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I Regret

  • Liberty
  • 04/15/2015 09:14 PM
  • 499 views
Null Regrets 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
The graphics are basically a mix of RTP and edits and fit quite well together, helping to create an eerie, serious atmosphere. The mapping is pretty solid, bar a few tiles that are odd and there are some subtle poses of the heroes that are pretty neat, matching facial expressions and the like.

Music was default RTP, as was sound. While it fit the scenes it was used it, it didn't stand out much at all. Custom music and sounds would have really helped fill out the atmosphere a lot more, though.

The writing is quite well done with no errors that I could find. The story and concept are both well written and presented. The characterisation was pretty well done via both dialogue but also the sprite poses - the eyes of the faceset were mirrored by the eyes of the sprite, so that when the hero was looking to the left or right on the sprite, the faceset would also be looking in those directions. A subtle touch, but it helped show the character personality quite a bit more than just static facesets/sprites would have.

The ending/title screen transition is really nicely done, fading from game over to title. Very nice.

Gameplay
This is where the game went wrong. Frankly, the battles are both interesting and terrible.

There are three main battles through which you must progress, each getting harder as you go. After each battle you gain/unlock more skills, which should help you out a lot more. Sadly that isn't really the case.

Each battle is a long uphill slog to deal more damage than you take. Battles should be interesting - skills are dynamic and work well together. The introduction of constructs (summoned characters that have specific skill sets) is pretty interesting. However. Enemies are almost impossible to kill and if you make a mistake the game is unforgiving.

Enemies are on-map encounters or progress related. The on-map encounters are really not necessary. You don't gain anything from battling them - there are no items to gain, no experience to build, no money to hoard. They exist only to piss off the player and pad out the game with unnecessary battles.

The bosses are annoying and take forever to beat. Not only that, but their skills are designed to drag out the battles - not to beat you into oblivion but to last as long as possible.

Skills cost too much. Honestly, 10 CP to run from battle takes about 5+ turns to gather. By then you've almost defeated the enemies anyway.

There was a bug in the last battle that caused the game to crash with no error pop-up. Just a plain crash. I think it was tied to an enemy skill reacting with a character skill or something.

There were three collectables but they weren't hard to find and there was no prize for getting them that I could find.

Fun factor
I wanted to like this game, I really did. I thought the storyline was nice and would have liked to have seen the resolution. The graphics were well-used (for the most part) and there was a lot of characterisation with the addition of facial changes that reflected those of the sprites.

The battles, however, were just painful. The concepts were great but the actual way they played out weren't.

The fact of the matter is that they were just too hard and long to be fun. It took me over 10 minutes to beat the second boss and it was basically just a case of repeating the same strategy over and over again. Honestly, it felt more grindy than just beating up a bunch of random encounters. That is not mentioning the utter horror of not finishing the game because I got the last boss down to just a sliver of health only to have the game crash on me.

Oh, and battles that could have just been events to teleport you back to the start of the level - giving the same 'I don't want to touch' feel without taking away from the boss battles. There was no need for them at all and they just sucked.


It's a pity but gameplay is a large part of making a game worth playing. You can have a great, interesting skill set but balance can screw it up completely - that is what happened for this game. I gave it a 23 out of 60 in the IGMC. On RMN I'm giving it a 2.