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Sacred Reviews: Empress of China

Intro

Empress of China was developed by Someoneman and Jeroen_Sol as part of the Swap in the Middle with You event and was created with RPG Maker VX Ace.

Story
Greatest Strength
While the game only contains a few cut scenes of varying length it manages to use a lot of early cut scenes relatively well to establish the nature of Lei as well as of her parents.

Greatest Weaknesses
If I had to pick the worst aspect of the story for Empress of China it would be the ambiguous nature of the ending. It's not entirely clear to me what was intended by Lei killing the school bully at the end. Heck, it's not even clear to me if what we see at the end of the game is actually taking place of merely a part of one of Lei's dreams.

I suppose some would argue that this is a positive since it leaves the ending open for interpretation, but I would counter that in a game where you end with a child murdering another child. I shouldn't have to guess if the ending is meant to be taken as symbolic or not.

Gameplay

On the gameplay side of things Empress of China is comprised of 16 different puzzles which fall into one of four distinct types. Thankfully, most of the puzzles tend to get rather difficult rather quickly so this isn't a puzzle game you'll be able to simple steamroll through without a little aid. On the downside I wish there was a few more puzzles to help set the flow of certain puzzle types like the "Path of Light" which is so difficult I actually I had to ask for the solution to the last one since I had exhausted every possibility I could come up with on my own.

Outside of the "Path of Light" puzzles the game also features rock pushing puzzles, word puzzles, and movement puzzles. Though, I honestly find the movement puzzles to be the second most annoying of the bunch since you can royally screw yourself while trying to solve those if you get carelessly caught up in a groove of rapid movement.

Conclusion

On the plus side this game does feature some quality puzzles that will take some time and effort to solve. On the downside the ambiguous nature of the ending for this game hurts the project as a whole and undermines the efforts that were put into giving Dad, Daddy, and Lei any sense of characterization. As such, I can only recommend this game to people that take great joy in solving puzzles. Other wise you'll probably find this game more frustrating then enjoyable.

Posts

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Jeroen_Sol
Nothing reveals Humanity so well as the games it plays. A game of betrayal, where the most suspicious person is brutally murdered? How savage.
3885
Thanks for the review! I did make some of those puzzles excruciatingly difficult. I hope Someoneman will agree to us changing this game for the better when the judging period of the event is over.
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