Charon's Sabath was one of the entries for the IGMC (Indie Game Making Contest) for 2014. As one of the judges for the RPG portion of the competition it is my pleasure to share my thoughts on the game. This review will basically just be the notes I took cleaned up. It will be based on the competition version of the game, so certain aspects of the game may have been changed.


Presentation
Graphics are great - mapping is detailed, lovingly crafted and really portrays the areas depicted very well. There were some misses, though - the caves for example - and some of the graphic styles didn't mesh very well, but otherwise the graphical components were used very well and polished quite well. There were some passability issues, however.

The music used fits the tone of the game perfectly. It's very nice and really adds to the atmosphere. There were some odd sound effects (menu effects) but most of them are fitting and really well-used.

Writing was well done for the most part, but there was some awkward phrasing and repetitive writing. The plot itself was interesting, though there were some issues with figuring out what to do next - unintuitive in some places.


Gameplay
It's easy to skip dialogue since it's set to auto end, which is a pity and doesn't help with finding the necessary clues needed to lead to the next areas.

Eventing is done well with nary a bug in sight. That said, the gameplay itself is exceedingly unfair, with little to no hints about what to do/avoid doing.

Case point - ghosts in cave, house fire deaths, jumping into river, touching villagers in swamp - all of these things are 'learn by trial' and even learning of them by trial doesn't mean that you'll get it right the first, second, third, fourth, fifth... time. In fact, racking up deaths is the main component of gameplay, it seems. It would have been amusing to have a death counter of some kind.

Often you'd get halfway through a puzzle and die. Then you were given the choice to either die for real or lose a soul to retry - but then the retry would put you back at the start.

That said, providing two endings based on soul collection was a neat idea.


Fun factor
Unfortunately, the game was extremely frustrating from getting game overs all the time. Even using the 'save' to stop a death meant not getting the good ending since you lost souls for it and you die so many times it's not funny. It was more expedient to just get a game over and start the puzzle again, especially since So frustrating. Keep getting game overs all the time. Not fun.

It's a neat concept that would be great if you could make any progress bar one or two souls. It's a completely different kind of grinding - instead of levels and experience, lives are the grind and you only have the one which is extremely easy to lose at any time.

It's seriously unfair gameplay, though. You have no clues bar 'oh I should be careful' as to where you're going to die. In the cave you don't even see the ghosts until you step on them and you aren't told to hide but have to guess guessed at it. Even then, avoiding the high-speed ghosts is near to impossible.

In the fiery house you have to avoid spots or die - with not visual indication of said spots. It's a guessing game and you just have to keep reloading over and over again until you can make it all the way through. The swamp zombies move crazy fast in some areas with no way to dodge them, thus progress is cut there as well.

Even using the souls you carry as a sort of 'life' amount, you're sent back to the start of the puzzle and have to make it back to where you were initially. It's just too hard to progress very far, let alone complete.

Once you do figure out what to do and manage to get the soul, it's okay but the process of getting souls is crazy. I died well over 15 times just in the house! That's not counting accidentally jumping off river banks, being grabbed by zombies or running into ghosts.

The game is full of frustration, which is a pity because the premise and polish put on the other aspects is really, really nice. I would have liked to have seen more thought put in to the gameplay itself.

In the IGMC I scored it 35 out of 60 - it would have been a lot higher if I didn't want to quit after the first few minutes of gameplay. On RMN I give it 2.5 stars. Gameplay is important, people.