Bound

This review was originally written as part of the Secret Santa event of 2015. It has been edited to correct a few grammar mistakes.

One thing I really like about the Indie gaming scene is that it allows people to take certain liberties that would never be allowed in the AAA industry, be it in regards to gameplay, story or presentation. For instance, you can make an RPG game that kicks off with a witch getting dumped by her boyfriend, and develop a whole story from that premise without any publishers trying to stop you, and sometimes, these stories turn out awesome.

In Bound, the authors opted to kick off an RPG with a down-to-Earth, real-life relatable plot about how awkward and sad breakups can be. With that, they did a pretty nice work that shows a lot of promise and was a delight to check out. However, there's a whole lot to improve for this game to be as great as it has all the right to be.

PRESENTATION AND STORY

Graphics-wise, this game looks very pretty. I'm no expert in RPG Maker VX, so I have no idea what is RTP and what is custom, but every map and sprite looks great. The character sheets are adorable and stylish, and everything from backgrounds to battle animations to monster sets is nice. There are also some character arts that are probably original, and I really like those, except for the fact that Sara's hair color clashes with her walking sprite, which is weird. Music-wise, this game contains many excellent tunes, always fitting the moods of the scenes and battles. Once again, no idea whether the songs are RTP, game rips, or custom, but that doesn't matter to me, since they work nicely.

Relatable story, comic relief, and magic

The story follows Ryrude, a warrior-like character who broke up with Lena, an attractive but vengeful witch, due to some unspecified betrayal. The dialogs that kick off the presentation, right before the scene fades in, get us thinking about love in general, and about how time sometimes makes it fade away, and the unspecified betrayal mentioned makes us curious about what could have happened between these two. Anyone who's ever been the dumpee in a breakup is sure to relate to Lena, and will feel the urge to seek out answers, while anyone who's ever been betrayed could relate to Ryrude. To top it off, the society where our characters are inserted is somewhat intolerant towards witches (thinking they're weird, dangerouns, etc), making Lena's life even more miserable and lonely, and making bleeding hearts such as myself want to seek justice for her in spite of playing as her ex. This is a pretty good story for anyone who's ever loved and lost, regardless of what side of the breakup they were in.

Anyways, the game starts out after Lena throws a hilariously weird curse on Ryrude, and he sets out to seek help from his friend Sara, who tells him that they should try to reach Lena in her house to lift the curse... but it just so happens that Lena's house is a creepy abandoned temple, where the adventure then takes place.

One thing I like about this story is that, while the main theme could very well fit into a modern-age realistic flick, its setting in a magical world of medieval fantasy makes it so that certain bizarre (and awesome) things become possible, such as a heartbroken Lena throwing the aforementioned hilarious curse on poor Ryrude, or a person having to talk to their ex by going into the creepy dungeon said ex calls home. In fact, a lot of this game's comic relief comes from the crazy situations created by having such a "mundane" plot take place in a magical world, and I really like that.

Other than that, the game's full of funny little tidbits: every item is described in a hilarious way, the dialogs tend to be a tad funny, and there's some epic pieces of equipment that talk during battles, I swear.

GAMEPLAY

Outside the dungeons, there are so many open doors, but so little to explore

One thing that got me upset right off the bat is that the first city we encounter in the game, where we meet Sara, has a bunch of open doors, some contained within very intersting-looking buildings, but we can't enter any of them. This "negative possibility space" threw me off a bit. I like RPGs where I can explore, and this one has no exploration outside of the dungeons themselves. That not to mention that a whole bunch of NPCs don't even talk to the player, which is a shame, since some of them seem to be doing interesting things. Maybe these problems are just demo version issues, and all those doors and NPCs will get maps and dialogs of their own, respectively, in a next release. I sure hope so.

Dungeons, keys and rooms

Now, there's one thing I found really interesting and awesome. When visiting Lena's lonely ruins, you can choose between a set of room types to explore, including more monster-filled rooms, more puzzle-intensive rooms, and other options. You need some keys to get to each dungeon type, and a few keys are given to you as soon as you first enter the dungeon, while others need to be gathered in loot chests spread around the rooms.

In each dungeon type, the rooms have a different gimmick to them, and in each room, you get some extra keys to select what kind of room you want to face next, which is pretty cool. Standard rooms feature some monsters and chests like a regular dungeon crawler; monster rooms feature a bunch of monsters and no loot; treasure rooms feature a lot of useful loot without any danger in sight; recovery rooms feature a bunch of healing loot; puzzle rooms feature puzzles (duh); and finally, miniboss rooms feature very interesting looking minibosses, some of which could very well be adventurer parties lost in the dungeon just like our heroes are.

In dungeon-crawler fashion, you gather useful equipment and stuff as you explore, and gearing up your party is essential to remain strong against the onslaught of enemies. I really like this feeling where it's sometimes unclear what you're going to find, and you have to make sure to check as much loot as possible to get your characters buffed up.

Battles with an interesting premise, in a nice dungeon-crawler context, but occasionally somewhat unfair in their difficulty

The battles follow a mostly standard turn-based RPG style, but with a few unique things. For instance, characters can change classes during a battle, and that's pretty cool. Each character has his or her own set of classes they can change into, and the classes change a set of different things, such as their skill set and their inherent HP/MP meters. I really like this character change mechanic, and it shows that the developers had some great ideas in that sense.

In dungeon-crawler fashion, all enemy parties are visible on the game map as you venture through the dungeons, and you get to choose your battles by selecting what enemies to run into. That's much better than random encounters, and I really like games that use this mechanic.

In order to beat most encounters most efficiently, the player has to rummage through the classes in order to get the one that's most powerful against whatever encounter they might be faced with, and that would be made much easier if we could see in advance what each enemy party contains. You know, just an idea. As it is, if you start an encounter with an unfavorable combination of classes, you'll have to waste turns in order to change to a favorable combination, and that could very well result in losing the battle for lagging behind, since some of the monsters spread around are relentless.

The "boss" battle at the end of the first "standard" room is absurdly hard to beat, and I simply couldn't manage the first time around. I ended up being left with 1 HP in each of my characters after I lost, and unable to leave the dungeon room I was in. At first, I thought that was a game breaker, but I eventually learned that the weird sword-like column in the room would heal us for 25 coins, which finally allowed me to better strategize and beat the crap out of the fiends in front of the door. That healing column should stand out a bit more for the player to know to interact with it, maybe giving it some sparkly effect with a battle animation or character sprite would work.

Bugs

The tilesets seem to be configured wrong, because I managed to clip through a wall like this:




Also, sometimes, puzzle rooms contain riddles, which I found more annoying than interesting, and those have the flaw that, sometimes, an "answer monster" to a previous riddle is going to sit on the way between the player and one of the answers of the current riddle (picture below), making it impossible to reach the answer without triggering the enemy.



Then there's a puzzle room where I can't interact with anything and can't move forward either, making me assume that the room simply wasn't finished and I'm now stuck forever, that's bad. Picture below, again.



Other than that, sometimes, the dialogs and item descriptions are partially occulted due to the fact that they're too long and don't fit the text frames, which is really weird. An example is the picture below.



OVERALL

I really like where the authors were going with this. The story is nice, the presentation is good (mostly), and the gameplay premise shows some very interesting ideas that I'd love to see being used in a more balanced out experience. I'd really like for the authors to get the flaws I mentioned ironed out and release a new version, that'd be awesome. I really like where this is headed, it just needs some polish. I'm currently subbed to the project, who knows when I can expect something new to come along.