At its core, this is a sprite-based RPG/Platformer in the vein of metroidvania. You kill enemies for XP, upgrade your stats, and gather abilities to both make your life easier and bypass obstacles.
I'll start with the biggest problem.
CONTROLS: The controls in this game are terrible.
They can be rebound, which is nice, but there's no keybind for cycling through spells.
They're stiff and unresponsive with lots of frames that just outright drop input. The worst of the dropping comes from hit-recovery, where input is ignored until after you've landed.
The jump mechanics are awkward. It's easy to over- or under- shoot, and the more complicated jump mechanics are inconsistent.
This leads into the next problem...
GAMEPLAY: ...which is level design intended for fluid and precise movement. There are lots of moving platforms, timing puzzles, tight jumps between spikes, and things of that sort. The layouts look like they would be fun, but the poor controls turn them into a frustrating mess.
The RPG elements are straightforward with no strange mechanics to delve into, so there's just the stats and what they do to cover.
Every level your stats improve on your own, and you get five points to distribute as you like. The stat points are undocumented. This is both annoying and entirely normal, but unfortunately the stats aren't entirely clear-cut, so I'll cover what each one does.
The first two are easy:
Con: This one is straightforward. Con increases your HP.
Int: This one boosts magic damage, and I think it boosts mana recovery speed as well. Mana recharges pretty quick anyway, so it's not easy to tell.
Unfortunately, the others aren't so clear
Luk: As always, luck is a nebulous stat with no clear function.
Dex: This one takes some figuring out. At first I expected it would boost melee damage, but after sinking 50 points into it my punches weren't all that much more powerful than they started. What was confusing was how my magic kept pace with it. As best as I can figure melee damage increases with your level. I'm still unsure what this actually does.
Of course, punching seems to exist only so you're not completely helpless until you get magic. Magic can hit faster, and doesn't put you in range of enemy's wailing and gnashing teeth.
Sadly, even the magic suffers from the dodgy controls, mostly due to the fact your movement affects projectile trajectory. Worse still, since the angle of deflection changes on a frame-by-frame basis you can't really use the deflection for anything.
On the plus side you can choose to aim 45 degrees off from horizontal, which is great for shooting up and down slopes.
Platforms are weird. You can jump up through them but not back down. Intentionally, at least, as getting get knocked down results in you falling right through them. This is sometimes exploitable, but more often it just compounds the game's control problems. There are several sections where you have to climb shafts of alternating platforms while dodging projectiles. If you get knocked down you'll fall all the way to the bottom and have to start over. Of course, the hit recovery is such that even if you don't get knocked down you'll often slide off a ledge and still wind up falling all the way to the ground stunned anyway.
Pickups and defeated enemies usually, but not always, fall through platforms. While mana pickups aren't important health certainly is, and having to backtrack to retrieve those precious red orbs is sometimes risky and always annoying - assuming they didn't fall into spikes anyway.
Some platforms are solid when approached from the side, which is just perplexing and makes a few of the jumping puzzles more frustrating than ostensibly intended.
If you can work past the problems, then gameplay is solid.
The sprites are drawn and animated well, but the world art can be a bit bland and some of the placement is sloppy.
SOUND: As far as sound goes, it's not bad. The sound effects are solid, but the music is a little chaotic.
Sadly, the voice acting is poor and sometimes unintelligible. Subtitles would help, but there's no such option.
SPECIAL FEATURES: Speaking of features, it has a Gallery for viewing unlocked CG and a Museum so you can interact with every enemy in the game. Spoilers aren't prevented by changing the Museum, but by loading your save game and throwing simple barriers in your way.
Notably absent is a content lock, so the NSFW content can't be disabled.
STORY: The plot is generic and tissue thin; schoolgirl falls down a hole on the way to school, schoolgirl finds lovecraftian cult, schoolgirl fights for justice and survival. The most I can say about the story is that it exists, and exists only to give the game some basic context. Don't expect any surprises.
NOTES: I played the demo, which I am fairly sure is representative of the full game owing to the fact that the demo is, in fact, the full game with everything after the first boss locked until you stick a license file in the game's folder.
TL;DR: I can say it's not a bad game, but it's sorely lacking polish. The biggest sticking point is the poor control. None of the problems are actually core parts of the game, and all of them could be fixed in patches, but I have to judge based on what is instead of what could be.
Grade: D
Site: Links to adult content are not permitted, so you'll have to google it. Sorry.
Current Price: $6.50
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