I liked the game, it surprised me, took creative risks, and was charming overall. Even from the first minute, the game had a short intro-cinematic that set the tone and style of the game. The computerized voice of the god figure made me laugh, it doesn't sound good but it was charming none the less and didn't make me want to stab my ears like those games playing some crappy atmosphere-destroying rock song. In fact the whole series of events, up to your character gaining control, just felt good. Something that a lot of games on BYOND lack.
Disclaimer: I'm going to abuse and over use the words "charm" and "charming". because this game is on a charm-aholic rampage eating lucky charms and stealing every teen-age girl's charm-bracelets, watching Charmed reruns, charming all the ladies and doing really odd things for the sake of a metaphor.
This game is far from well polished but it's got some sparkle even now. The style is simple and charming. Nothing in terms of art sticks out and feels copypasted from some free-to-use-library. It, you, and the author knows what kind of game it is, a simple old-school hack-n-slash rpg. A fun one to boot.
This game is well made, so much in fact, that the issues it does have stand out that much more. It has some dialogue in HUD format which is nice, except for the fact the text flies by your screen with no input so that's a bit annoying. However, a lot of the prompts, like for shopping and banking use the standard BYOND/Windows alert/inputs which are ugly compared to the much more stylized HUD chat prompts.
Speaking of GUIs, the hot-slot bar confused me at first as it is black and the background while inside is also black- it was only once I got outside that the mysterious numbers on screen made sense.
(Edit, I'm told every issue mentioned above was fixed/will be changed in the current dev build, so good news to that. Teka ended up stopping in while I was there and giving me some insights.)
I absolutely hate tabs and verbs, but this game keeps them to a minimum, none of the tabs even are large enough to scroll, they only state obvious needed information and there's no mutating verb tab that changes depending on where you are turning into a cascading terror. One thing that bugged me is the fact the only right-click accessible verb I was able to see was the "drop" command. If items only have one use for right click it would be nice to see verbs turned off and just allow right click to process that way. However, I don't know if drop is the only function as I didn't get that far in.
One mechanic I did really enjoy seeing was "At level ten visit the Prophet to choose a class", that is just plain thoughtful to new players who still need to get accustomed and hopefully prevents people from regretting their skill choice without introducing an odd skill-reset system.
Overall, fun, charming, nice art, and feels like what more games should be. Check it out!
~Ripper man5~