floor 3) then this is worthless. I assume preset mobs will give you various bonuses so the gameplay loop seems to consist of finding which of the mobs the developer put bonuses on so you can fight those and ignore the rest, because as mentioned earlier there are no shops and no way to replenish your resources. The sparse and preset treasures I found on the first three floors gave me 999G of gold I can't spend, a staff weapon, a potion, and a life potion


When you beat the boss from the first floor, the narrator from earlier lets you know that you leveled up with a vague message of "level up new abilites and such..." which basically gives your magic user a physical attack and your white mage a new magic attack (if you even brought them along). Your fourth guy still has nothing but basic attack. When you beat the 2nd floor boss you don't get any level up messages that time so it doesn't really seem consistent as to when you gain levels, just whatever floors the dev feels like adding them on.

By the time you reach the third floor boss you're completely exhausted on resources because you don't know which of the touch mobs have bonuses associated with them so you end up fighting them all and have nothing left. If you want to play through multiple times so you can rapidfire the enter key and see exactly which particular mobs you need to beat then you could probably do that.


CONCLUSION
Sorry to be blunt but this isn't a good game at all. The only redeeming quality really is the concept itself which got me to download it. I love the idea of rpgmaker games focused solely on difficult turn based combat, so if the developer happens to be working on a sequel to this then I'd love to try it. Not that this game can't be salvaged by any means, it can still very much be turned into something fun. However, as the game is marked complete then I have to assume the dev is moving on to other things.