ostpreussen: I'll play the demo at some point before I comment or review it too much, but in the vein of other comments so far... Ehm, it's giving me a kind of unpleasant
Limbo of the Lost vibe. I mean, since I can't do art, I work in text adventures; there's always a way around one's weaknesses.
I don't know, it just doesn't sit quite right with me.
You said the same thing I was trying to say much clearer.
I've seen comments on this game elsewhere saying "if you expect modern graphics, look elsewhere" as though the complaint is that it doesn't have enough HDR and bump mapping. Honestly, I would have rather seen this look like Wizardry than it does now. Hell, Dark Spire on the DS has a wireframe mode and that's how I played the entire game, mostly because I found the "main" graphics too distracting. At least imitating Wizardry would be a coherent style and have some "retro cred" for those who care about that sort of thing, and as a bonus it would keep every screenshot from looking like a little kid's Photoshop mockup.
For what it's worth, I downloaded the demo. I have to admit, I'm curious to see if the laziness extends beyond the surface. I'll report back later with my opinions on it.
Edit: well, I gave it a shot.
The mouse stutters and lags, and sometimes doesn't notice clicks (except for times when it inexplicably changes back to the Windows mouse, like when you want to confirm a created character). Little white spots are everywhere in the graphics, presumably left over from attempting to erase the background of an image and not bothering to finish the job. He forgot to draw grass for the square you're standing on, so it's just a green block, and none of the graphics scale up properly so everything is a mess of pixels and weird proportions (a proper scaling routine would have easily solved this). Everything seems to take too long to execute, most of the time because it's pulling up a generic sound effect. Battles are a pain in the ass, mostly because the main battle screen gives you precious little usable info while still having a ton of empty space. Life bars are used in lieu of numbers, which can only be viewed on a separate screen, and god help you if you need to cast a bunch of spells because you are given no information on resources for that.
There's also no animation (obviously, since it's just a bunch of random images from various sources), and things are frequently either out of aspect ratio or improperly placed on the screen. The white border surrounding text boxes doesn't connect properly all the way around (nitpicking? of course, but it's symptomatic of how little the developer cares because this is literally a twenty second fix and yet it's left as it is anyway). The sound has not been properly balanced. The engine seems to have trouble using apostrophes in text, leading to things like "Brad s turn." The text box is massive with a very tiny font, yet we still get sections where we have to advance the text a sentence at a time, to no great effect. The writing itself isn't particularly impressive... I can't comment on the quality of the overall scenario of course, but descriptions and dialog are bland.
The actual underlying mechanics seem solid enough, if completely unimaginative. I didn't see anything offensive here, but I also didn't see anything particularly inspiring. I can't comment on the quality of the world design except to say that the demo didn't show off much of interest and has no character.
There may be some workable mechanics somewhere here (maybe later levels start to show something interesting), but this is not a $20 game, it's a proof of concept that could, eventually, result in an actual product with a lot of work. As it exists right now, it does exactly nothing better than the classics that inspired it, and does most things significantly worse.
To make an analogy, these kind of indie RPGs are like low budget films. I'm forgiving of a lot, and understand that the best actors aren't going to be available and that the best equipment won't always be on hand, but I still expect the camera operator to keep the damn thing in focus. If you can't even be bothered to do
that then you're not "indie," you're just lazy or out of your depth.
