A Hand From Beyond the Grave

Note1: The version I played of this game may have been recently replaced with a newer version. These scores do not reflect the quality of the new version.
Note2: I did not finish the demo I played before writing this review. The scores given reflect this.
Note3: Final score is not an average.
NOTE 4: I had to come back, 3 years later, and change the score of this review to better comply with a) the text of the review and b) the standards-consensus of RMN. This score definitely suffered from "game informer" style score inflation, although in this case it was merely to be nice rather than because of some innate corruption in the system.

This game was full of necromancy, the undead, graveyards, and darkness, all of my favorite things, since I am a ghoul. However, it disappointed me so much that I could not get very far into the demo, let alone finish it, without quitting in frustration.

Let's take a look at why, category by category:

Story/Plot
:
: You play an undead (or Lamor'dae) called Malaeus, who has just woken into undeath from the grave, remembering nothing his life, his death, or the world of the undead. A pair of endlessly bickering ghouls, Reddart and Pence, introduce him to the world of the undead as they guide him back to the necropolis.

Unfortunately, this promising beginning, while competently written, is horribly plagued with a host of grammatical and spelling errors, especially "your" in the place of "you're" and other missing apostrophes. Reddart and Pence were characterized interestingly, but inconsistently. Additionally, the game was full of text heavy "cutscenes" (very dull to watch, with the characters, mostly Reddart and Pence, just standing around talking) and it was these cutscenes that made me not want to reload my first save and try again, after I died senselessly. (See gameplay, below, for details.)

The world was intriguing, but the presentation felt very sloppy. This gets to be an ongoing theme with the game.

Story Score: 2.5/5

Visuals/Sounds:
The soundtrack didn't stand out for good or ill. The absence of any music on the title screen was distracting, the creepy sound effects that played when I learned my first spells were kind of cool, but also a little bit overdone.

The field visuals are, compared to the lushness of the VX RTP I've been working with, dissapointingly drab, although the mapping is competent to my standards. I did not take off points for this.

The one battle I saw looked like ass, suffering from badly resized monster graphics, a hero battle graphic with only four poses (I am terrible with graphics, and even my sprite-edit-battle graphics look a lot better than this) each of those poses looking very awkard, and a poor choice of battle background that left the hero standing on top of some giant plants in a way that really let me know I was looking at flat 2D images on top of each other.

Visuals/Sound Score: 1/5

Gameplay:
In addition to looking like ass, the battles were badly broken. My badass necromantic undead guy got his ass handed to him by the first leech and two bats he ran into. As is a common mistake for newbie game designers, the creator badly underestimated the status effect, here called "wound", that caused me to lose 7% of my HP each turn, in rm2k3 which counts every action any combatant takes as a turn. As a result, I was losing 28 of my 100 HP every action I took. Worse still was that the one spell I managed to cast before dying, 'Pain', did the same damage as my staff. If Pence and Reddart had been added as party members, which would have been logical to the story, this would probably be a different review. But I died in a stupidly balanced battle, and I stopped playing right then and there rather than reload my save game and listen to another 20 minutes of Pence and Reddart bickering.

WARNING: THIS GAME IS ALSO BADLY HAMPERED BY A BROKEN CMS, WHICH NOT ONLY DOESN'T WORK BUT BREAKS THE GAME IF ANY OPTION OTHER THAN MENU IS CHOSEN.

Gameplay Score:
0.5/5

IN CONCLUSION:
Another promising game premise, executed very poorly. As of June, 2011 I'm still willing to (one day) try and play through all of a finished version of the game, and after that, I will try to edit this review accordingly. Hopefully, the experience will be better. I am still excited about this project, and wish the creator the best of luck.