Temple of Memories

Many first attempts at games stumble in so many areas that they fail to achieve basic playability. To this, I was relieved that this wasn’t the case with OzzytheOne’s Temple of Memories, a short puzzle RPG made for a contest centered on PewDiePie. For the first rpg maker project created by the author, Temple of Memories displays a sense of competency and succinct storytelling that allows the game to stand on its legs, with issues like tileset misuse, lack of clarity in level design, and a few other painstakingly common mistakes made in games within the community not being a distracting factor in the game.

In spite of these pros, Temple of Memories is still the developer’s first game, and there are some questionable design decisions and other weaker aspects of the game that could use improvement.



STORY
Temple of Memories will either leave you in between the spectrum of light-heartened and dark, or start off completely goofy venturing into a more tragic story, depending on what paths you take. There is a room you can enter on the first map of the game, indicated by a sparkle, that allows you to visit a quirky statue with several references to the aforementioned internet celebrity. This was supposed to be a bonus room, but in my point of view, it wasn’t really well-hidden, and it does have an effect where the player’s outlook on the game as a whole can be shaped.

Aside from that, Temple of Memories is a surprisingly tragic story indeed. You receive the familiar, gentle affair of a band of relatively youthful adventurers delving into a tomb for treasure, only to receive several misfortunes that pick them off one by one throughout the journey. Even the protagonist is a victim to a cruel fate that you can’t help but reflect on afterwards.

While the tragedy is unexpected for what the game initially presents itself to be, there isn’t a lot of things wrong with the story’s delivery and the use of back-story in the game was presented in a way that was easy to follow. It didn’t “wow” me, but it worked; a simple, workable premise for a simple contest game.

GAMEPLAY
As a puzzle game, Temple of Memories core gameplay comes from overcoming carefully-crafted obstacles in a set of rooms to progress. There are also bits where the game throws in turn-based RPG battles as a means to break up the pace. While it didn’t stop me from enjoying the game, I strongly felt the execution of these aspects could have used some tuning.

To start off, while the puzzles were relatively light in their challenge, I’ve often found them difficult for the wrong reasons. Puzzles rely on the player understanding the logic of the respective puzzle in order to beat it, and the loss of that often leads to forcing the player to do a lot of guesswork to figure out the solution, which can lead to boredom.

Case in point, the first room contains a simple switch puzzle that creates platforms. The only challenge you have to go through, as a player, is navigation, and one of the needed switches is behind a pillar. I recall the creator lamenting how some players couldn’t even find that switch, and while I got it right on my first try, I can understand why. There weren’t any pillars the player could walk behind before this, or at least ones that forced the player to do so, thus the precedence for the existence of that mechanic wasn’t clear enough. It sounds minor, sure, but in level design, minor details do count.

The worst case of this miscommunication rears its ugly head in the following puzzle. You have to navigate a room of teleportation portals to reach your next goal, and the path each portal takes you is indicated by color. This sounds straightforward, until you realize that there is no straightforward, intuitive hint as to where each portal takes you, regardless of color. Think you’ll be at the exit when the color matches that of your destination? Nope, you are sent off into some arbitrary spot possibly closer to where you started instead. What resulted as a scenario where I felt like a chicken with its head cut off, stumbling about randomly until I finally reached the exit by a stroke of luck. To this game’s credit, this is the only area where I truly felt a sense near game-quitting frustration, but the fact that I even felt that way to begin with means there’s a real problem.

Aside from the issues with the puzzles, the RPG combat was relatively inoffensive by comparison. The only choice I would question is the first enemy you can encounter a battle with. These are “magic slimes” that are immune to basic attacks, requiring you to use a magic skill to beat. Only two of your four party members possess magical abilities, thus only two of your party of four can actually do anything meaningful. Are you attempting to tell me that the “attack” command is useless? That my other two party members are just meat-shields? Neither of these are really the case later on in the game.

The first battle in an RPG is important, because it sets a precedent (there’s that ‘p’ word again) for all future battles to build upon. By making known commands and mechanics useless right off the bat, it will be harder for the player to understand when they need to take advantage of them. Think of it as like giving a miner the objective to mine some minerals veins from a nearby wall, and instead of giving them a pickaxe, you give them that, a rope, a shoe, a paintbrush and a lantern to go along with it. The average person would have no clue what to do with the load you just dumped on them for a comparatively straight-forward objective, and the same logic applies to game mechanics. The fight is at least winnable, but it would have been better off as a build-up from a more basic battle instead.

GRAPHICS/AUDIO
Temple of Memories sticks with the Run-Time Package assets through and through, with minor custom material in the form of generated/edited face graphics.

Now, the “first games” I’m aware of typically have large, empty rooms with no design or direction, tiles clipping in random spots or just outright misused, and generally poor utilization of space on a fundamental level. Temple of Memories, however, avoids all of those sins, utilizing the materials given to create detailed environments and deliberately crafted passageways. It’s only as breath-taking as the notoriously over-used RTP is going to be, but it’s used competently, and that’s what counts.

My only recommendation is to get a better title screen. The dusty old book with random scribbles, with a bland, computer generated title doesn’t really do the game justice, but I can understand that time constraints existed.

OVERALL
Despite some rough spots, Temple of Memories managed to surprise me. It was an RPG-maker game made by a first-time user that is competently made and fun to play, despite some glaring flaws. Keep at it, OzzytheOne, you have a knack for this!

SCORE:
3/5
Average