Midnight Realm

This game is pretty. There's no denying that. The graphics are pretty typical for this sort of game. Cutscenes with an interchangeable background and two characters talking to each other. But it certainly is pretty.

I can't say much about the dialogue because about halway through I started to instaskip it. Instaskip it in order to get to the gameplay.

The gameplay.

The gameplay is a bit of a weird thing. I think the intention is that you should click around and select as many blocks as possible before activating them for a bonus to your stats. The idea makes sense. it's something we've seen before, clicking blocks and connecting stuff and things like that.

It's in the implementation that it all goes wrong. The game is easy to exploit. I found after a few tentative clicks here and there that tere was little real difference between strategically clicking and button mashing the left and right mouse button all over the place. By all the later levels I had constantly 999 in everything and with an occasional press of an abilities button more stuff happened.

And all I was doing was furiously clicking all over the place. I won every single fight without losing any health (because I kept regenerating). Even with that massive advantage though another thing became apparent for me. The battles were way too long. I don't know how long they are if you don't exploit the system and have 500% more attacking power than the opponent. But while furiously clicking away they still felt a bit too long.

I think that the concept is good. Perhaps moving it away from the real-time system somewhat and making it more of a thoughtful "where do I click" (perhaps with a timer so some of the real-time still happens) with limited clicks would be a solution. As it stands the game offers depth in its description but none in its execution. (a bit like Baldur's Gate, though that's the only time I'll mention these two games together)

So yeah. Good ideas. Bad execution.