Shades of Black

Dear game designer, I'll give you a piece of advice right off the bat; do not screw around with the basic keyboard commands for a RPG Maker game. Do not for example, replace the action button, generally the enter key or space bar, with a random key, like H. This is a bad choice, and will irritate your players. It will irritate them a great deal, it will in all likelihood lead to the use of expletives and pounding on the keyboard. This is not good, don't do this. Indeed if it wasn't for the fact I'm the sort to try anything at least once to see what will work I would have F12'd out of this game without ever starting it simply because you have disabled the arrow keys and reassigned the basic keyboard interaction. This meant I couldn't even confirm I wished to start a new game at the title screen. I honestly thought I'd seen the worst way possible to start a game; that is until I was presented with the following 'user manual' layout.


You're having a laugh, aren't you?

What's worse, you can't reassign this dog's breakfast to something the player is more comfortable with; you are forced to use this convoluted mess as your way to interact with the game. I haven't even started the game and I'm already contemplating opening a bottle.

So after spending 10 minutes of my life I will never get back trying to memorise this junk I watch the obligatory sob story cut scene outlining how our hero, and I use that term very loosely, came home the day before his 20th birthday (since he refers to it as the last day of his teenage years) to find his home ransacked and his parents, brother, sister and dog brutally murdered, oh and they stole all his furniture, that or his mum was an aficionado of the minimalist look for indoor furnishings.


Sorry, doesn't the complete lack of furniture and the blood splattering the walls give you pause?

After being forced to enter the rooms in an order predestined by the game maker you come face to face, well actually face to hood with the person who murdered your family and dog, who then falls back onto the clichéd, 'I was just following orders, kid, and now I have to kill you too' line. After what can only be described as a painful and frustrating on-screen battle, with Blizzard's action battle system you defeat the evil hooded villain and escape your home, only to be given what is frankly a nasty comment about how you should have searched it more thoroughly and you are obviously an idiot for not doing so. I kid you not the game calls the player an idiot. After the mess of the keyboard layout, that would be strike two, and about when I actually opened that bottle.

So after that promising start (I really need to invent a sarcasm font) you find yourself in the assassin's underground transport system, known to most people as the sewers, where Reyte, the protagonist of this debacle is hunting down the people who ruined his life. The vengeance angle for a basic plot isn't a bad one, some of the classics have used it successfully for centuries, but this is no Count of Monte Cristo, the way in which this is handled is woeful. There are frequent uses of vulgarity with no reason, huge leaps in 'logic' that does not in fact apply any logic to the situation, spelling and grammatical errors and yet again more insults directed to the player from the designer.

Add to that some basic game play flaws such as if you are in a room full of monsters if you engage them and then back out of the room when you re-enter they are all in their starting positions and will not advance of defend themselves which means you can just wipe the floor with them. This is a major flaw but was actually the only way I could advance to any extent into the game because if the battle mechanics had worked as they were supposed to the ridiculously convoluted keyboard controls would have seen me slaughtered every time as I fell over my own fingers.


That's it, good little monsters, just stand there while I kill you.

In addition to the plethora of frozen monsters there is one boss with the game, a giant squid living in the aforementioned sewers, and offers the only bright spark in this otherwise dull and frustrating experience. The fact that the main character realises there is no way that a massive aquatic creature should not only be surviving at a much lower pressure level than the one in which it usually resides, but that is should not be able to move around on a concrete floor far away from any water source is priceless. This realisation actually gave me a slight chuckle, and was the highlight of the entire game. Yes a single throw away comment was the best part. Then again I was on my second glass by this stage, so I may be attributing more humour then there actually was.

In regard to everything else it's all pretty much the default, music, graphics, menus etc. and all of it used without a great deal of imagination. Maps mostly fall into the my way or the highway rule and are full of open empty spaces that don't actually go anywhere. The 'mystery' of the death of your family is never explained or answered, but then that is pretty much on par with the rest of this game.

This game is terribad, to borrow a phrase from Liberty's scoring rubric, and the only good thing I can honestly say about it is that eventually it ends. With the ominous words...to be continued, though why is anyone's guess, and given the last time this was touched was 2010, I think we dodged a bullet there. Luckily for me this portion was less than 30 minutes, otherwise self harm or the prodigious consumption of alcohol, or both, may have been required.

Avoid this.