To properly discuss Ill Will, you first must be familiar with its fairly notorious development cycle, which was something of a legend on RMN for a few years. This is an interesting topic for me to talk about, for you see, I was there when it all began…

It all started waaaay back during Game Chill, 2009. This was the first official event to ever take place on RMN, and everyone was very excited. A team, getting together to make a game in a mere two weeks? How exciting! Anaryu ordered invited me to make a game with him and Krisanna for that very event. Meanwhile, LouisCyphre (then known as ChaosProductions) gathered together a team to create this game under the moniker of “Team Kill Monsters.” His recruits included Happy (then known as Rei-) whose sci-fi demo Ascendence was legendary at the time, and Nessiah, whose artwork speaks for itself. An impressive team!

As the contest went on, most of the teams inevitably dropped out. But our two three-member teams remained in the game to the end, developing something of a friendly rivalry over the course of the contest. People marveled over the production values of Team Kill Monsters’ project, the fabulous artwork and exquisite mapping. In the end though, Ill Will proved to be too large a game in scope to complete in the two week span. Various development delays hindered its production. As months and years passed, it eventually came to jokingly be known to community regulars as “Ill Will Forever.”

But LouisCyphre was nothing if not persistent, and two and a half years later, this two-week game was finally completed.

The game casts you as a teenager, by default named Will but you can name him whatever you like. Will is hanging out with his friends when they suffer an apparent car crash and wake up in a strange, otherworldly Purgatory, where they are apparently being punished for some transgression that is a mystery even to them. The hellscape toys with their sanity, tempers flare and paranoia sets in, threatening to turn the friends against each other. You must guide them through Purgatory and solve the mystery before the team tears itself apart.

The first and most apparent quality of Ill Will is that it looks phenomenal. Everything from Nessiah’s fantastic character artwork to the carefully constructed maps to explore, to the clean, functional menus and interface look and feel absolutely professional in quality. It’s no stretch to say Ill Will is one of the best-looking RPG Maker games ever made.

If you’ve played LouisCyphre’s previous project, Speak no Evil, the premise of this game will be familiar to you. A group of people are suddenly assaulted by hordes of monsters and fortuitously discover hidden powers which give them the ability to fight back. Each of your four friends has access to magic from one of the four classical elements, and each grows his or her stats differently. Will is neutral and may use any magic, and you may grow his stats any way you like, as well.


Though the game lets you use all five characters right from the start, I pretty quickly fell into a pattern of only using a particular three and mostly forgetting about the other two. I favored Francesca and Josephine, the two female characters, who have better offensive stats than the more defensive male characters, Aaron and Ethan. This let my Will comfortably settle into a healing and support role while the girls demolished everything. Experience comes at a breezy pace and level ups are frequent, and rewarding. I often found myself seeking out fights to gain a level, whereas in most games I ignore this. Characters only gain one stat point per level so each point makes a significant difference. For this reason it’s easy to mess up your hero’s build if you misplace a stat point, so it helps to plan ahead here. Incidentally, I gave my Will insanely high Cunning because I was under the impression it raised the effectiveness of his healing magic. It actually influences how effective healing magic is on you.



The game is primarily a dungeon crawl. Purgatory is divided into many levels, each of which is further divided into multiple enemy lairs. Each battle you win builds a healing charge that you can use at the nearest save point to recover when you start to get weak. Your goal is to manage your resources well enough to fight your way through the lairs to meet the boss. Slaying this boss unlocks “traces” which your party can equip to learn new skills. When you have gotten strong enough, you can challenge the level’s guardian for the right to continue your journey upward. Enemy encounters can vary a lot, with each enemy having specific strategies they’ll use to kill you. Depending on the difficulty mode, you’ll occasionally see enemies make nonsensical moves that give the player a break, but usually they’ll zero in on your weaknesses and attack mercilessly. On harder difficulties they become even more ruthless. Learning enemy weaknesses is important, and once you’ve fought a particular enemy enough times you’ll know what the best way to fight them is. It can be tempting to just try to mash attack your way through, but you really do need to slow down and be patient in this game to play it well. Some enemies don’t even try to kill you so much as frustrate you, however, like groups of enemies that do nothing but spam shield spells that null your magic. It’s just an annoying waste of time.

Players of Speak No Evil probably feared the boss fights in that game, but here they are actually pretty reasonable at first, waiting until later before becoming truly brutal. My early strategy generally revolved around letting Francesca kill the boss while the other two characters played defense, and most bosses don’t really vary their strategy enough that a reasonably leveled party can’t force their way through eventually. They really seem to serve more as checks on your progress than any real test of skill. The real challenge tends to come from the Pits. If you accidentally fall into a pit, you’ll face an encounter with very large groups of enemies that are quite dangerous. These pits go a long way towards making Purgatory feel dangerous in an otherwise fairly forgiving game, but it punishes you for not making very precise movements and makes it a lot less fun to explore. If you can handle the enemies you find in a pit, however, you’re probably more than a match for the area’s boss.

Some of the boss encounters, however, are designed to be irritating rather than challenging. One early boss called the Foul Caller revolved his strategy around putting your entire party to sleep, poisoning you, and casting regen on himself, which amounts to you watching your life tick away and him recover all the damage you just did to him without so much as being able to push a button in response. There’s a stat that can reduce the effectiveness of status ailments, but none of your allies put stats in it by default, and there’s no skill or ability to prevent it, meaning its just the luck of the draw. This continued until the boss ran out of MP, at which point the scenario reversed and he was completely helpless to fight back against me. This fight didn’t really test anything but my patience. A later fight against an enemy called the Gatekeeper relied on event-driven sleep effects being inflicted on your party at random, which meant at any time you might randomly lose the fight because your whole party suddenly fell asleep without you being able to do anything about it. Tiresome. This continues later in the game, with many late-game bosses simply spamming sleep, confuse and stun moves that affect your entire party to prevent the player from acting. Battle designed to minimize the player’s input strikes me as poor design.



Fights like this are exceptions rather than rules though, and it can be fun to watch as your team grows and can now demolish foes that gave them trouble only a few minutes ago. It does feel like you are in fact gaining mastery of Purgatory rather than just blindly stumbling through. However, the game often feels badly-paced. Your first few battles will result in characters gaining many levels all at once. Later areas of the game see bosses dropping multiple traces instead of one, as though the developer had more ideas for traces than bosses. Skills have a minimum level requirement, but I was always well-past this point by the time I found the appropriate trait, and learned piles of skills at once. There was never much reason to keep a trace equipped for more than one level.

Despite the very high production values in other areas, the script is another matter. It is often strangely-worded and contains a high number of grammatical and spelling errors, likely due to one of the developers not being a native English speaker. This is understandable to a degree, but it indicates a lack of thorough editing and proofreading, which given how long this game’s development cycle was, there’s really no excuse for.

The game’s plot centers around you and your friends trying to escape Purgatory and getting into arguments every five minutes. The game is fairly slow to start and you’ll need to sit through a lot of cutscenes before the game begins in earnest. The general theme underlying the game is the sense of paranoia and mistrust that slowly builds up in your group, and the occasional glimpses and hints that they might not be as innocent as they seem at first glance. While the opening scene gives the impression that they are painfully oblivious about their surroundings, the actual circumstances of how they got here are much less clear as the game progresses, and the plot introduces new mysteries more often than it solves them.



The characters themselves are somewhat ambiguous. Other than the frequent conflicts between Aaron and Ethan, they for the most part don’t really stand out from each other or have any particularly clear voice or mannerisms, and they all tend to blend together. For this reason they all seem to come across as pretty shallow and self-centered, which may have been the point. Regardless, it’s still pleasant to watch them interact, as they all have unique artwork, go through little poses while talking, lots of little attention to details that make the game better. It’s a shame that a lot was lost in the big picture.

The game does get a bit repetitive after a while as the basic gameplay never really deviates from “Grind, kill the bosses, advance to the next tier.” But if you’re a fan of that kind of game, if you like dungeon crawlers or pretty graphics, this is definitely a game you should try out. The game does suffer from a lot of little bugs, typos, and other minor issues which seem to stem from a lack of testing (a problem that also plagued Speak No Evil) that are really a shame since so much effort was put into other areas of the game. I really wanted to give this a higher score as it’s a very pleasant, pretty game with a fairly interesting narrative. Unlike a lot of games I play where I feel like the creator is working against his engine trying to create the game he wants, I very much feel like here the creator and engine were working in harmony and it’s a pretty great feeling. But the lack of thorough proofreading, editing and bug-testing really do hurt this title, which is a shame because it seemed so great otherwise.