A roguelike that captures a cute cartoony artistic style and parodies the Zelda series. While the game juggles the core tropes from Zelda it goes for a much more whimsical and silly tone, such as its legendary equipment being called Toys and power ups represented by Stickers.
The basic idea of the game is that there's an evil witch who curses the world and a hero arises who is challenged with defeating her. However every time you die 100 years pass until a new hero is born during which time the world changes.
The game's broad loop is that each time you're reborn you have 5 days to explore the land, gather equipment, complete dungeons, destroy the 'anchors' that weaken the final boss, and go face off against the big bad Mormo in her castle.
I think the problem with this game is that its whole design is contradictory. It wants you to explore but not to make too much progress, it wants you to get stronger but has scaling difficulty on enemies so you never feel stronger, it wants you to beat dungeons but imposes a bunch of arbitrary difficulty modifiers to slow you down. At every step it sort of punches itself in the face to justify it's own mechanics.
I think after my first win I realised that this is the type of game that's more interested in doing what it wants to do than really factoring in if that makes the game better or worse. For me it just didn't make the game any more fun. A lot of the design decisions seem arbitrary and I just couldn't get on with it.
The basic idea of the game is that there's an evil witch who curses the world and a hero arises who is challenged with defeating her. However every time you die 100 years pass until a new hero is born during which time the world changes.
The game's broad loop is that each time you're reborn you have 5 days to explore the land, gather equipment, complete dungeons, destroy the 'anchors' that weaken the final boss, and go face off against the big bad Mormo in her castle.
I think the problem with this game is that its whole design is contradictory. It wants you to explore but not to make too much progress, it wants you to get stronger but has scaling difficulty on enemies so you never feel stronger, it wants you to beat dungeons but imposes a bunch of arbitrary difficulty modifiers to slow you down. At every step it sort of punches itself in the face to justify it's own mechanics.
I think after my first win I realised that this is the type of game that's more interested in doing what it wants to do than really factoring in if that makes the game better or worse. For me it just didn't make the game any more fun. A lot of the design decisions seem arbitrary and I just couldn't get on with it.
4 Comments
It is challenging and because of the scaling remains so throughout. The dungeons more so because of the modifiers that provide random limitations which don't change between deaths. The difficulty feels intended to make sure you'll have stuff to do across multiple lives and dungeons will take several to overcome. The bosses alone feel like they have inflated health pools since they aren't really difficult as much as time consuming to defeat which eats into a given run's limited duration.
That’s a bummer to hear. If I had a dollar for every instance a game artificially inflated its runtime using annoying gimmicks that overstayed their welcome I would be rich beyond imagination. But anyway, thanks for answering my question!
Too true! And no problem!
Rezlo
9 months ago