Serment - Contract with a Devil
released on Dec 31, 2018
Serment - Contract with a Devil is a visual novel/dungeon crawler hybrid featuring highly tactical turn based RPG battles, challenging dungeon puzzles, optional minigames and most importantly, a lot of cute anime girls.
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An awkward and derivative dungeon crawler/sim/visual novel hybrid that does some things decently, some poorly, and none particularly well. The combat is cribbed from Labyrinth of Touhou and the time management plays out like a simplified Recettear, complete with weekly debts to pay off. Unfortunately, they don't fit together at all: the dungeon gives you more gold than you need to pay off your debts, buy all the items you want, and purchase a hefty helping of stat boosts (another thing cribbed from LoT) besides; meanwhile, the Stamina system, which is supposed to kick characters out of your party after they fight a certain number of battles, is rendered irrelevant by the clock, which advances with every battle and (once your characters have a few levels under their belts) kicks you out of the dungeon before any of them can leave.
Also somewhat clunky and buggy, possibly because it was made in Ren'Py. I had important hotkeys fail to work, menus lag, and a waypoint fail to be added to the teleportation menu. Alternating between the keyboard for dungeon navigation and the mouse for everything else sucks. Also, the skill menu displays only a few skills at a time and can only be scrolled by dragging the mouse wheel, which is highly obnoxious if you're playing the Freelancer, who acquires approximately one trillion skills.
The dungeon design is surprisingly decent, even if it doesn't do the things I usually look for in a DRPG. There's no sense of exploration or atmosphere; instead, most of the floors ask you to gather orbs and keys to unlock doors. A couple of puzzles use quirks of the system in really interesting ways.
Weirdly, the side characters all have very professional-looking portraits, while the main characters are amateurish. Not sure what's going on there, but the contrast is distracting.
I found the story yawnworthy and have nothing to say about it.
It took me a bit under seven hours to complete the story, fully explore the dungeon, and defeat the superboss, which is a pleasant length that fits the price. I'd like to play more short DRPGs like this.
Also somewhat clunky and buggy, possibly because it was made in Ren'Py. I had important hotkeys fail to work, menus lag, and a waypoint fail to be added to the teleportation menu. Alternating between the keyboard for dungeon navigation and the mouse for everything else sucks. Also, the skill menu displays only a few skills at a time and can only be scrolled by dragging the mouse wheel, which is highly obnoxious if you're playing the Freelancer, who acquires approximately one trillion skills.
The dungeon design is surprisingly decent, even if it doesn't do the things I usually look for in a DRPG. There's no sense of exploration or atmosphere; instead, most of the floors ask you to gather orbs and keys to unlock doors. A couple of puzzles use quirks of the system in really interesting ways.
Weirdly, the side characters all have very professional-looking portraits, while the main characters are amateurish. Not sure what's going on there, but the contrast is distracting.
I found the story yawnworthy and have nothing to say about it.
It took me a bit under seven hours to complete the story, fully explore the dungeon, and defeat the superboss, which is a pleasant length that fits the price. I'd like to play more short DRPGs like this.