Zelle is a occult adventure game. You can explore the inside and outside of the castle using adventure game mechanics and battle demons with strategic mouse clicks. Your goal in this game is to bring the protagonist home.
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this game is split in two. the first half is a very creepy and quirky first-person horror game, and the second half—i don't even know what it is.
JESUS SAVES.
Sometimes a work comes along that feels like it was made for you. I’d like someone to break into the dev's office to confirm whether or not they’ve got satellite images of my house. I’m not certain what I was prepared for, going into this — all I really had to go off of was the ridiculously good box art — but the initial point-and-click exploration blobber gameplay hooked me. It’s a unique method of exploring this castle; most point-and-click games would take you directly to the next screen, while a game that gave you direct movement controls would be even more granular. This is more in the vein of something like Shin Megami Tensei, and it’s a really neat way to handle walking through these dark corridors. While this isn’t an especially frightening title, this is still a good method for building some tension while you explore.
Of course, this only lasts for about as long as it takes you to enter your first combat encounter. You meet a goddess who gives you a rosary to protect yourself, and you’re immediately pitted again a demon with the sole instruction to click the bead color that matches its eyes. A cross engraved with JESUS SAVES slams into its face, the demon’s head cracks open with a little hand-drawn animation, and you get a triumphant jingle on the following results screen which gives you an exorcism ranking. It’s a dramatic tonal shift, and it fucking rules. It marked the exact moment that I knew I was going to fall in love with this game.
I’m a sucker for the mixed-media approach that’s already here — a lot of the enemies look like drawings clipped out of demonology books, contrasting the overworld sprites and the dithered castle graphics — and the back-and-forth swinging between goofy minigames and tense exploration works in a way that seldom does anywhere else. There’s even a massive genre shift near the halfway point, where the game turns into a top-down RPG Maker game where you walk around solving puzzles and exploring dream-like areas beyond the castle walls. There’s so much going on here, and it would be so easy for all of this to feel sloppy and unfocused, and it doesn’t. I don’t know how Odencat and Fuming managed.
I’m just stunned at how perfectly this aligns with my tastes. It desperately needs to be experienced, because discussion without that baseline of having played it is near-meaningless. This is a dense work with a lot of little branches, and there’s going to be a lot that I missed on my playthrough that someone else picked up on right away. I'm surprised at how little I'm managing to come up with. Normally I'm incapable of shutting the fuck up. I've obviously written enough that I can't claim to have been left speechless, but there are only so many ways that I can say "I love everything here". This is my hole. It was made for me.
Oh, the power of friendship saves the day? Splendid.
Sometimes a work comes along that feels like it was made for you. I’d like someone to break into the dev's office to confirm whether or not they’ve got satellite images of my house. I’m not certain what I was prepared for, going into this — all I really had to go off of was the ridiculously good box art — but the initial point-and-click exploration blobber gameplay hooked me. It’s a unique method of exploring this castle; most point-and-click games would take you directly to the next screen, while a game that gave you direct movement controls would be even more granular. This is more in the vein of something like Shin Megami Tensei, and it’s a really neat way to handle walking through these dark corridors. While this isn’t an especially frightening title, this is still a good method for building some tension while you explore.
Of course, this only lasts for about as long as it takes you to enter your first combat encounter. You meet a goddess who gives you a rosary to protect yourself, and you’re immediately pitted again a demon with the sole instruction to click the bead color that matches its eyes. A cross engraved with JESUS SAVES slams into its face, the demon’s head cracks open with a little hand-drawn animation, and you get a triumphant jingle on the following results screen which gives you an exorcism ranking. It’s a dramatic tonal shift, and it fucking rules. It marked the exact moment that I knew I was going to fall in love with this game.
I’m a sucker for the mixed-media approach that’s already here — a lot of the enemies look like drawings clipped out of demonology books, contrasting the overworld sprites and the dithered castle graphics — and the back-and-forth swinging between goofy minigames and tense exploration works in a way that seldom does anywhere else. There’s even a massive genre shift near the halfway point, where the game turns into a top-down RPG Maker game where you walk around solving puzzles and exploring dream-like areas beyond the castle walls. There’s so much going on here, and it would be so easy for all of this to feel sloppy and unfocused, and it doesn’t. I don’t know how Odencat and Fuming managed.
I’m just stunned at how perfectly this aligns with my tastes. It desperately needs to be experienced, because discussion without that baseline of having played it is near-meaningless. This is a dense work with a lot of little branches, and there’s going to be a lot that I missed on my playthrough that someone else picked up on right away. I'm surprised at how little I'm managing to come up with. Normally I'm incapable of shutting the fuck up. I've obviously written enough that I can't claim to have been left speechless, but there are only so many ways that I can say "I love everything here". This is my hole. It was made for me.
Oh, the power of friendship saves the day? Splendid.
i forgot i played this game 3 years ago - it was kind of a fever dream experience which I think influenced the rest of my dreams for a long time ; honestly though, i think this game is really cool presentation-wise and narratively. it's got a really interesting world and it'd be cool to see more of it
This review contains spoilers
|Non-Spoiler Section|
Zelle is a very... interesting game. It doesn't define itself as a horror experience, instead choosing the term "occult adventure", which is much more generous. However, it does try to create a rather tense atmosphere throughout it's runtime.
This atmosphere never really hit me in the way I had hoped it would. The "scares" were all rather predictable, and though the art is very well done, nothing shown gave me any sense of dread for the situation our protagonist is in. This could just be due to me being intimately antiquated with the horror genre, but I was never shaken by the games' events. I find that games need to give you something within the plot that feels unnatural and tense to achieve the vibe Zelle was going for. However, the premise of "boy goes outside room when he's not supposed to and meets demons" wasn't nearly enough to get me invested.
While the game tries to make some commentaries on sin, heaven, and hell, all it's observations remain surface level, and never dig down to the core of the discussion. Perhaps with a longer runtime this issue could have been mended, but I feel that a longer runtime would also sacrifice player attention-span, with the barebones mechanics of the gameplay not leaving much room to be expanded upon. I wish the gameplay was entirely reworked from what it is, as the shortcomings from this game's tiny length don't end at it's inability to make any greater points.
A major intention of the second half of the game is to try and get you invested in the characters of the world, but again, with such a short runtime it's VERY hard to give any of the characters meaningful dimensions, leading me to not care about what happened to any of them, even our own protagonist. The shift from first to third person that also occurs in the second half is an interesting gimmick, but does absolutely nothing to enhance or change the player experience. The developers seemed to add this feature only so that they could insert short "cutscenes", but with this being made in the RPGMaker engine, all the cutscenes were extremely stiff, and the lack of connection between the player and the characters means I didn't care much for what was occuring in the first place.
|Spoilers|
The boss fight with the reaper (I forget what his real name was because I did not care about him) was the only time in the game the gameplay actually felt slightly tense. However, this tension is INSTANTLY brought down by the fact that directly after, you fight the final boss, which you win with, you guessed it, the POWER OF FRIENDSHIP!!!!........ Without any explanation or reasoning, a little dragon baby turns into a big dragon and finishes off the final boss for you! Yay!?!? This could have MAYBE been a cool moment if it was explained a little??? But even then, AGAIN, it is SO hard to feel any emotion towards any of these characters when they are so two-dimensional and underdeveloped, so a character-driven finale felt EXTREMELY underwhelming.
As someone with a deep love for RPGMaker games (My #1 game on here is one), I really, REALLY wanted to like this game. It has such a unique vibe, but unfortunately that gets ruined by the shift that occurs in the second half, and it never really recovers or expands upon itself in a way that makes the experience memorable. I wouldn't NOT reccomend the game necissarily, as it's runtime doesn't make it a major timesink to be lost, but I would advise expectations to not be too high while playing, and to simply view this as someone's short-and-sweet art project.
Zelle is a very... interesting game. It doesn't define itself as a horror experience, instead choosing the term "occult adventure", which is much more generous. However, it does try to create a rather tense atmosphere throughout it's runtime.
This atmosphere never really hit me in the way I had hoped it would. The "scares" were all rather predictable, and though the art is very well done, nothing shown gave me any sense of dread for the situation our protagonist is in. This could just be due to me being intimately antiquated with the horror genre, but I was never shaken by the games' events. I find that games need to give you something within the plot that feels unnatural and tense to achieve the vibe Zelle was going for. However, the premise of "boy goes outside room when he's not supposed to and meets demons" wasn't nearly enough to get me invested.
While the game tries to make some commentaries on sin, heaven, and hell, all it's observations remain surface level, and never dig down to the core of the discussion. Perhaps with a longer runtime this issue could have been mended, but I feel that a longer runtime would also sacrifice player attention-span, with the barebones mechanics of the gameplay not leaving much room to be expanded upon. I wish the gameplay was entirely reworked from what it is, as the shortcomings from this game's tiny length don't end at it's inability to make any greater points.
A major intention of the second half of the game is to try and get you invested in the characters of the world, but again, with such a short runtime it's VERY hard to give any of the characters meaningful dimensions, leading me to not care about what happened to any of them, even our own protagonist. The shift from first to third person that also occurs in the second half is an interesting gimmick, but does absolutely nothing to enhance or change the player experience. The developers seemed to add this feature only so that they could insert short "cutscenes", but with this being made in the RPGMaker engine, all the cutscenes were extremely stiff, and the lack of connection between the player and the characters means I didn't care much for what was occuring in the first place.
|Spoilers|
The boss fight with the reaper (I forget what his real name was because I did not care about him) was the only time in the game the gameplay actually felt slightly tense. However, this tension is INSTANTLY brought down by the fact that directly after, you fight the final boss, which you win with, you guessed it, the POWER OF FRIENDSHIP!!!!........ Without any explanation or reasoning, a little dragon baby turns into a big dragon and finishes off the final boss for you! Yay!?!? This could have MAYBE been a cool moment if it was explained a little??? But even then, AGAIN, it is SO hard to feel any emotion towards any of these characters when they are so two-dimensional and underdeveloped, so a character-driven finale felt EXTREMELY underwhelming.
As someone with a deep love for RPGMaker games (My #1 game on here is one), I really, REALLY wanted to like this game. It has such a unique vibe, but unfortunately that gets ruined by the shift that occurs in the second half, and it never really recovers or expands upon itself in a way that makes the experience memorable. I wouldn't NOT reccomend the game necissarily, as it's runtime doesn't make it a major timesink to be lost, but I would advise expectations to not be too high while playing, and to simply view this as someone's short-and-sweet art project.
You know I gotta love a game that makes me genuinely piss my pants and also laugh really hard. Just incredibly unique in every aspect and beautifully executed all the same.
القيم بلاي : مزيج بين الالغاز وانك تضغط على شي بسرعة ووقت محدد الالغاز عادية لكن فكرة التضغيط جدا حبيتها وحبيت تنوعها
القصة : قصتها جدا جميلة وفيها كمية غرابة لكن النهاية كانت محبطة وغبية
الجرافكس : جرافكس اللعبة تحسة جاي من الديب ويب.. تصميمهم للمابات واختيارهم للالوان والانماط مقلق للعين واعطى للعبة طعم فريد
الموسيقى : لعبتها قبل مدة سوو ما اتذكرها لكن اتذكر كانت جميلة
تقييمي : لعبة فريدة من نوعها تشبة اندرتيل لكن باسلوب مختلف.. اللعبة اعطتني تجربة جديدة ومميزة وحبيتها جدا
القصة : قصتها جدا جميلة وفيها كمية غرابة لكن النهاية كانت محبطة وغبية
الجرافكس : جرافكس اللعبة تحسة جاي من الديب ويب.. تصميمهم للمابات واختيارهم للالوان والانماط مقلق للعين واعطى للعبة طعم فريد
الموسيقى : لعبتها قبل مدة سوو ما اتذكرها لكن اتذكر كانت جميلة
تقييمي : لعبة فريدة من نوعها تشبة اندرتيل لكن باسلوب مختلف.. اللعبة اعطتني تجربة جديدة ومميزة وحبيتها جدا