STORMCROW'S PROFILE

LOVE DAT title screen.

Custom graphics? Noice? Hmm, I can't seem to actually walk left or right though, just kind of scuttle sideways like a crab.

I get that we're aiming for a minimalist graphical style here but...more differentiation between walls, floors, and ceilings would be nice. Everything is just a slightly differently shaded block that I don't know if I can walk on or not.

This seems like a depressingly hyper-quotidian world. Or deadpan black humor. Unsure.

One of my clients is asking for a discount? What? What is it I'm selling? How big of a discount? More information PLZ. Ah, but thou must.

Hahahaha. Ignore your coworker?

>Yes.
>Yes.

As soon as Color Dan shows up I'm feeling Rick & Morty vibes. Eyepatch Dan? Okay, that was definitely intentional then. Lovely homage to Rick And Morty here.

Ah, I see Dans are very flammable.

What is this "Zoom Out" camera move I saw here and in 3F? Is that just something you can do with MV, or is it a script? Anyway great reveal of the Kraken.

Man, this started weird and is just get weirder and weirder. I love it.

Ugh fuck algebra, I'm glad I'm not drunk while I'm playing this.

Beat it! That was really fun and entertaining. Very funny and even a little thought provoking, tickled the feels a bit. Overall probably my favoritest of the Roulette games I played. I'm really glad I could convince my computer it wasn't malware.

One thing, though: It. Is. Spelled. Deity.

Okay, that was totally worth replaying in its unborked form for the ending alone.

Critiques: I am not sure what fighting six identical and quite boring battles adds to the game. I'd just have her chainsaw the zombies apart on the field map, not get the battle system involved at all. I think you could totally drop the Evil Dead connection, honestly, and therefore lose some of the exposition at the beginning. Post apocalyptic world, zombies run amok, chainsaw robots protect us, that's all you need. The ending was appropriately graphic and viscerally upsetting (good job!!!) but would have been even better with some wet, splattery noises underscoring that chainsaw sound. I was disappointed when the first two murders were executed with a fade to black, and happy to see the third and most upsetting actually shown and animated.

Overall, I loved the ending obviously; I'm a real sick fuck.

Very first thought: Jesus H. Christ I hate random encounters, especially with a rate this high. Zoe's healing does not seem worth using for its output. Weird that taunt only lasts one turn but I see how it's balanced. I've never had this thought before while playing any RPG, but I wish I had the option of a guard command.

Got my ass murdered by carnivorous plants the first go-round. Gonna take another shot ... and another try, too. : P

It's weird how the chest doesn't make a chest noise and also disappears. Took a look at my status screen. Holy small numbers Batman! Nice music.

Four game-overs in: having Zoe do anything but Taunt is a fucking death sentence, even once I had her hit level 4 and learn Haste and Fireball. I've been dragging Abe's corpse around since my first hellhound fight, where he got one-shotted, due to a lack of phoenix downs/phoenix down analogues. I would suggest that if there are no phoenix down analogues, that you just get game over if either party member dies. Because you're basically doomed.

This is #$%^&*@ hard but fuck it, I almost beat a Dark Souls once, I'll give it a few more tries.

...okay, a few more game overs in. Getting Abe into the cave alive is tricky. Chests reappear along with their contents a short while after they get opened, I presume this is a bug. But I totally took advantage of it to win the game.

Overall, Zoe is a megabeast (you all attack me and I reflect EVERYTHING is one hell of a one-move combo) and Abe is...kind of useless.

Interesting to climb up the level ladder in such a short time (was level 10 when I reached the dragon; those numbers didn't stay small too long). Finally found the Phoenix Down analogues, in the chest past the dragon. Doy. Pretty good use of warmups and cooldowns in combat, particularly warmups.

Okay, slew the Demon Dragon, beat the game. I feel like only during the final battle with the Demon Dragon (of course it's a Demon Dragon, of course it is) did I really feel like my party members feel like they were balanced (or, to be even more on the nose, in equilibrium), i.e. that Abe had something worthwhile to do with his turns and that Zoe could do something with some of her turns other than taunt. I assume the exploration of the theme of Equilibrium here is tied to the game's mechanics as there is not much of a story.

My initial approach was to run straight at the dragon three times, die three times, and declare the game impossible. The game really needs to communicate somehow that there are other things in the room to fight. Of course, Fomar did say it was in a terribly broken state. Thank goodness for mjshi's notes.

Where did these awesome animated battlers come from? They're grrrrreat!

I got done in by slimes a good half dozen times. Very frustrating.

Then I slew the dragon.

This soul-stealing metamorphosis meat shield thing is an AWESOME game mechanic. Someone should totally make a game using it. Obviously it could be expanded by giving the monsters you can harvest actual traits and skills (i.e. I expected maybe the Burny would go undamaged by the fire breath because it's made of fire, etc.). Other than that, it's not hard to beat at all, I love the look of the battle system and the monster collection aspect. Someone should make a story and maps to go along with it and you'd have one A+ game.

BTW, what engine was this even made in? Is this what RMMV games look like?

Oh man, I haven't played a 2k(3) game in a hundred forevers. Dat nostalgia, especially with some of the default musics. I'm expecting Don Miguel to jump out from behind a bush.

It's nice to see somebody bothered to put a real story in one of these motherfuckers, and the writing ain't bad. Gonna state the obvious complaint that the world seems to conceptually BE modern (machine gun fire, scientists) but looks like RTP medieval fantasy land. If there had been time to make this world look like how it's written, I would be all over this game like white on rice.

Alright, I'm ready, let's do this, let's KILL SOME FUCKING GODS.

Ugh, I had forgotten my primordial disgust at the look of 2k3 battlers.


Well uh...fuck you too!

Seriously, I am really digging how this game portrays a militantly atheistic regime with its writing.

No characters having ANY skills is making all these repeated combats really frickin' boring. It's a classic 2k3 era space-bar-mash-a-thon. (And as soon as I typed that I leveled up and learned my first skills. D'oh!)

I am pretty far up this mountain and I wish I had any practical way to spend the huge pile of um...T....I've accumulated without going all the way back to the worldmap (I appreciate the teleport Braziers but it's still a hike; also nice to see a game other than mine feature lighting things).

The skills...didn't turn out mattering all that much. I'm using autobattle on some of these fights. Less fights would be nice. This encounter rate is definitely verging on annoying.

The use of solid black AND a panorama backdrop in the gorge looks awkward and weird. One or the other I think.

I quit in frustration when two pieces of wood--one of them extracted from a very tough mother of an ent--was apparently not enough to build a bridge two tiles wide. I wanted to see how the story ended and how the God-slaying played out but the battles were just too frequent and too tedious for me to keep on keeping on.

I didn't really see any reflection of the assigned theme, Umbra, in my time with the game.

Oh man, RM2k!! What a fucking full-on nostalgia trip, mate!

As regards the OBVIOUS LIES with which the game opens, the proper term for a ninja waitress would be kunoichi, not shinobi /weaboooooooooo.

And after making a point of being a pedantic Japanophile, I see the word I was looking for, kunoichi, in the game's opening dialogues. Nice.

EDUCATIONAL ADVISEMENT: Everyone should play this game if they don't know why people are sometimes two snakes!!

Seriously, I found this pretty funny. Not like ROFLMAO, but I'm definitely sympatico with Healy's sense of humor. This was short, abundantly silly and fun. I got more lulz from my short time with Ninja Waitress than most full length comedy games I've tried, for what it's worth. This was a quick breath of fresh air after trying to force myself to finish Godslayers.

First thought: Piano, if you want to make an Evil Dead fangame, then just commit to it!

Marilyn's chainsaw should certainly not be unequippable ('Fix Equip' in VX Ace parlance).

Are those zombies all schoolchildren? That's a bit ... dark, all other things considered. Y'know, the nod nod wink wink Evil Dead references, the ridiculous dialect in the ranch house, and then... (un)dead children? There's a bit of tonal whiplash there.

The execution on the graphics for Marilyn's battler is nothing to write home about, but the effort is appreciated, as is the concept! Wouldn't mind seeing the credits for this one, as there are some resources I don't immediately recognize the source of.

The mapping is really pretty good!

After I disposed of all of the zombies I was heading back to 'report' when a zombie ran into me, battle animation #1 played, and the game froze. : (

Ouroboros is phenomenal, overlooked, underappreciated, and underrated. It is not, however, perfect, and little details like spelling errors detract from an otherwise stellar experience. In my opinion this deserves more downloads, more subscribers, and more reviews.

Ouroboros belongs to the subgenre of Space Horror, in the vein of "Event Horizon" and "Pandorum", a delightful collision of Silent Hill and "Alien".

Story
There is a lot of it. Ouroboros has a lot of story to tell and there is a lot of in-game documents to find and read. Here's the short version: it is the 2080s and the UNSC (United Nations Space Command, the name of which is a direct lift from the Halo franchise that the developer might want to change if this is still an active project, and dear lord I hope it is) is developing its first FTL (Faster Than Light) capable ship in the orbit of oh let's say Jupiter. As Julie Ryans (which is not a real surname, another thing that could be tweaked), you're a reporter and computer programmer with a pretty haunted past that's sent to infiltrate the Ouroboros (I'm talking about the ship now, not the game) and report back on what's going down there.

What's going down there turns out to be a carnival of horrors: the ship's reactor activates itself without warning, everyone rushes to cryo-sleep in a panic, including you, and then...you are thrust without warning into a hellish recreation of your past (think Silent Hill, without the subtlety and nuance) and then awaken in a present that is even more nightmarish.


Without your clothes.

Action
So I will admit I was reviewing this game in a hurry, because rum...that's a double entendre, referring both to the hard liquor up in my bloodstream and the distilled opinions review event. So I don't know precisely what the gameplay IS. I'm not expecting any turn based battles, but I'm not quite sure what to expect. I found the gameplay, what there was, somewhat obtuse and mystifying? At first, I saw there were numerous dialogue options when interacting with the crew, and I thought we might be looking at some Sentient style fun. But then the horror angle kicked in big time. There was hinting at the fact that this was an adventure/horror game, and that you'd be hiding in lockers and that kind of Clock Tower stuff. Also I collected some ammunition, leaving me hopeful maybe at some point I'd find a gun. I thought the concept of hacking computer consoles and rerouting power was really cool, and I was reminded of Alien: Isolation, but the computer hacking minigame I performed before the ship up and went to spookytown felt nonsensical and arbitrary: I succeeded at "deactivating the two correct nodes" but I have no idea how or why!

Sights
I thought the graphics in this demo were phenomenal. Certainly not flawless but phenomenal nonetheless. I recognized Pioneer Valley Games' Mythos graphics pack, heavily (and occasionally a bit awkwardly--it's a big leap to imagine the fashion of the future has circled back around to the 1920s) edited and repurposed, but I have no idea where the sci-fi graphics came from and must assume they're at least partly custom. The skill involved in editing PV Games style graphics, which I have to assume there was a lot of, impressed me. The menus were heavily customized, the game made use of elaborate visual effects in terms of lighting, character animation (including sprinting, diagonal, and idle animations), elevators, and more.

In general, the game was a visual feast. It recommends players play it in the dark, alone, with headphones, and that is just how I played it. Nothing I saw actually scared me, but as an avowed horror junkie, I am pretty difficult to scare. Especially and particularly considering it just so happens that I just got done making a shock/horror game with PV Games Mythos pack myself.

Sound Design
The sound design was, in my opinion, fucking excellent. All of the music chosen appropriately ratcheted up the tension, gradually but inexorably. The science fiction noises from the in-game terminals and UI/menus were appropriate, and little touches like the sound of rapid typing accompanying pseudo-code flashing past the screen during the hacking sequences were excellent. I'm always a fan of footstep sounds in these kind of games. But the sound of the protagonist's terrified hyperventilation in her cryo-pod combined with the screams from far worse happening to the poor bastards around her? Se magnifique.

Overall: Ouroboros was last updated in March of this year. I earnestly hope it's still an active project. There's something really special here, and it doesn't hurt that it falls into perhaps my favorite subgenre: horror in space.