Tale of the Twin Knights

Ok, after playing hours of jprs and classical party based battles I wanted to try something different, a short game with a peculiar combat system... aaaaand Tale of Twin Knights was my choice.
This game was made by Calunio for a secret santa gift to eplipswich, and for me it was quite a surprise due to the interesting idea and concept.

Tale of Twin Knights isn't an adventure game, there is no exploration, only dialogues and combat. The story is a sort of dark faery tale, or mythic legend (like "Orpheus in the underworld") that start with a classical premise: the protagonist, Gene, is a heroic knight that wants to rescue his dead twin brother Lou (that he accidentally killed) from the depth of the underworld, the mythical abode of the dead, imagined as being under the earth. Being a knight he is ready to fight anyone that will try to stop him.

The game is basically a sequence of combat encounters against various opponents, that become stronger and stronger as the adventure progress. But Gene will become stronger too after each victory.


There are few characters in this game, and they're all hostile!

Gene and his opponents have three values: Hitpoints, Skill and Power.
Hitpoints clearly represent the lifeblood, and once at zero the character is dead, Skill is used to perform moves (some cost more than one skill point), and Power is the damage that Gene will inflict with a successful hit. Our hero begins the game with three moves: a basic attack, parry and healing. But we can also spend skill points to learn other useful skills that also the enemies sometimes will use against us. For example there is the double strike (that inflicts less damage but is useful when the enemy tries to parry since he will only block the first attack), a strong charged attack, a skill that turns the damage received into healing and so on.

Combat works as a sort of stone-paper-scissor game but more complex and developed: you select the sequence of moves that Gene will perform and the enemy will do the same, then the respective moves are revealed and resolved (I remember a tabletop game that used a similar concept to resolve duels among players).
There is clearly some strategy involved even if luck is needed to survive, anyway the game saves after each combat encounter and it's possible to retry immediately every defeat.

Graphically the game is minimalist but nice, there are no backgrounds or images, but I liked the sprites of the protagonist and other characters, and I found pretty nice the simple effects associated with each move. The only thing I did not like is the weird sound the game makes each time you press the action key during the dialogues... but uhm, ok it's not terrible I think!

Verdict
A short tale paired with an interesting custom system. And I liked them both, a lot. It's like reading a short fantasy story from a collection, pretty good and entertaining, in my opinion. It would be great to use this system in a bigger game, maybe with a more complex story, anyway this plot is evocative and really well told. If you want to play something totally different from the usual Rm2k3 games, this is a good choice! 3.5/5 this tale surprised me!