Posted June 10, 2016
I'm on a quit streak of late - burning through my backlog the wrong way:
Cthulu Saves the World
Admittedly, I made the mistake of starting this very soon after Breath of Death (same developer, same game "engine"), which really hit the sweet spot at about 5 hours of playtime on a very simple, throwback, RPG formula: simple graphics, simple story, combat just complex enough to enjoy messing with in small doses.
Cthulu is in many ways the same exact game, just with a slightly different cast of characters, most notably the title hero. There is some humor to be had here, but it's very intermittent. The bulk of the game is trodding across various maps and fighting battles.
A lot of battles.
Against very similar monsters.
That said, the real problem with this game isn't the combat, which could be a little harder, certainly, but offers the opportunity to experiment with various skills and spells and combos, (though using more than the same few is rarely needed) it's the maps.
For one thing, there are more of them, which would be great if they were awesome. But they aren't. They're kind of a mess (I made a similar complaint in my review of BoD about the final dungeon - here that style extends to most of the maps in the game).
Less linear maps in the prior game sounds like a good thing, except they're primarily empty (aside from random combat) mazes which spiral and loop and dead-end with no real purpose or design except chewing up time. The game has no built-in mapping (that I saw), nor does it lend itself to easy hand-mapping. I ended up with several pages of brutally ugly hand-drawn maps just to avoid getting lost, and to try and find the few pieces of treasure hiding in each.
It wasn't particularly satisfying, and in a handful of cases the map had to be scrubbed because I'd drawn a curving hallway too long, or short, at which point nothing connected anymore.
The one very good thing this game added over the prior was the ability to at least teleport back out of any dungeon to the town of your choosing to avoid wasted time crawling back through 3-4 dungeon levels to the wilderness.
Don't get me wrong, I actually did enjoy this game for the first 4-5 hours (on top of the 5 hours BoD took to complete), but they stretched this game out to 10-12 hours (I'm about 8 in at the moment - projecting based on the number of dungeons left), and the dungeon-crawling has long since turned to drudgery, and the combat/loot/story/humor is just not nearly rewarding enough to overcome that.
It's not hard, per se - the only thing stopping me from finishing is a lack of will to spend 2-3 more hours on it just to say I completed it. Though I'll probably leave it installed and finish it off in a month or two.
Still, if you can pick this up for under $1 on sale, maybe skip BoD (they come bundled) and just play this one straight through. But only if you don't mind hand-drawing non-tile maps, and can get some enjoyment out of a fairly simple game. It's enough to get a few hours of simple fun out of, it just overstays its welcome a bit.
Cthulu Saves the World
Admittedly, I made the mistake of starting this very soon after Breath of Death (same developer, same game "engine"), which really hit the sweet spot at about 5 hours of playtime on a very simple, throwback, RPG formula: simple graphics, simple story, combat just complex enough to enjoy messing with in small doses.
Cthulu is in many ways the same exact game, just with a slightly different cast of characters, most notably the title hero. There is some humor to be had here, but it's very intermittent. The bulk of the game is trodding across various maps and fighting battles.
A lot of battles.
Against very similar monsters.
That said, the real problem with this game isn't the combat, which could be a little harder, certainly, but offers the opportunity to experiment with various skills and spells and combos, (though using more than the same few is rarely needed) it's the maps.
For one thing, there are more of them, which would be great if they were awesome. But they aren't. They're kind of a mess (I made a similar complaint in my review of BoD about the final dungeon - here that style extends to most of the maps in the game).
Less linear maps in the prior game sounds like a good thing, except they're primarily empty (aside from random combat) mazes which spiral and loop and dead-end with no real purpose or design except chewing up time. The game has no built-in mapping (that I saw), nor does it lend itself to easy hand-mapping. I ended up with several pages of brutally ugly hand-drawn maps just to avoid getting lost, and to try and find the few pieces of treasure hiding in each.
It wasn't particularly satisfying, and in a handful of cases the map had to be scrubbed because I'd drawn a curving hallway too long, or short, at which point nothing connected anymore.
The one very good thing this game added over the prior was the ability to at least teleport back out of any dungeon to the town of your choosing to avoid wasted time crawling back through 3-4 dungeon levels to the wilderness.
Don't get me wrong, I actually did enjoy this game for the first 4-5 hours (on top of the 5 hours BoD took to complete), but they stretched this game out to 10-12 hours (I'm about 8 in at the moment - projecting based on the number of dungeons left), and the dungeon-crawling has long since turned to drudgery, and the combat/loot/story/humor is just not nearly rewarding enough to overcome that.
It's not hard, per se - the only thing stopping me from finishing is a lack of will to spend 2-3 more hours on it just to say I completed it. Though I'll probably leave it installed and finish it off in a month or two.
Still, if you can pick this up for under $1 on sale, maybe skip BoD (they come bundled) and just play this one straight through. But only if you don't mind hand-drawing non-tile maps, and can get some enjoyment out of a fairly simple game. It's enough to get a few hours of simple fun out of, it just overstays its welcome a bit.
