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The devil lies in the details

  • Kylaila
  • 07/16/2014 08:54 AM
  • 2475 views
Sunken Spire is a RPG made for the IGMC 2014. It takes place after In Search of Immortality, so those who played it will recognize both characters and general tone.

It combines great humour with a immersive town and a dungeon tower-crawl. While latter is a little bit lacking, details of the town's people and your character are what makes it outstanding.
You are tempted to stay in the tower, but I highly recommend going back to town once in a while, as you get many details regarding plot and character only there. If you missed out on those, the game will definitely be duller.

The Story

In Sunken Spire you assume the role of Alma, magical engineer and agent, to uncover a secret laboratory and whatever may be connected to it by the behalf of her majesty, the Queen.


The Queen is quite a character herself ..

Accompanied by the scythe-wielding general called Elsa. Who looks more like a male in the artworks rather than the female she is, but nevermind that.

And connected to the laboratory is a shapeshifting slime who you take with you and a huge tower, the Spire, giving the game its name.

The Characters


Being cuffed to a bench while being experimented on is nothing

Alma is the most interesting character in the game. Also starring in "In Search of Immortality", she is logical, and calculating above all. Seemingly cruel, even. But she also has a very open mindset and is kind as far as her stance allows.
She is not fazed by anything and is a quick analyzer of whatever may come her way.
Most of all, though, her subtle sense of irony combined with her unpredictableness makes her not only unique, but also very funny.

Elsa is a typical brutish woman who wants to destroy first and thinks second.
It is quite of a shame this gets exploited quite a lot early on, but, of course, she also does have a lady-like side even if she does not like being called one. Nevertheless, she is quite alright, especially later on.

Our Gooey friend is the simple-minded, childlike ever-friendly creature. And while most often than not these types of characters get on your nerve, I really liked him. With a soft spot for food and flowers, he takes in any food and information he can get and is complimenting quite a lot.
As he starts out very weak it was quite a lot of fun to see him grow and shape-shift into all kinds of deadly beasts.

The Dungeon

Our spire is .. well, yes, it's a tower. 20 people are trapped there, and the tower itself is devided into regions starting with undead, showing progression towards the top.
There are lots of puzzles there, you can teleport back and heal yourself anytime near the portals you take to advance from one stage to another.
Most puzzles are quite simple, others require a little testing out, but they are all in all no-brainer which require you to only hit switches. The most "complex" one is very early on where you conduct a skeleton band as they play their new and stunningly wonderful song.

The battles are very easy, but unfortunately, the random encounter rates are high.
You can halve these later on, and I would advise to do so. It was pretty fun, though. No hassle to beat enemies.

Very notable is that you have an indicator as to how close you are to battle, similar to Etrian Odyssey, SMT and other games. It's a kind of button turning from green to yellow to red should you encounter enemies soon.

As you use don't use mana, but have many healing abilities (including possible health regeneration after each fight) you will not use any items, nor will you need to really heal yourself. That makes healing spots rather obsolete and encourages you to just press on without going back to town. Which you definitely should check out despite that!
Only in town do you get clearer hints to what the Spire actually is.

It also clears of why Ezekiel is there. Not to mention that you get hints to him being a demon, too (horses being scared and stuff)


At the very end you will need items, but you will have accumulated enough money to not have any trouble. If you explored the town some more, you will also have better equipment/accessories, so you will not struggle too much.
Before then, however, they have no use at all. You still find enough of them, but so be it.

A nice touch is that while all items you can find on maps are indicated by an arrow, this arrow only appears when you are near it. I quite liked this approach, because no indication at all will make you check everything and having it sparkle kills the wonder of looking for stuff. This is a very nice medium and gave the search a nice touch. It also makes sense seeing stuff only once you get closer.

As another touch and in addition to your battle-skills possesses each character unique character "abilities".
Our magical engineer can build a golem, for example, and later research new attacks for it. She will also build herself some new equipment with which she can use new skills.

Else, a death knight (my my) uses runes in battle, and she can create new skills and items with used ones.

Oozy (as I called him), can eat and absorb practically anything and will gain new forms, new skills for these forms, and passive boosts for whatever he consumes. This makes him ridiculously powerful later on, but horribly weak when you set out to fight your first monsters.
The different forms including beast, bird and plant and more make him variable to your wanted play-style, be it mage or brute, and are a cool feature on their own. I have a soft-spot for shapeshifting.

While they do not impact your general play-style too much (except for Oozy), they are a really nice and realistic feature for your characters.

The tower-part might be tiring if you don't take any breaks. I find it too long and to bare in comparison to the rest. Very little chatter inbetween compared, too. But it was not a pain, either.


The World

This is where this game shines. It has a wonderful town atmosphere and in a game where you can rescue people along the way .. there are actually people missing.
And they actually return, too, once you find them. Thank the heavens!
The maps are detailed, full of life and quite beautiful. While the music is not too memorable, it is friendly and gets out of the background.



The dialogue is hilarious, the towns folk have their own life. They complement each other as they often talk about similiar topics. You see students goofing off or learning for their exams in a music schools and have teacher comment that those who do will be those who have to take extra classes.

The setting is wonderfully absurd.
In this world ghouls, skeletons, demons and the like are all perfectly normal, especially in your hometown Ulstern.
At your destination, a vampire family reigning over the country. We've seen that often enough, but these vampires don't suck any blood, instead they crave art making this town bustling with painters, singers, a music school, a gallery and more.
People commenting on how the vampires really should suck some blood off them is quite the irony.

As you can easily see, this game doesn't take itself too seriously. The story, too, is not serious at all, while our characters do remain faithful to their mission. So are the villains who are more of a bunch of kids playing them than anything else.

But there is more. What the Spire is, what it has with your characters is mostly displayed in town. You have lots of different Inn scenes where you reminisce about the people you miss, see memories of our little gooey friend and have some laughs while you're at it.

which then also explains the persons showing up during the succubus-episode


There are lots of optional things to do, rewards to get from rescued people, cats to find and an optional dungeon allowing you to unlock another form for your slime. You can have some historian research artifacts you find regarding the Spire, too.
All these touches make it much more lively and enjoyable, hell, you even have a scene where you just gather 'round to eat. The devil lies in the details, and this game does it right.
You may not get a grande story, but a lot of fun and friendly atmosphere instead.


In short

Sunken Spire is a humorous, friendly game with much emphasis on small details that may be missed. There is no epic story, nor a too interesting dungeon, but there are charming NPCs, funny characters, hand-drawn scenes, and a lot of hilarious banter to be had.
I'd recommend it to anyone who looks for a lighthearted game. I for one had a jolly good time.





Posts

Pages: 1
nhubi
Liberté, égalité, fraternité
11099
Jolly is a word that does not get used enough!

I have this on my list already (because you know the developers are marvellous), but if I didn't this review would make me want to play it.
It sounds like I missed out on a lot of the good stuff :v
I was quite baffled by the difference in perception. Especially when I was reminded that you gave this is a lower score than for something I rated 1.5 instead.
But it does show in the notes. I really just wanted to rush through the tower as well : D

Did you use the encounter-rate reducing gem at least? Made it much more comfortable. And enemies potentially hurting, too. Oozy is still dishing out ridiculous damage, of course.
I'd recommend going back to just pick up on some town folks if you do like this kind of banter^^

I did miss one person somewhere, so I couldn't quite finish the optional dungeon. But I really don't want to search all floors.

author=nhubi
Jolly is a word that does not get used enough!

I have this on my list already (because you know the developers are marvellous), but if I didn't this review would make me want to play it.

Haha, thanks! And jolly really should be used more often :)
I have no idea why, but it is a wonderful little word.
Glad you like the proximity arrows, I can't stand clicking on everything and tiny sparkles are either a give away or a headache if you have trouble seeing them.

As you played In Search of Immortality I'll just say a bit more on the golem and Alma. Last time Alma learnt skills by analysing enemies, had I not have ran out of time you'd have been able to view enemy's bestiary pages in battle and narratively Alma would have built an auto-analyser or something. So Alma needed a new system and something grounded in reality like R&D appealed to me. I don't like how in sequels you lose all your items/skills from the previous game but it is needed to an extent. Elsa managed to keep most of her abilities but given that the kit system in IMM wasn't that well received Alma lost most of her skills but I wanted to try and keep one of the constructions but I didn't want the other characters this time around to be using Alma's skills. Hence I made it automated, at first she was going to have a range of turrets but then I decided the Golem would be more interesting as it was her ultimate skill last time around. Then the automated Golem naturally expanded into the 4th party member. We had a largeish cast for the size of the game so the Golem being the 4th party member helped keep the character count down in the cutscenes.

The Ooze was largely born out of Indrah mentioning an old game where you had different ways of levelling party members and you fed one type of party member to get them to level. He certainly has the system where you need to be more active in developing him.

It's really heartening to see you took the time to explore the setting, we tried to make it a rich and packed as we could. We had hoped for the Spire itself to be more interesting with more puzzles and dungeon mechanics through out but the deadline loomed.

Thanks for the review, it's highly detailed and is sure to help us as we develop Sunken Spire further, really glad you had a good time with it :D
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