Pocket Mirror has everything to reach excellence as a RPG Maker mix of horror/cute. Unfortunately, it has some heavy issues that lessen the experience.
A game that’s frustrating to play
As someone who’s played a few RPG Maker games, I certainly don’t have a problem with its default and limited core mechanics such as the grid based walking. This is not where this game has problems.
One of the issues of Pocket Mirror is in its game design, based around puzzles you need to solve to progress throughout the story. A lot of the puzzles are very time wasting because they are based on trial and error and their presentation doesn’t help you in solving them. For example, for one puzzle you get three keys to pick up in a room and you have to go back and forth between that room and another to try them. As far as I know there was no clue on how to proceed. Honestly, I didn’t even understand most puzzles.
The second issue is the most important and goes in pair with the problem of centering the puzzles around trial and error: you die A LOT. Dying in this game has two consequences: the first is that you are sent back to your last save and the second is that you have to endure an absurdly long animation before you can do so. Whenever you die, you have to redo all your progress and that means going through all the cutscenes on your way, which can take forever.
It doesn’t help that checkpoints can be quite rare in certain parts of the game and the nature of the deaths encourages you to go back every single time you trigger a cutscene, out of fear of having to restart them. You never know when you might die: perhaps a conversation will trigger a choice that leads to your death. Perhaps it’ll be a chase that starts as soon as the conversation ends: these chases don’t give you a single second to figure out they started before you die, making it almost mandatory to die on your first attempt. I find the deaths in this game to be extremely cheap for these reasons.
The first hour and a half of the game can be quite frustrating because of these problems and the lack of build-up for the story. That aside, I’d like to talk about what I, despite these problems, liked about the game after enduring a rough introduction.
A very beautiful RPG Maker game
If not for the gameplay quirks such as how you walk, perhaps you would not guess this is a RPG Maker game. The sprite work is absolutely beautiful and rich. The locations can get very varied and detailed with few repetitions. I also noticed some nice animations for the sprites here and there.
The game also has very pretty portraits for every character and some occasional drawings to illustrate a specific scene.
As far as music goes, I wasn’t impressed but neither was I disappointed. On another hand, the sound design works well to complement the atmosphere and the eerie noises used in this game work well. There’s a lot of ambient tunes heard throughout the game as well as a variety of noises meant to distress you.
I can’t say much about the story, I did enjoy it but I don’t think it’s a standout. The start is very slow however and there isn’t much of an introduction to anything at the beginning. It’s the overall experience which is pretty cool.
If you like the trendy mix of horror and cute things, then you will like this game. It doesn’t really do anything surprising but it’s not a bad game either.
A game that’s frustrating to play
As someone who’s played a few RPG Maker games, I certainly don’t have a problem with its default and limited core mechanics such as the grid based walking. This is not where this game has problems.
One of the issues of Pocket Mirror is in its game design, based around puzzles you need to solve to progress throughout the story. A lot of the puzzles are very time wasting because they are based on trial and error and their presentation doesn’t help you in solving them. For example, for one puzzle you get three keys to pick up in a room and you have to go back and forth between that room and another to try them. As far as I know there was no clue on how to proceed. Honestly, I didn’t even understand most puzzles.
The second issue is the most important and goes in pair with the problem of centering the puzzles around trial and error: you die A LOT. Dying in this game has two consequences: the first is that you are sent back to your last save and the second is that you have to endure an absurdly long animation before you can do so. Whenever you die, you have to redo all your progress and that means going through all the cutscenes on your way, which can take forever.
It doesn’t help that checkpoints can be quite rare in certain parts of the game and the nature of the deaths encourages you to go back every single time you trigger a cutscene, out of fear of having to restart them. You never know when you might die: perhaps a conversation will trigger a choice that leads to your death. Perhaps it’ll be a chase that starts as soon as the conversation ends: these chases don’t give you a single second to figure out they started before you die, making it almost mandatory to die on your first attempt. I find the deaths in this game to be extremely cheap for these reasons.
The first hour and a half of the game can be quite frustrating because of these problems and the lack of build-up for the story. That aside, I’d like to talk about what I, despite these problems, liked about the game after enduring a rough introduction.
A very beautiful RPG Maker game
If not for the gameplay quirks such as how you walk, perhaps you would not guess this is a RPG Maker game. The sprite work is absolutely beautiful and rich. The locations can get very varied and detailed with few repetitions. I also noticed some nice animations for the sprites here and there.
The game also has very pretty portraits for every character and some occasional drawings to illustrate a specific scene.
As far as music goes, I wasn’t impressed but neither was I disappointed. On another hand, the sound design works well to complement the atmosphere and the eerie noises used in this game work well. There’s a lot of ambient tunes heard throughout the game as well as a variety of noises meant to distress you.
I can’t say much about the story, I did enjoy it but I don’t think it’s a standout. The start is very slow however and there isn’t much of an introduction to anything at the beginning. It’s the overall experience which is pretty cool.
If you like the trendy mix of horror and cute things, then you will like this game. It doesn’t really do anything surprising but it’s not a bad game either.