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Well what do we have here? Another game made in rpg maker vx ace that uses stock assets and probably has a passable story? Well I can say one of those things are correct. I spent a total of 8 hours with the game combing through all its nooks and crannies, trying to get the different endings and I will say that the game does deliver on it's story.
You start off in the small mining town of Moonstone. Very early on you're tipped off about weird occurrences happening down in the mines, someone's even lost there life. So you suit up and form a party and together you depart on your journey. So the premise is fine, and it does get the job done, but I did find a lot of exposition trapped behind side characters and books. That's fine of course, but the problem is the larger narrative is just shoe-horned along by your party and other characters.
I also found an issue with the presentation. The characters stand out from their environments like a sore thumb. Everyone's tall and dark, with stark contrasting lines, while the world has this soft 16 bitish look to it. You can tell the devs put work into the character sprites, but just used stock assets for the world and it truly hurts the game. The characters move like robots and just look so out of place.
I really wish the dev had just waited an extra year or so and just worked on creating custom sprites for the characters. And because of all this the game runs at what I believe is only a couple frames per second. Now as bad as that may seem, everything's stable, but it still looks weird when you can literally count the frame cycle for your party.
The game also suffers from translation issues. There's been several instances when grammatical errors have popped up, especially in the opening scenes. I know the Dev is based in Sweden, but I'd suggest brushing up on the American Vernacular because that's definitely going to be a sticking point for people. I really do want to get into the story though, there's some really cool plot points and awesome sub themes to discover, but I'd suck the fun right out of the game if I told you about it.
Other than these points, I find the game to be okay at best, but unpolished at worst. It's certainly got a good story, but it also needs good presentation. The game already has two strikes against it for being made in rpg maker so it's going to need all the polish it can to impress people to shell out 5 USD for it.
We at Shock Site give the game a 2 out of 5.
