Death end re;Quest
TLDR; Great JRPG / visual novel with a dark story and great foreshadowing if you pay attention. Would recommend if you enjoy a dark twist in stories.
STORY
The story follows Shina who awakes from a gruesome dream of her own death with no memory of where or who she is. As she starts to remember her past she forms a group of friends to battle against a growing corruption plaguing the world. Arata assists her in her journey but the more Arata learns about Shina’s situation the darker the world around them becomes.
– Real player with 71.3 hrs in game
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Death end re;Quest is a more serious and edgy JRPG from Idea Factory, with good graphics, challenging combat, and a dark story with many bad endings, exploring the old trope of a character stuck in a virtual world (TRON, Matrix, Sword Art Online, .hack etc). There are two protagonists, a girl stuck inside a VR MMO, and a guy in the real world trying to help her clear the game and get out. The girl’s sections play like your typical dungeon crawler with an all female party, while the guy’s sections are a pure visual novel with no gameplay elements. The game is much more text heavy than your usual JRPG, even compared to other Idea Factory games. It’s not uncommon to spend 40 minutes just reading, which can break the pace of dungeon crawling, as examining some random item in a corner can trigger a very long visual novel scene.
– Real player with 50.8 hrs in game
How We Die
This retro 2D action RPG is inspired by the 16-bit RPGs from the good old days. It’s both a story-driven narrative game as well as an action shooter.
Story
You play as John, a modern-day wage slave in a big company, working day after day in his small cubicle. John’s life is pretty boring. But one day Leto, a friendly spirit, invites him to leave his boring everyday life behind for a night and come with her to a better, more exciting world, where John can be a hero and a savior. Where he can make his dreams come true. Where he can be what he always wanted to be. Yet John must soon learn that happiness comes with a cost. And he must decide between his dreams and the life he has already built for himself. Especially since all of his choices have consequences.
Gameplay
How We Die is about the story. Great stories are what made the old 16-bit RPGs so awesome. With How We Die, the focus is on delivering a great narrative, but in a more modern engine, with real-time dynamic lighting, weather effects, a nice full audioscape, and a fantastic soundtrack to accompany your experience. A fast-paced combat system using everything from swords to modern assault rifles and grenades will challenge you in refreshing ways. And the choices you make during your adventure determine how it will end.
Key Features
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Handcrafted pixel art!
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Not made in any of those fancy build-your-own-RPG applications.
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Fast, action-packed combat
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Dynamic lighting and weather effects
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16 different weapons to fight with
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Amazing soundtrack with each track tailored to the game
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4+1 different endings
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It has puppies!
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Lumen
RPG Maker strikes again!
Lumen is one of hundreds of low effort retro-pixel JRPG ripoffs spamming the Steam catalog, made with the RPG Maker video game construction kit… in their own words, “Our easy to use tools are simple enough for a child.” Like all RPG Maker “games”, this is essentially a bunch of low quality/canned assets from RPG Maker coupled with a cringeworthy high school anime club weeaboo fan fiction. Basically, these guys didn’t make a game, they filled out a couple of templates in a construction kit then proudly called themselves “developers”.
– Real player with 0.1 hrs in game
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Undernauts: Labyrinth of Yomi
From the prolonged life and death struggle to survive in the hostile environs of a blockaded mining complex, cut off from any form of outside assistance; to performing - under duress - morally dubious acts to sate the whims of otherworldly beings to whom life and the living have no intrinsic worth; to the expectation from your corporate superiors that, even under threat of - and after experiencing - pain of death, you will continue to operate your day to day routine mining spirit electricity so that your company’s board members can post record profits and justify their seven figure bonuses and six month vacations in unnamed tax havens; Undernauts reveals itself to be a fantastical metaphor for the everyday situation for many of its players, that of the constant and unspeakable pressure of attempting to carve a living from the ossified, crumbling husk that is the modern day Gig Economy.
– Real player with 109.0 hrs in game
For context, I played it on PC for 77 hours including the post-game content which I presumed to be obligatory to complete. I highly recommend to use a gamepad or other controllers instead of K+M controls because support is bad in the ported version.
Now, to start with: Undernaut: Labyrinth of Yomi is a first person dungeon crawler at first, then a horror game second. To my surprise, the game remarkably managed to show the correct way to set an ominous tone and a gritty narrative of a sick and twisted world with the story pulling-no-punches when it’s required which I personally absolutely enjoyed. You, as the main protagonist will be subjected to numerous morally dubious acts to survive under the whims of otherworldly beings whether you want to or not. And adding that, the somber visual style captures perfectly the way the story should be told. And I simply adore the art directions and the representations of the characters in-game such as the Mad King and The Divine Child which I noticed to be quite different from the other characters' design of which heavily came from the Spirit Hunter series artist. Different from the other games, ULoY is a reverse-isekai game where the world takes place in Yomi Ward - Japan during the Showa period. It’s a very interesting take on the trope and one I thoroughly enjoyed.
– Real player with 79.7 hrs in game
Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass
SUPER SHORT VERSION: this is a turn-based RPG for lovers of the genre. It’s very well-crafted, there’s a lot of strategic depth, lots of hidden content to encourage exploration and puzzle-solving, and a beautiful aesthetic. But heed the content warnings: this is a dark game with mature themes, unsuitable for children or the faint of heart.
LONGER VERSION:
Put simply, it’s Earthbound but better in every way. I could compare it to Undertale, but Undertale is an RPG made for people who don’t enjoy traditional RPGs; Jimmy is made for the people who LOVE RPGs, such as myself.
– Real player with 302.3 hrs in game
Overall 7.5/10
Music: 8/10
Gameplay: 7/10
Art: 8/10
Story: 7/10
Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass is a very thoughtfully built passion-project game created by one guy over the course of four years. That being the case, this game is pretty incredible.
Music:
There is a huge quantity of music. Over 80+ tracks cross the span of the game, and each song is carefully crafted to match the theme of different areas you explore. I found myself playing a few of the tracks on loop around the house. Truly pleasant stuff. That being said, there are also tracks which aren’t so pleasant, and intentionally so. There are many points in the game which delve into darkness, and the tracks accompany these dark dives quite well. That said, most of these tracks are fairly short, running 1-2 minutes on average. In a few places, the music can be pretty repetitive, especially if you’re grinding. I would’ve appreciated a little more variety in fight music from battle to battle, but this is a minor complaint. Every major RPG has this issue.
– Real player with 145.2 hrs in game
Percy’s Last Stand
The Game, from what I’ve played of it, is pretty good, the combat is fair and the dialogue is great. Overall a pretty solid game.
7.5/10
– Real player with 0.8 hrs in game
This game is honestly the best thing i have ever been gifted. I can no recomend this game enough. It should be sold for at least $20.99.
– Real player with 0.2 hrs in game
Death end re;Quest 2
WARNING: Before buying the game have a look at the forum and check a thread about an early game-breaking bug. Many people still cannot play the game after starting the first dungeon. At the moment this review is published, the bug is still present, but the team practically solved the problem. My original review was negative due to the bug, but an additional branch of the game provided by the Idea Factory tech support allowed me to continue to play through the game without problems. This is an experimental branch but I think it is just a matter of days till the problem will be solved for everybody with an actual patch. According to other players, the game has other potential bugs, but on the branch I played everything worked quite fine. However, maybe if you have the possibility, a console version of the game is a safer bet right now. Anyway the following is the review of the actual game, without considering the bug.
– Real player with 50.1 hrs in game
Well…. this is kind of a letdown to be honest. The game is a shadow of its former self
Death End Re;Quest 2…..I was really amped when I heard that the Death End’s going to have sequel instead what I got was closer to an intermission rather an actual sequel, and not the good kind at that. The only good news is that this part is a set up for the next arc. So, we know there’s going to be a sequel unless the series got cancelled.
The Pros
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Exceptional CG
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Great soundtrack
– Real player with 48.5 hrs in game
Happy Bones
Happy Bones is like a beautiful fever dream that continued to surprise me and simultaneously disgust me all the way through.
You won’t forget this game for sure, I’ve never played anything quite like it!
– Real player with 19.3 hrs in game
the game was great and i loved the horror elements:)
– Real player with 6.4 hrs in game
Corpse Party: Book of Shadows
I’ve finally achieved 100% completion, so it’s time to give an honest no-spoiler review for Corpse Party: Book of Shadows.
This game was very different from its predecessor. Corpse Party: Book of Shadows plays like a visual novel with a point and click adventure style of game play. At first, it took some getting used to since the first game was an RPG Horror game, but thankfully it didn’t take too long. The more chapters I played and the more I explored within said chapters, the more I began to realize this game’s change in game play was likely done on purpose. After all, looking back on all of it, this style definitely better fit the narrative Makoto Kedouin (creator of Corpse Party) was trying to show this time around. Allow me to explain.
– Real player with 53.9 hrs in game
Okay so, a little backstory.
I’ve played Corpse Party as a general series since the Back to School edition came out a few years ago on the 3DS.
Read: Not that long.
However, I adore this series. I used the PSP version of this game, Book of Shadows, to help me practice my Japanese when I was in college. I know– weird flex, but okay. It was something I could get into, so I focused more on what I was reading. Perhaps because of that, BoS happens to be one of my favorite games in this series. I love the extra care taken with each level, the Darkening mechanic, and the backstory that kind of fills in some gaps from the original while also creating a new timeline of events that eventually proceed into the plot of Blood Drive, which comes after this one.
– Real player with 28.5 hrs in game
Advent Crossroad
I came across this game after searching for games like Etrian Odyssey & Shin Megami Tensei.
I’ll start with the positives :)
The good
The ‘vibe’ of the game is very similar to Devil Survivor, artwork is nice, story starts off nice and simple and gets more involving as you go through.
Battle system is similar enough to above mentioned games and also varied enough for you to get a kick out of organising your party with a selection of acquired skills (collected via getting hit by a monsters attack whilst you use a turn to absorb said monster skills).
– Real player with 18.2 hrs in game
A great dungeon crawling game! I had a lot of fun finishing it. The SMT inspirations did a great job here, btw! Can’t wait to see your next project and good luck!
– Real player with 15.4 hrs in game