Review written with difficulty settings set to default.
Everything breaks is multiple creative turned based combat ideas rolled into a diamond in the rough.
The basic idea is that each move (called weapons) you have has a limited time use. If its used up then you have to find another move to replace it.
Imagine Pokemon but pokecenters do not restore PP so eventually you need to catch another pokemon to use moves again.
Unlike Pokemon, picking up weapons does rarely cost anything except running up to the weapon and risking a random encounter.
**COMBAT**
This has potential to make many interesting situations where the player has to figure out a strategy with the random moves that are in the area.
What helps this is the interesting way the game handles the party. You can get up to 3 party members but you cannot let them all go in a turn.
Each party member has their own stock of weapon, health, buffs and everything else. However if one character dies then the whole party gets wiped. If you want to use a weapon from one of the party members you then have to let them be for the enemy phase. This causes amusing situations like the time I had a character nearly dead but all the healing items were on the character with full health. So my attacker couldnt attack because he was almost dead and my healer couldnt attack because he only had heals.
There were also moments were it was to my benifit where one of my characters was almost dead but had many weapons with stun abilities so I used them to stun, then switched to someone who could take the hit.
The reason why I call this a diamond in the rough is because as it stands there is very little being done with the system. Having weapons with different types of attack stats is fun but if you just focus on a specific type of damage you should be fine. I basically beat the whole game with the same strategy, even with the constant cycling of weapons. What I would like to see are dungeons or areas that give you weapons that force you to play in specific ways. Think of it as some areas being builds and the challenge being understanding the build and trying to execute it to the best of your ability.
Like give me a dungeon that has only healing and poison weapons that force my to turtle up. Give me a dungeon with weak weapons but strong buffs/debuffs, give me a dungeon that gives me weapons that give me debuffs. The sky is the limit but we barely jumped here.
**DUNGEONS**
There are a few dungeons in the game. I they are not amazing but they are passeble. There are no puzzles and the lore (more on that later) isnt anything to write home about.
The challenge of most dungeons is to see how much you can clear it with the least amount of enemy encounters possible. There are no random encounters, each battle is a entity in the overworld that jumps/walks/warps around and its possible to ever fight anything except the few encounters where you need to fight to proceed. The dungeons arent very maze like but they do offer their own gimmicks.They are an enjoyable part of the game and are distinct from the overworld.
I personally would like a bit more character and lore.
**ART**
Ah yes, the critisism that can be invalidated by simply looking at my itch.io page. Lets be constructive here. First of, the enemy and character designs are great. Very charming
with their own style and feel. Every character feels distinct in personality, tone and manurisms. One look at them and you can instantly tell what they are all about.
Enemy designs are really well done. They look fun and even the "samey" looking ones have distinct poses to instantly tell you the differences between them.
The problems start with the overworld and the UI/UX. First the overworld.
Each asset is lovingly crafted and fits with the world. However through the many screens of the game that you have to go through a bunch of them are going to look like each other.
Its not like layouts are repeated but many areas are the same few assets constantly repeated which makes remembering where what is hard. This could be remidied with unique enemy placements/behaviours but those are few and far between and are mostly saved for the dungeons. Doesnt help that the artstyle for the overworld is very low pixel so even enemy designs that are different may look like other ones.
The artstyle mandates a specific colour pallet which makes making these areas substantially different a challenge but as it stands they are currently too many samey rooms. An alternative would be a map but I am not aware of how the developer thinks about adding one.
UI/UX is another issue. As it stands if you are not aware of something then reading it through the UI is nearly impossible. Some fights can take a while and I cannot remember
all the buffs/debuffs 3 characters have in any given moment. This is bad when I am trying to figure out what to do next. Same thing with the enemy. At least its shown how weak/strong they are to a specific type of damage but if they are poisoned or buffed is another story.
Also there is very little feedback in how much damage the player is taking and if debuffs were applied. There is a system that allows you to see the enemies stats but its in a place where I need to select an attack and then an enemy to see it which is a pain especially in group fights. I would like some icons to showcase the current status of everything and then keep the status windows to see exactly what is happening if I do not understand the icons yet.
**JANK?**
Here are a few things that I would like to add that do not fit into a single topic.
The game has 3 story dungeons and a secret boss but there is no sign for when I am "done" with the demo. If I didnt contact the dev about it I would probably still walk in circles looking for the credits
The game explicitly says I need to fight the main villain to end the game but that is impossible in the demo, yet every character is hyping up our fight. This is a extra grievance together with the last point
There is a crafting system in the game where I can craft every weapon in the game... I only know this because I got an item in a dungeon that says I can craft something and the dev showed me where the menu is. Currently its not explained anywhere in the game
There is a tower where you fight increasingly difficult enemies, at the end there is... nothing. Litterly a void of nothing. Thank god I left because I later found out that I could just walk into the void, get lost and needed to load a previouse save meaning I would need to fight the tower again.
There are characters that allow you to buy weapons but they are largly pointless. There are more than enough weapons on the ground to fill all your slots and they dont sell items that are super better than the things you find on the ground.
The game allows you to go in every direction but there is a very clear "first area" where you get both of your party members... a first area you can skip by going right instead of left at the start. I do not know if that can cause issues but just food for thought.
**LORE/STORY**
The dev mentioned that he will rewrite a big chunk of it so I am not going to comment on it. My only point of critisism is that I would like to see less modern lingo in the game.
**CONCLUSION**
Everything breaks is an enjoyable yet flawed game. Currently a lot of benifit of the doubt is placed thanks to possible future content/changes that could make its systems shine.
I want to see more done with the systems and possibly more risks taken. There is an amazing game in here, it just needs to be realized.
With enough feedback and polish I believe something great can come of it.
final score: 3/5