Recent reviews by hafl

This is a nice little diversion. The final battle is suprising and really elevates it.

This is a pure cargo cult video game in the most literal sense. It is a crude facsimile of a real video game that from long distance appears to be the real thing, but the moment you look at it, you find out that it's at best painted cardboard.

The dummy game at first appears to have mechanics. This is a lie. The numbers mean absolutely nothing, the effect of everything is random, not even the purely arbitrary experience numbers add up correctly.

This phony game also tries to have quests with choice and consequence. As the game description puts it "There are some antogonism rewards you will get by choosing a particular decision that favour one spiritual path. Choose to fight slavers, and a Paladin companion might join you, choose to help the slavers and you may get gold and a dark paladin in your party. Those are your choices, and it is up to you to shape the destiny of you character as well as Ethernalia course of events." This is in fact true, except this particular choice comes at a point in the game where the creator gave up trying to make something at least passably similar to a game and the player no longer has any real input.

The farce of choice and consequence is brought to a finish when the game stops referring to your character by the name you picked and just addresses you as Balder, the name of the protagonist of the self-published novel this game was based on. The ordinary post-Baldur's Gate roleplaying games usually give the protagonist some sort of title that can be used in voice acted sequences in place of a name. This game does the same in spite of not having any real voice acting. However, as it is a cargo cult game, it just crudely replicates the outward appearance without any understanding of the underlying purpose.

By the end of the game, the pretense drops off and things just stop working. Whole areas are devoid of anything interactable and blatant placeholders are everywhere.

A casual look at the game might make one think it's a blatant scam. I, however, think that the creator is just too dumb to know what a video game is and is trying to make one based on seeing screenshots.

This game might be the purest work of love that I have ever seen and I'm not saying it just because I'm hopelessly in love with the creator. It's hard to describe just how pure the game is: a pure expression of love for anime girls with kemonomimi and cute outfits made by a 17+XX months year old (because all girls are under 18 years old).

Now that the game is finally finished, I can replay it in its entirety rather than in installment and I'm looking forward to it immensely. Even when replaying the first stage, I constantly had a smile on my face.

Not only that, this game is the first game where I cried while watching the final credits. Partly because I was sad it was over, partly because I was filled with absolute joy.

There's still a ton of lore I need to unlock, so I have an excuse to play it again soon and I'm looking forward to it because everything about the game is either cool, cute, or beautiful.

If there is a single thing I don't like about the game, it's that in the latest release, the creator's comments were significantly toned down in their enthusiasm and exuberance. I sincerely hope that's not a sign of the creator being disappointed by how the game turned out, because I adore every single bit of it.

At this point, I'm running out of words to describe how much I love this game, so all that's left to say is that I want to marry the author. If that's not possible, I just want her to continue making games like this forever.

This game is quite bizarre and the mechanics must be seen to be believed. Get it on sale for the experience, not for the gameplay which is really bad.

It's a dungeon crawler that really tries to be like a Might and Magic game, mostly Isles of Terra and the Xeen games, except it manages it only in the most superficial ways. The screen layout is similar. Areas have descriptions, but unlike Might and Magic where you got a bunch of mostly useless, but cool lore, these are usually just a line or two of description that doesn't add anything. The world is large, but there's nothing to find. There's fountains, but they all do the same stuff. There is food you use for resting, but you have a free warp over the overland area, so you can restock at any moment for negligible cost. You fight at most three enemies in a group at a time, but there is absolutely nothing interesting about them. You get titles from completing quests.

The start of the game is sort of promising, since you start right next to an area that has enemies too strong for you, but it's almost immediately downhill. The cities are just a screen with buttons for shops and a few people you can talk with that don't say anything interesting. You still have to talk with them because there's 2 or 3 people in towns that are sort of important. All the dungeons are amazingly empty and uninteresting. Might and Magic's dungeons might have been designed to annoy and infuriate, but these are just tedious. The are no unique features. All loot comes from chests no matter where you are. There's books you can read for +50 xp which is negligible even when you get to the first dungeon that has them. There's crystal holders that give you secondary currency (just like gems in Might and Magic except lame). There's switches and a few traps and that's all. The engine appears incapable of zero thickness walls, so the dungeons are stretched out and it makes them appear even more empty and boring. The enemies are all uninteresting. You're just mashing buttons and sometimes heal. They have literally no intelligence and move completely randomly. It's completely possible to walk past a boss and loot their treasure without them ever stumbling into the party and attacking. The writing tries to be funny, but it's too lazy and uninspired to be anything but embarrassing.

There's a few glimmers of good ideas, but they're not used well enough. Some of the titles you earn from quests give actual bonuses which is nice. Just nice because the bonuses are too small to matter except in one case. The Arcane system that makes spells scale off a special derived stat is nice to allow spells to grow in power and keep up with melee when it comes to damage dealing and it also helps make full caster classes better than hybrids. However, the spells are either healing or damage with party-wide buffs (of which exactly two are worth their mp cost). The basic idea is good, it's just that nothing is done with it. The equipment system is potentially nice with encumbrance being the main factor of who can equip what, but there's so little variety in equipment you never really get to think about what to use. The staff a wizard starts with that gives 30% bonus to Arcane is literally the best weapon for them in the entire game.

And to add to it all, the game might be the ugliest looking game I have ever played.

You're much better off playing Swords of Xeen instead. It's similarly empty, but it still has loads more things to do, better selection of spells, more interesting quests and much better graphics. Yes, this game is so bad that Swords of Xeen is superior to it in everything.

Grimoire has excellent early game, intriguing but overly long midgame, and infuriating late game and at this point, I'm not sure if patching the game will make it better or worse, since the design goals of the game seem to be a misguided idea of hardcore where you need to play optimally and where playing optimally means savescumming every level up for maximum hit point and attribute gains. Many of the most infuriating game features seem to be features and not bugs: in late game, every combat turns into a speed contest over who can completely neutralize the other in the first round.

That said, the early game is excellent, quest and puzzles are interesting, areas are well-designed, and there is some actual character progression. However, by the time you hit midgame level progression slows down to a crawl and while some dungeons are still involved and interesting, there's a lot of empty transit space without much going on. The main issue is that the game solves balancing difficulty in an open world game by just making all areas roughly equally difficult, giving xp only in a trickle and making xp requirements for levelling up ridiculous. It sort of works, but it also makes midgame seem like it's going on forever. By the endgame, actually gaining a level is more dream than reality unless you're willing to spend hours grinding the one enemy that actually gives semi-worthwhile xp (about 4k a piece when a bard needs roughly 1.1 million xp to get from level 9 to 10.) Endgame just increases enemy difficulty without actually giving you new tools to deal with them (except for immeditaly casting time stop) or giving you a chance to adapt in other ways.

There's still some unadressed bugs at the moment. The most annoying one is armor class overflowing into negative numbers if it gets too high, making a lot of endgame armor mostly useless. This bug might actually be a feature, though. The most serious one is that the Recharge spell literally does nothing. This prevents you from recharging items that let you walk over lava fields and there's two large lava fields you have to cross to win the game. I assume that the spell doing nothing is a bug and crossing the lava fields with a cleric that self-heals on every step while everyone else dies and has to suffer resurrection penalty is not the intended solution. Then there's minor bugs like incorrect decimal points in item weights causing some items to be heavier than even the strongest character can equip and some weapons, mostly axes, being completely unusable in combat. These bugs will probably get fixed at some point. Except for the armor class overflow. That's the sort of thing a misguided insane person would think is hardcore.

The writing and general attention to worldbuilding detail is strangely the game's strongest point. It does not try for insanely overwritten purple prose like Wizardry 6+7 and instead goes for a generally more light-hearted and silly tone that works for the most part. It helps that 99% of the incidental text when checking piles of wood, beds or spider eggs is unique and does not repeat itself. When the game does try for more serious tone, it usually fails miserably, but it happens so rarely it's not really a concern. All the little tidbits help make the dungeons more distinct and make it worthwhile to actually check random pieces of furniture. In general, Grimoire's strengths are the small things like the Shrill Sound spell blinding bats and not the larger picture. The larger picture is that the plot of the game is a complete nonsense and the game's mechanics ultimately fall apart because of the decision to slow down level progression to a crawl.

Overall, Grimoire is not as good as Wizardry 7, the game it's ostensibly trying to emulate and surpass, on any level except for writing and some quality of life stuff. It is still good in spite of the late game and at this point, further patches are just as likely to make it into an excellent game as they're likely to completely break it into a tedious slog. So at this point, I think Grimoire deserves a qualified and cautious recommendation. 7.5/10.

In short: This game is bad.

If I had to describe why it's bad in one sentence, I'd say: "It has cooldown based real-time with pause combat, boring random loot and atrocious level design."

The combat is unberably tedious. The farther in the game I got, the more I lowered the difficulty level, just so I'd have to engage with it less. Sadly, even at the lowest difficulty, the enemies are tedious sacks of hitpoints that take forever to kill. At least lower difficulties lessen the amount of endless waiting between combat. You need your HP and MP to regenerate (this takes forever). If you use food items to heal, they debuff you and you have to wait for the debuff to wear off. Even if you are healthy at the end of a fight, you still have to wait for your buff skills to cooldown and some of them take three minutes. It's tedious even on lower difficulties where you can often skip it, but on higher ones, you actually have to do it if you want to do well. Enemy variety is pathetic, but hidden behind decent graphical variety. You have melee guys, melee guys with gimmick, ranged guys, and mage guys. The only variety is that few (3?) enemy types can fly and that few enemy (2?) types are immobile. That's not counting the elite variants which are the same with more DPS and HP. Terrain plays almost no importance in combat. You close in and fight until one side is dead or you have to run away. Sometimes, you first go hide behind a corner to be covered from ranged attacks. Once or twice, there's ranged enemies you can't hit and have to run past. The flying enemies are obliging enough to move to your level almost immediately. The only semi-interesting boss fight in the game is the final boss. All other bosses are built around having a move you can't interrupt and a move you can, plus a variety of filler attacks.

The level design is strongest in the first seven levels where there's actually some little sense of progression. After that, the levels degenerate into random mishmash. For example, level 15 Golem Crypt, level 16 Dragon Lair, level 17 Goblin Tower. You start fighting demons on level 19 and in any other game it would be a sign that the game is near the end. Here, there's still obliging storerooms of food in demon lairs and the enemies in the next level could be ratlings again for all I know. Achievements are the only reliable measure of progess you have. The puzzles you have to solve to progress in the game are uninspired, consisting mostly of finding buttons while being hindered by no proper light. I suppose the lack of light is supposed to be atmospheric, but it's irritating instead. The optional puzzles are tedious and just as uninspired, going for size instead of cleverness, and unless I could solve them in under a minute, I stopped doing them around level 10, since the reward for them would be a crap item that most likely isn't an upgrade except this time the name is purple or orange. The biggest offender in level design is probably level 18 which has a "find a switch on badly lit wall to progress" puzzle, then it repeats the same puzzle about four times. The level design is also stretched extremely thin. The author had enough ideas for maybe 10 levels, but the game has 20. To say it overstays its welcome is an understatement.

The game is the crappiest dungeon crawler I bothered finishing. It has a bunch vestigial mechanics that have little effect, but they were in Dungeon Master and Grimrock, so they have to be included. Let's compare.

Food and Water:
Dungeon Master: Takes a lot of weight and inventory space. Water is sometimes scarce and you might have to use potion bottles to get extra supply.
Chaos Strikes Back: Same effects on weight and inventory space, but food is scarce until you kill a few dragons and with the way the dungeon is constructed, you might run out of water with no convenient way of getting back to a fountain.
Eye of the Beholder: If you have a Cleric, it's a non-issue. If you don't, you'll starve. No water.
Lands of Lore: No food or water.
Stonekeep: No food or water.
Grimrock: Food takes inventory space and weight. Same as in Dungeon Master, but weight is handled differently so it's less important. No water.
Dungeon Guardians: Food and drink is an out of combat healing item. It debuffs you and makes you wait.

Item weight:
Dungeon Master: Heavy armor and best weapons are very heavy, so your frontliners can't actually carry much. Inventory space is limited and the only way to get more are extremely heavy chests. Too much weight slows you down, which is a severe handicap in combat. Chaos Strikes Back is the same, but you have less equipment and food to carry, so it's less of an issue.
Eye of the Beholder: Inventory space is the only limit.
Lands of Lore: Inventory space is the only limit, but inventory's shared.
Stonekeep: No inventory limit, shared inventory.
Grimrock: Weight is rarely an issue if you play with full party. Inventory space is limited, but lightweight expansions to it like sacks are plentiful. Too much weight makes you move slower, which is a severe handicap in combat.
Dungeon Guardians: Weight is rarely an issue unless you hoard equipment. Too much weight makes you move slower, but mobility isn't important in combat except for a few boss fights. There may be a limit to inventory, but I never reached it.

Both these mechanics are used in a way that's less meaningful than in Dungeon Master and Grimrock while also being significantly more boring and irritating than in lightweight dungeon crawlers like Eye of the Beholder. I found the Firestaff reference behind a puzzle that was almost identical to a Dungeon Master puzzle. The author is most likely familiar with that game, but on almost every level, this game is inferior to it. And Dungeon Master is a game that was over quarter of a century old when this came out and there's only one improvement Dungeon Guardians have over Dungeon Master that's not graphics or sound. What it takes from its predecessors is executed poorly and where it tried to be its own thing, it ends up being MMO with loot garbage.

There were some things I liked about the game, but they were very few. The party banter is a nice addition, even if it's a bit bland and consists mostly of "this boss is x and does y". Tapping on walls to reveal illusory ones was in Dungeon Master and it's nice to see it back, since I can't remember it being featured in any other dungeon crawler. The final boss fight had a neat gimmick. Having to find a map to allow automapping and having to find another map to reveal the complete map was a nice idea and as far as I can tell, original to this. The graphical variety is good, even if it mostly serves to conceals the lack of mechanical variety among enemies. That's about all I can find good about this game and it is extremely little. I definitely wouldn't have finished it, if I had internet access while playing it and could play anything else.

Someone thought I was bluffing when I said I wanted to played this game and bought this for me to troll me. Unfortunately, I thoroughly enjoyed playing the Kokoro Wish of 2010s.

This game is absolute garbage, even by the appalingly low standards of neptunia games.

Great game if you're depressed and want to die all the time.