In Arcem Miseria

In Arcem Miseria 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
Graphically the game is very impressive. 3D rendering is unique to this quarter of the interwebs and the version used in this game looks great to boot. The maps are a bit dark making it hard to see details like items that need picking up. Aside from that, the graphics look very polished. The battle hud looks very nice and high quality.

Music is original. There's only one track, as far as I recall, nothing that really stands out. The sound effects are a bit lacklustre as well, which is a pity because there are many places where they would have fit well but just weren't present. Working on the sound a bit more could have really helped enhance the atmosphere a lot.

The writing is pretty decent with no writing errors that I could tell. The characters are okay, if a little too similar to each other and there's not really much there in the way of personality except for the main boy.

The story does it's job. It's also a bit lacklustre in that while the flashbacks are interesting and hint at the reasons for boy to be there, there isn't really much in the way of building the relationships of the characters - and considering there's a death scene within the first 20 minutes which is supposed to give reason to the whole exploration of the tower, it just didn't mean much to the player.

Gameplay
This is where things start to fall apart a little.

The game is puzzle-heavy and in that it does well, if a bit blandly. It forces you to think with two characters and interact to the map with both of them, changing things so that they both can progress. However, the puzzles become rehashes of themselves. Basically you were collecting items to use in certain areas in order to turn on switches that you could use to open doors. So much more could have been done with the idea of two characters to control, each with different skills and abilities, but alas, t'was not to be.

Battles are annoying. It's hard to handle both characters at the same time and having on-map enemies that can gang up on you if you get too close and draw them in, with only one way to heal yourself and limited skills... Well, quite frankly, it gets repetitive fast. The battles also take too long to complete for on-map affairs and there's always more than one or two enemies around the progressive path, so you can't just skip them or they'll chase you until you get a chain of enemies.

The controls were pretty clunky, too. You controlled both characters with your mouse - easy enough - however, changing characters would force them to stop following each other, thus you had to use the keyboard to retoggle follow, which got annoying pretty quickly. In fact, it would have been nice to allow for an either/or option. Allowing movement by keyboard would have been great, but alas, only mouse.

Battles were also clunky when it came to using moves. Your skill use was governed by constantly regenerating points (5-6 there were). Each skill cost a certain amount of them to be performed, then you had to choose where to cast the skill and the target and confirm. It was awkward - especially when you've got enemies attacking you constantly at the same time who didn't have to navigate. You had to use the Confirm key to bring up the skill menu, too, which was - yet again - awfully clunky when most movement is being done by mouse.

There were no items so the only way to heal was via a defend skill and it didn't really do much in the way of healing, especially when two enemies are wailing on you with attacks that do more damage on their own than what you healed. Boy died a lot.

There was some issue with heights - often you'd mean to go under a walkway that was off the ground and instead backtrack up it instead.

Fun factor
I liked the idea and concept, the visuals and even the story. Those were very strong reasons to enjoy the game. While the puzzles were a bit bland, it was the battles that were the bane of my experience.

I got keys jumbled, and boy kept dying because what he healed wasn't enough to offset the enemies ganging up on him. Robot was constantly ignored by the enemies and even when she used Distraction they preferred boy's squishy body instead.

There were far too many enemies and they took too long to kill... Frankly, it was an exercise in how well I could hold my temper/patience and the answer was: not as long as I would have liked.

I've always said that Gameplay doesn't matter when a story is good enough. This game has made me eat those words because while the story is decent and does have mysteries I want to know about, the battles, while not broken, were annoying enough that I didn't think the pay-off was worth it.


Overall, while pretty, it was too annoying to enjoy. For the IGMC I gave it a 41 out of 60. On RMN I'm giving it 3 stars.