Darkness of Hope - Save The Heart of Painful

Darkness of Hope: Save the Heart of the Painful 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 game was a literal minefield of butchered English in all its varied forms. Rife with spelling, grammar, punctuation and capitalisation errors, as well as strange word usage and very awkward phrasing.

Despite that, the story itself was okay - nothing exceptional, but decent. It's presentation could have been better, but the characters were interesting and the plot was fine.

The animated intro was especially lovely, though I felt that the text moved a bit too fast. I'm a pretty quick reader and I had a little trouble in some spots. I feel sorry for those who are slow readers.

There was a bit of bad tile usage - benches on wall tiles and strange carpet usage, for example - but for the most part, while a bit bare, maps were about average. It used the default RTP tiles with some custom sprites.

The custom resources were very nice. The portraits were lovely and the in-battle design was pretty unique.

Music and sound were default RTP but didn't really stand out much at all.

There was some sexual content in the non-optional parts of the story which made me cringe a little. For example: You have to choose to stick a large carrot either between the breasts or up the butt of a succubii. To which she becomes "horny". I felt it was gratuitous and served no purpose.

Gameplay
Battles were interesting. The two that I experienced were more like duels - fighting over control of a bar. You had four abilities - Defend, normal attack, magic attack and counter. Counter wasn't very useful at all. Defend would sometimes negate a normal attack. Strike was powerful but easily dodged and normal attacks had a chance of hitting three times, but with low success and damage output. Unfortunately, battles were pretty hard to win. The first one led to a draw which carried on the scene, but the second was flawed.

The second battle was odd in that it ended after a certain amount of turns. The thing is, if you don't beat the battle within that time, the enemy gets off an attack that kills you straight out. Game over and done.

The majority of the game is a puzzle - you have two parties that you can switch between who have to find their way through a dungeon and back to each other. Most of the puzzle was pretty good, actually. There was one part, though, where I got stuck and only out of complete desperation did I find the way to go. It was unintuitive, as you were supposed to check (and triple check) a chest you had already opened in order to get more items. You aren't given a hint to do so and you need those items to progress with the plot.

In fact, the whole game had issues with telling you what to do next. You are dropped in the dungeon, told that 's' changes party and left to your own devices.

Oh, and forget about saving. You cannot save in the dungeon. The dungeon that takes up most of your game time. The dungeon with a lot of steps you have to complete to get out of. Only after you leave can you save, and then you get repeatedly beaten down by one of the villains.

Speaking of - I could not get past that battle. Every time I managed to get close to defeating her, she'd throw a super skill at me and take most of the bar. And if you don't defeat her before the battle ends, even if you've got the bar almost to your end... game over.

Fun factor
While there was little direction and I couldn't get past a certain part, the dungeon puzzles, once I knew what to do, were kinda fun. I replayed the end and got past the battle eventually, only to have the game end after a scene. The puzzles were fun, the battles a bit frustrating, if interesting and the writing quite poor.

And the sexual content was very cringe-worthy. Very.

In the IGMC I gave it a 26 out of 60. On RMN I'm giving it 2 stars. Polish adds a lot to a game and is required to impart a story effectively to the player.