During a drunken night out Riley and Elaine disturb an ancient magical artifact, and find themselves trapped in another world. Now they must contend with a myriad of fantastical trials and tribulations before they can return home, ideally with their humanity intact.
This is the third game of my RPG maker trilogy, and is considerably bigger than the last two. There are several transformations which can be acquired, none of which involve bad ends and all of which are visually represented and narratively important.
The game is divided into four areas each with a different gameplay focus. The forest focuses on combat, the town focuses on dialogue, the ruins focus on puzzles and the desert focuses on exploration.
Since my disdain for basic RPG maker combat is alive and well, this game uses an action combat system instead. Press 'C' for light attacks and 'Shift' for heavy attacks while in combat areas.
Screenshots can be found on the itch.io page.
1.0.3: Minor bug fixes.
1.0.2: Fixed bugs, added an item to teleport the player home, made the one demon name hint appear more than once.
1.0.1: Fixed several bugs, made the hint for the prison puzzle a bit more generous, made it slightly easier to progress the beads investigation after the search.
I play all my games in my living room on my TV with a joystick mapped with Xpadder.
But with this game it double inputs many keys on my stick which makes it almost unplayable.
I don't have this issue when using my keyboard, but due to a wrist injury I can't play well with my keyboard.
One might assume that the issue lies somewhere with me and my joystick setup, but I have downloaded every single RPG maker game on this site with 50+ likes, and many below that, across all RPG maker versions (XP, VX, Ace, MV, MZ) and other games not on this site, and this is the only one where I have ever encountered an issue.
Don't take this as reason not to download this game, you most likely wont have any issues, just sharing my experience.
I was pleasantly surprised by how good this game turned out to be! There's some really solid puzzles, fun characters, a very simple but effective story, and a respectable handful of TFs. Like the other games this dev has made, there's a level of polish to the game you don't necessarily find elsewhere. There's really only two negative things I can say about the game: 1, if you really, really, REALLY don't like puzzles, you're not going to enjoy what is arguably the best made section of the game, and 2, the TFs (with one exception) should have been expanded on. Not to say they're bad, they aren't, but there was a good bit of lost potential that could have been realized. I do look forward for more stuff from this dev, because if anything, this has shown they have some serious potential for fantastic games.
Regardless, pretty good game! Would recommend you at least try it out.
This game is wonderful, and I highly recommend that you play it.
The production quality is high enough to be a commercial product, and a pretty good one at that, and you can really tell a lot of care and attention was put into this game.
While the story is simple, the dialogue is very charming, and often witty. The riddles and puzzles in this game are very well constructed, and difficult in an intelligent way. These riddles were made with the gameplay experience in mind, so you won't have to save scum or worry about accidentally creating impossible situations. Along those lines, there is no dead end in this game. You can keep playing comfortably from beginning to end, no matter what happens, so you never have lengthy or obnoxious end game screens to navigate through.
As for the actual TF content, like Charlsebob's other games, the TF's are well integrated into the story and acknowledged by the world you're interacting with. There's a number of small things that give the TF a sense of depth. Too many games these days have paper thin purely aesthetic TF's, but the transformations in this game actually have consequences.
Charlsebob dislikes the default RPG maker combat mechanics (bless you) So the combat zones are always a fun mix of real time mechanics, and stealth/ exploration gameplay.
All in all this was incredibly charming, incredibly enjoyable, and worth every moment. The worst part about this game is that it ends.
First impressions after tackling some of one of the game's regions, I can only say this is a VERY well developed game, that genuinely impresses with its polish. Conversations flow well, and premise is, unlike a lot of other games, not a very common trope. Completely original is unlikely, but still uncommon enough that I can't actually remember any other game with a similar premise off the top of my head, and that's honestly still pretty impressive on its own
Puzzles are, much like Charlesbob's other games, actually decent brain-teasers, while combat is.... at least not what you'd entirely expect from a rpgm game. Both challenging, but not as hard as to be downright frustrating.
On the note of other games, have you tried them? No? Definitely games worth a try, so highly recommend trying out those as well. If yes, then you might have an inkling of what to expect regarding to the puzzles and quality.
Highly recommended game, unless you for some reason have a vendetta against the rpgm engine or puzzles in general. Fact it's actually marked complete just strengthens the recommendation.
