Recent reviews by Noobcake

I looked all over the place.

Surprisingly good!

You're a vampire who was driven out of his castle. Now you have to run a weapon shop to settle your debts.

I enjoyed the game quite a lot. The characters and setting can be pretty funny (although this was clearly not an English-first development team so there's a few minor translation weirdness).

The gameplay itself is a pretty fun crafting progression system. You create equipment, gear out your staff, and level them up, and send them off on more challenging adventures. Rinse and repeat.

The one major downside is how grindy it feels. Some games are fun to grind. Take World of Warcraft for example. In that game, you're pretty much just grinding for levels and equipment most of the time. Maybe you'll read some quest text or chat it up with friends. But past the veneer of some minor storytelling and social elements, you're really just grinding for more numbers.

With this game, it's the same. Except you don't really have much agency. The adventures that your staff go on are on autopilot. You just click "Go" and watch them hopefully not die to an orc. And then you hope that they come across enough coal on their half-minute adventure that you can craft them a shiny new steel battle axe.

Once your hero has a new steel battle axe, he'll be able to kill those orcs easily. But now he'll need to go fight some wraiths to get to the next tier of gear. So here's to another round of waiting while you go look up what new quests are available or look through your recipe list to find something you missed that might make this round go a little bit faster.

There's two clear points at which the game explicitly tells you that "you can get off the ride now," so to speak. These points mark a new level of grind and a substantial reduction in content.

The first third of the game might be the most "contentful". There's the story of the vampire with a debt to pay. There's plenty of new quests, items, and enemies to keep you occupied. I don't remember ever "feeling stuck" at this section of the game without any feeling of progress. The next upgrade is always just a few minutes away. Then you'll kill that orc/ghost/demon/whatever.

The second third of the game has the same gameplay with less content. The enemies are exactly the same as last time, just with bigger numbers. The story quests are pretty much done, so there's only a tiny handful of cutscenes. The main difference is that at the end there's one new enemy that's significantly more powerful than all the others you've seen before. And you have to kill it. No amount of cleverness saves you from being one-hit-killed. So you need to grind enough to at least survive one attack. It takes a couple of hours of pretty mindless grinding to raise your HP up that high.

Once the Big Bad is defeated, that's the end of the story quests. Then the last third of the game opens up. This one is absolutely bonkers and is aptly named "Impossible mode". The Big Bad from last time? Well, even a slime on Impossible is comparable to that guy.

Oh, and you've already unlocked all the items and characters before you even beat the Big Bad. So if you felt like you were up against a wall then, Impossible is just a whole 'nother level.

Don't get me wrong. Finishing Impossible mode isn't merely grinding to max stats, picking the highest damage skills, and setting your staff loose. There's some strategy and smart skill selection involved. But all the strategy in the world won't help if slimes one-shot you. So you need to get grinding to raise your stats.

The one saving grace to all of this nonsense is that the developer added a secret "auto adventure" feature you can use after you defeat the Big Bad. Once you've defeated him, you enter the Konami code and let your staff grind for themselves while you browse the internet, periodically checking in to switch some skills and equipment around. It feels a lot like Cookie Clicker in the hours between defeating the Big Bad and making your first serious attempt at Impossible mode.

I personally had plenty of fun playing the game! But it might not be everyone's cup of tea.