The Swallow's Descent

Hello, detectives!
This game is called The Swallow's Descent, and it's 2016 visual novel adventure game made with RPG Maker VX Ace by psy_wombats, Vaccaria, mjshi and InfectionFiles. The team released the game for the event Bacon Jam 2016 - "It's like one of those BBC mystery shows except it takes place in Final Fantasy". Ok?

First a warning: this is a text heavy story-driven adventure game with no battles, minigame or action moments, so if you are looking for a more exciting experience you will probably have to look elsewhere. If instead you are ready for a relaxing mystery adventure, well you will be entertained for sure!


This game is a murder mystery, so of course there is a murder. The mystery is WHY there are TWO identical cardinals in this cutscene, but probably it's a little mistake (one of the two had to be the monk)!

The game is set in 1206 in this fantasy world where we play as William Byske, an agent of the ARC, or Arcane Reconnaissance Corps, a magical special ops unit. He is tasked to guard an incompetent ambassador of Salemsvall, Belgrave at St. Hyssmark Monastery while disguised a a cook during a meeting with the Ytterian delegation. But later ambassador Belgrave is found dead inside his room, so William has to find the assassin, that is surely one of the people inside the monastery... was the culprit a member of the Ytterian delegation of someone that wants to put the blame on them and provoke a new war between Salemsvall and Ytteria?

Being this is a sort of interactive story, you can probably expect that 80% of the activity will be walking around, and the rest is talking to people and look for clues, and while this can seem limited, mind that there is a LOT to read, explore and experience: every point of interest delivers some kind of descriptions, the characters have lot of lines, and there are also lots of notes about them that are progressively added. The dialogues not only are well written (the various characters are also interesting and different) but sometimes include also some jokes and fun parts, pity for the presence of some typos, but this was probably difficult to avoid, in a game with so many dialogues.
Since this is a linear game, it's important to find the events that let you advance the plot, but luckily if you feel lost, there is always the option to “Move on to the next scene”, or if you prefer you can "Keep investigating" so you can explore more the area.


Yes, this is not an rpg but I liked reading every reaction to the interactions, ok?

Let's talk about the visuals: the game uses the classic RTP assets (except for the portraits, that I'll mention later), even if I believe that the charsets are at least edited. Mapping is ok, I already mentioned the tons of interactions you can have with the various items, the only problem is that sometimes the VX Rtps look a bit generic and those halls may become stale after a while, even if a couple of new locations are unlocked later, but at least they're used well. The intro cutscene with the lone stagecoach is especially well made and same can be said of the other cutscenes except for a couple of errors I noticed (like two identical characters on the same scene) and some passability errors on some maps, but just a pair if I remember well.
The portraits of the characters (that you can see in the pics here) are custom made by mjshi (author of Someone Killed the Butler, another murder mystery game I reviewed last year) and they're very good, each one has also several expressions that perfectly convey the tone of their dialogues. Well done!

Sounds are RTPs for the most part, and soundtrack is from Presence of Music and Eric Matyas (http://www.soundimage.org), a good selection for this contest game that also fit the atmosphere, that't not too tense like in other mystery games.


Oh yes, of course, that's IT! The inavoidable...

...Final Verdict
For a contest game this adventure is pretty long (took me more than 3 hours, about 3 hours and 30 minutes, if I remember), solid and well made except for some minor flaws (typos and a couple of mapping errors) that are probably understandable for an event game that includes a great quantity of dialogues and descriptions.
Even if this is not a game for every player and not really replayable (like most visual novels and murder mystery adventures) I had fun with it and I can recommend this game to those players who like this kind of story-driven simple rpgmaker narrative games. It's good.