Sundown Project

Sundown Project by Rhyme
Genre: Action/Dungeon Crawl/Puzzle RPG.
Play Time: 30mins-2 hours approx.
Engine: RPG Maker VX

This review comes with...
Recommended Listening:
Track: Certain Morning by Presence of Music

WARNING: Review contains spoilers & is very image intensive. Major spoilers will be in hide tags but if you really want to experience the game to its fullest I suggest downloading it and giving it a play before reading the whole of this review.

Overview:
Sundown Project is a short, fast-paced nocturnal dungeon-blitz that throws you directly into the action from the word go. In short - A small army of rogue phantoms, curses and otherworldly creatures are attempting to bring forth the sunrise in the land of eternal night. You are a supernatural denizen of this nocturnal world and, as you may have guessed, it is your job to stop them before that happens. Combat is fast, fun and plentiful, there's a decent amount of variety in the gameplay and the atmosphere, presentation and overall "feel" of the game is so rich you can almost taste it.




Ah, listen to them; the children of the night - what sweet music they make:
First up, let's look at who we are. In Sundown Project you have a fixed party of four unique characters, each with specific attacks, techniques and passive abilities they can learn which are in many cases exclusive to them. Using your party synergistically is pretty much the essence of the game's combat (which we'll get more into later). Also this is a good time to show off Sundown Project's awesome-looking menu screen:



Your gang of spooky beings breaks down a little bit like this:

Camellia The nightingale. She serves as on-map avatar, party leader, all-rounder, powerhouse of offensive magic and a strong attacker. Only character to have the option of using different passive abilities. Has an affinity for burst and lunar magic (in fact is the only character to gain access to lunar magic, which happens to be the most ludicrously destructive magic in the game. Dealing, as the game describes it, "absolute damage").

Magnolia: A monster and the party's token tank. Highest HP/Lowest MP of the party. Deals in devastating physical attacks/techniques and has and affinity for fire magic. Her passive ability "Hell Blood" allows her to regenerate HP per hit.

Gardenia: Is a vampire and most possibly the most tactical member of the gang. Tends to use void-aligned attacks which drain HP from the enemy and later learns to buff the party's speed. Has an affinity for wind magic and her passive ability causes all her physical attacks to drain 50% of the damage they inflict.

Viscaria: As a Poltergeist is totally unaffected by physical attacks due to her "ghostly" passive ability; Viscaria is the party's primary healer and mage. She has access to void-type offensive spells, powerful healing magic and has the highest MP of all the characters.




Progressing through Sundown Project's world is pretty straightforward. You're at your home - a mansion in the realm of eternal night. You begin in (and will often return to) a sort of hub/main hall that has entrances along the left and right hand walls of the main hall. At the very bottom of the hub is a gravestone-type-object (sort-of pictured above) where you can trade Tarot Cards you obtain from completing sections/killing bosses for more character abilities. Due to the impending sunrise (which is nicely conveyed to you by a handy meter in the top-left of the screen) you don't have enough time to clear out the whole mansion's myriad infestations of ghoulish enemies and so must choose just one of two doors at each juncture along the length of the hub as you progress toward your final destination. This makes for some decent replay value as it's only possible to play 4 sections (3 chosen plus the mandatory final area) of the game's total seven in a single play-through of the game.



So after choosing one of two available areas along a section of the hub you enter a sort of mini-dungeon section and must complete a task or series of tasks within the area, whilst fighting hordes of touch-encounter-triggered enemy parties, in order to complete that section and gain access to the next two available areas of the mansion. Completing a section from one tier will permanently render the other area of that tier unavailable for the remainder of the current game. The tasks I encountered in my play-through were pretty varied and interesting and definitely helped to create immersion and diversity in terms of Sundown Project's atmosphere and gameplay.



Plus, of course, the final area's task which consists of activating multiple crystals and navigating hidden passages - but I won't spoil it too much here. At the end of each area, as you might expect, you fight a boss. Each boss tends to be based on a tarot card from the Major Arcana and will drop a tarot card item upon its defeat which you can trade for more skills when you get back to the main hall. Which leads nicely into...


Combat & Battle System:
Combat in Sundown project is kinda different for a menu-driven combat system. By which I mean it's FAST - Really fast. Not only that but the speed of player input is vitally important and I found that in some boss battles it can mean the difference between triumphant victory and crushing defeat. You really have to be on your toes and think fast in order to make it through and it's not that the game is entirely lacking in tactical decision making but rather that you must adapt to the pace and know your party and skill load-out pretty well in order to get by.



To be perfectly honest I really enjoyed the twitchy battles in Sundown Project more than I expected. It didn't particularly hinder the game's robustness in any way, it helped enhance the already-present sense of urgency the game has and ensured that combat maintained a pretty consistently quick pace. Because battles don't drag on; they don't become as tiresome as repetetive rpg battles can sometimes quickly end up and luckily you have a consistently effective escape command for when you can't take the grind any more.



But even with all that said; I'm not completely sold on it. At times, especially early on, it was hard to keep track of everything that was going on in-battle and to plan things tactically. This did get better as I got more used to it (and as I got access to more preposterously powerful skills) but keeping track of status effects, weaknesses/resistances/immunities in such a rapid system was at times a little challenging. I definitely prefer this sort of battle system to a snail's-pace rm2k3 DBS or mashing "physical attack" all the time; I just think a system like this could do with perhaps some minor tweaks to bring it to its full potential. At present it seems almost like an experiment in battle system design (which, considering that this is a short event game, it probably was) rather than the finished product it could be.


Sights & Sounds, Visions & Voices: (sorry ._.)
In case you didn't notice already (what with the abundance of screenshots); this game is beautiful (yeah, I'm getting deja vu of my Garden review here too). I was impressed with how Rhyme managed to make such a pretty looking world in Garden and that sentiment is extended even more-so with Sundown Project. I'm a complete sucker for aesthetics, atmosphere and good presentation and this game has these in droves. It's not that the graphics and music are all amazing original works (although I really liked the little hand-drawn eye-portait-thingies, they were a nice touch) but rather that everything in this game's "aesthetics department" is both so cohesive and immersive that everything comes together to make something greater than the sum of its parts.



I'll admit though, I am biased. I love well crafted, spooky, dark settings and themes and I'm easily won-over by the promise of warm, pretty lighting effects and a bunch of ghosts. Give me poltergeists by candlelight and you're pretty much guaranteed to have my interest. Sundown Project's whole world and feel is one that I almost wish I'd made myself. The mapping is intricate and detailed, the interfaces are stylish, the lighting and visual effects are beautiful and the atmosphere is rich and deep. Also some of the lines are just plain awesome:

Warning: Spoiler Screenshot.


The music in Sundown Project is, as you may be able to tell from the "recommended listening", amazing (As far as I'm aware most of the tracks are by Presence of Music). The choice of tracks and where and when they've been used is absolutely perfect and they work brilliantly to bring the game world to life. Definitely some of the best music choices I've heard in an RM game. Together with the setting, theme and rich visuals the music just wraps the overall feel & tone of this game into a very aesthetically pleasing and engaging package.




Minor Irks:
There were a handful of minor things that bothered me whilst playing Sundown Project and a few minor bugs or hiccups but they weren't enough to detract from enjoying the game as a whole.

• First of all, as I mentioned earlier. Some of the puzzles (I haven't played every area available in the game so I can't comment on those) can be a little bit annoying, obtuse or not-so-fun. But it's not a huge deal to be honest. It's more interesting than fetch quests either way.
• In one of the puzzles real-world names of things/places were used. I found this momentarily shattering the suspension of disbelief I had in this nocturnal otherworldly place I was meant to be in. Maybe this world exists in parallel to the real world? I don't know... But I didn't really want to have to think about it either.
• Although the interface is pretty and neat. Some inconsistencies show up such as ">" (greater than) arrows for choices which seems a little shabby next to everything else. Also some text boxe/interface element overlaps occur at some parts of the game. This could probably do with fixing because it's kinda not-so-neat looking although it's fair to say this wouldn't stand out so much if everything else wasn't on-the-whole very well presented.
• At one point I did actually run out of time and was confronted a recurring boss that had come to end my quest prematurely. This is a cool touch and a nice way of pulling off a timer-based game over condition. The thing is, due to the fact that in this game you recover your health and MP after each battle, I was able to keep beating the game-over-bringing boss over and over; ad infinitum. Sure, I couldn't carry on with the game and had to fight the boss again as soon as I'd beat it.. But this meant that if you find yourself in a position like this you pretty much just have to voluntarily give up fighting to actually get a proper "game over" from running out of time. I'm not entirely sure what the best way of fixing that would be but I'd suggest perhaps making automatic HP/MP recovery stop happening once the timer runs out or to just make the boss that comes after you a lot more powerful.
• There are some minor passibility issues on one of the maps. Nothing game-breaking though.
• The final boss seemed a little too easy compared to others! (But at least it wasn't impossibly hard like in Garden).
• For some probably-script-related reason the end-game clock (pictured above) displays your play time as "1 minutes and A WHOLE LOT OF SECONDS" rather than in hours, minutes and seconds.
• The previously mentioned sort-of-issues with the combat.

Considering the game was made for a time-restricted event these are pretty minor. Plus; in my opinion, due to the nature of the game and how it plays, they hardly make much of a difference aside from perhaps the niggles regarding the battle system.


In Conclusion:
So, I've managed to say quite a lot about a very short but very cool game. I think I've managed to cover everything that stood out to me about Sundown Project and I definitely think it's worth a spin if you fancy something that's short, not too complicated and heavy on battles and atmosphere (and certainly if you like haunted libraries, vampires and spookiness). I'm going to rate Sundown Project as I tend to rate everything - Based on what the game itself is and is trying to be. So as a very short dungeon-based game with a consistent, strong theme and engaging atmosphere - overall...




Rating: 4 Stars
- NewBlack