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As exciting as wandering through a lifeless tomb

  • Silviera
  • 10/31/2009 02:24 AM
  • 2229 views
Battle System- 2/5
Being an adventure game, Grave Spirit is understandably light on combat. Although the game does give you a weapon early on in the form of one very expensive wooden stick you'll rarely have opportunity to utilize it for anything other than swinging furiously at the air. The game contains no regular enemies but does have a handful of boss fights. Unfortunately, they are more annoying than fun. The first two bosses spend all of their time running from the player in various ways, and battling them consists of nothing more than chasing them around and hoping to get a solid hit in before they teleport or run away. The final boss was particularly disappointing. He stands at the top of a tall staircase and fires a thin beam directly forward which is trivial to dodge. After firing a beam his defenses drop for a moment giving you time to walk up to him and punch him in the face before retreating back to a safe spot. This pattern continues for several minutes until he finally dies. Essentially the problem with battles is every boss in the game only has a single attack pattern and they're all durable enough that their one gimmick will wear thin long before the fight has ended.

Storyline- 1/5
You begin the game as a sort of cat/lizard thing with glowing eyes who wanders into a dead village, through a rather long and drawn out intro where nothing happens. I'm not entirely sure what the main character was actually and the game never bothered to explain it to me. After wandering around for a bit you discover you are possessed by a weird shadow who informs you that you must find your way to an old stone fortress. For the majority of the game that's about as complicated as things are. While wandering around the ruins you'll encounter various stone tablets which will give you one sentence insights into the history of the land but they never reveal anything more than irrelevant or completely obvious information. The main character never speaks and you never have any clue as to his real motivations, and it's a long time before you learn anything of the shadow. The game finally does reveal the purpose behind your journey in one giant info dump during the final dungeon, but the end result turns out to be far from worth the effort expended to reach it. As a final note, the game is littered with a handful of spelling and grammatical errors, though they aren't too distracting for the most part.

Characters- 1/5
Aside from the silent main character most of your time is spent listening to a cryptic and vaguely forceful shadow. Since you spend nearly the entire game ultimately unaware of anyone's motives, it's impossible to connect with these characters or be the least interested in their plight, whatever it might be. The game does shove a handful of other characters at you during the climax, including a rather one dimensional villain and another cryptic unexplained ally.

Level Design- 1/5
The main thing I can say about this category is that maps are empty. Very empty. You'll spend almost the entire game wandering through lifeless halls at an extremely slow walk speed. Since the game has no enemies other than bosses, the only thing to break up the monotony of crawling through the landscape are a handful of puzzles. Unfortunately these too are few and far between and are rarely more complicated than flipping a switch to open a nearby door. The game introduces several potentially interesting mechanics early on, such as giving you a dash attack related to your wooden stick and granting you a birdlike spirit familiar to interact with far away objects. Sadly these mechanics are woefully underutilized, some of which have a single obvious use and are never heard from again.

What really hurts this category is that you are saddled with a painfully slow walking speed. Combined with the vast and mostly empty maps this means you'll spend nearly the entire game walking from point A to point B. To make matters worse some of the later points of the game include various lakes and rivers you are forced to wade through for no apparent reason, and sadly these bodies of water reduce your movement speed even further. Your only respite from the slow walking speed is the stick's dash attack, which sends you flying forward a few spaces. You'll spend most of the game swinging the stick at the air just to speed through the environments as quickly as possible. The game does contain a single stealth sequence which comes literally out of nowhere on your way to the final dungeon. It's littered with instant game overs and no real indication of what direction enemies or facing or what kind of line of sight they possess, and in my experience was the most frustrating area in the entire game.

It is worth mentioning that at several points throughout the game you will come across a large locked stone door. The only way to open these doors is to trek back to the very first area in the game and ask a stone statue to open them for you. Even though the game does provide some manner of shortcuts, it is still extremely irritating to be forced to run back and forth between two extremely large and empty areas just to move forward. Why the game forced me to do this every 30 minutes was mind boggling and I spent the majority of the adventure dreading the sight of those giant stone slabs.

Graphics- 2/5
The first thing you'll notice about this game is that it is very gray and dark. While fitting for the somber setting of abandoned villages and tombs, it does tend to wear thin after a while. The graphics all have a very dull blocky look that occasionally makes it hard to identify whether you're about to run into a roof or a plain, so some experimentation is required to determine what you can actually walk on. My real issue with the graphics is that many of the environments have rounded undefined edges. While this does serve to enhance the look of the game by presenting more realistic looking environments, combined with the strict grid based movement it actively interferes with the gameplay. You're never quite sure where a cliff edge begins or ends, and again just figuring out what tiles you can actually walk on becomes a matter of trial and error. Fortunately this problem is only present in the exteriors, as the interiors seem to be designed more with the game engine's limitations in mind.

Music/Sound- 4/5
Music consists primarily of peaceful and somber piano tunes, and meshes well with the dark tones of the game itself. Since you spend a good deal of the game aimlessly wandering from place to place, you'll have plenty of time to appreciate the quality of the music. Occasionally the music feels a bit too epic for the often uneventful game it occupies, for the most part I thoroughly enjoyed this category.

Random stuff I like-
Instead of throwing up a health meter in the corner of the screen which might have disturbed the atmosphere, you can keep track of your character's remaining life by the color of his eyes. Green indicates you are in great condition, while your eyes will slowly shift to yellow and then finally red when you are near death. Since the game contained no menu access it was a rather nice touch.

Random stuff I hated-
At one point I became stuck in a room and saw no easy way to progress. There was a small gap between the wall and a giant 2x6 pillar, which I assumed I had to open in some way. Turns out the solution was that my tiny wooden stick wielding character had to grab and push this 20 ton pillar halfway across a room, despite the fact he showed no aptitude for being able to lift or push anything larger than a small gravestone throughout the first two hours of the game.

I spent two screens wading through a lake at the slowest walk speed imaginable, and when I finally reached the other shore I was rewarded with a stone slab which read "they tell us the ancients could swim quickly across vast bodies of water by continuously pressing the X button".

Final Thoughts-
Although the game is somewhat successful at creating a dreary atmosphere it is ultimately lacking in qualities that make adventure games fun to begin with. The puzzles are rare and uninteresting, the writing is bland, and landscape is lacking in interactivity. When all is said and done this game is just boring.

Posts

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This sounds like the other review by Solitayre
Whoops, didn't see this comment for a few months. I ended up submitting this review 2 hours before Sol however!
Well, I'm glad you liked my music at least! =)
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