The Count Lucanor

Aside from a few bugs here and there (invisible walls, etc) and some qualms I have with the controls, the game is solid. I bought it as soon as I saw the screenshots. Very nice art style and the cut-scene animations are great! I thought I was getting somekind of low-key zelda clone but instead I was pleasantly surprised. With similarities in style and gameplay to Corpse Party, the game delivers with it's own unique atmosphere. I love it all! From the sound design to the different characters, the game managed to keep me in a trance :D

Fun fact: I learned about this game because Toby Fox recommended it on his twitter some years ago. Now that I finally played it, I was not disappointed. Fun fact 2: I was especially surprised to see the game seems to draw inspiration from German folklore in particular. "Hänschen klein ging allein in die weite Welt hinein", anyone? ;D Ähem, on to the review. Count Lucanor is a horror game in the vein of Mad Father or Mogeko Castle. If you enjoy titles like that, you won't be disappointed. The atmosphere is more creepily macabre rather than outright adrenaline pumping jump scares. There are light puzzles to be solved and some minor hide & seek from monsters to be done. Several endings available for a bit of replayability. One small warning for anyone going blindly into this: there is only a limited amount of save tokens available, similar to the ink ribbons in Resident Evil. The difficulty is not particularly high however, you should be able to find more than enough tokens to see the end. Even if you run out, the game's only about 2-3 hours long. So if you screw up royally and waste your tokens you could just restart from scratch. In fact if you play your cards right & outsmart some NPCs you can basically skip half the game and go right to the ending, I love it when games let me do that.

Unfortunately design choices frustrated me at the start, which left me not able to enjoy the rather slow wandering around gameplay. I had installed it and took my time exploring and enjoying the ambiance, then I had to leave to do something else. I couldn't find a save option (always a bad sign), so had to just quit and hope it had saved it as I entered the screen. Nope. When I came back to the game it sent me way back to a previous autosave. I find it so annoying when you can't just save a game if you have to leave a session for any reason. Autosave-only systems always lose progress.

Giving it 4 stars because there's no replayability value. Puzzles don't change and storyline changes only slightly due to yours choices, imo not worth the time needed to replay. It's a nice short game with a certain gothic atmosphere. It could be so much more, but at least it's ok with what it is.