When Inkle Studios sent me an email to review this the negative and cynical thoughts racing through my mind knew no bounds. I’m the last guy you ask to review anything related to 1980’s style pen and paper RPG’s. I’ve played Dungeons and Dragons twice in my life, and have done everything I can in the realm of nerd to avoid sinking “that far”. You can imagine, then, somebody telling you a fighting fantasy book converted to an app is a pretty far fetched pitch for you to enjoy.
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| The descriptive text guides you through the story, while music sets the tone. |
After playing through the game twice, once on my iPad and once on my phone, (which by the way it looks gorgeous on both with only one purchase!), I can without a doubt say that I’m hooked. The premise of the game is pretty basic as far as fantasy goes, a great evil has stolen an important artifact and you’re the poor sap chosen to go get it back. You wake up in a strange town with your sword ready to embark on the journey, a quick tutorial teaches you to fight, haggle, spend money, and deal with characters in the game and away you go. Instead of watching videos you read descriptive text to set you into the mood of the game, with music playing while reading I found it extremely easy to be pulled into their universe. The spell casting system was also very unique, instead of simply choosing a spell and having it use your magic points, you aligned stars that help spell out your attack. For example if I want to cast lightning, which happens to be called ZAP! I would align Z, A, P and then cast.
COMBAT:
Combat is handled in an incredibly unique way, being a game that would resort to dice rolls Inkle has taken that seemingly random event and made it strategic. You get to choose your attack power while your opponent chooses the same. Your goal is to choose a higher number than your opponent. If you block you are losing 1 stamina and if your opponent blocks they are losing one stamina, so strategically you don’t want to use a super heavy attack if they’re blocking since it wastes energy. Combat then, is a chess game of analyzing how much energy your opponent has and calculating how much he will attack with, or if he’ll block to conserve your energy. Imagine using this system against a creature with double your stamina, and double the attack power. The amount of strategy involved is ridiculous. I fought the Manticore (close to the final boss) about 6 times to finish him once. On my second play through I fought him 3 times, so the strategy is absolutely key.
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| The game map guides you from level to level. |
Without videos to move their story forward, Inkle has relied on illustrations that reference playing through a book, but still keep the game interactive. Words to describe are tough, but what I’m saying is that the images make you feel like you’re playing a pen and paper RPG, on your device. The crisp illustrations bridge the two technologies flawlessly, and make you want to defeat the “vile creatures”, or escape the terrifying situations you have encountered.
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| The game map guides you from level to level. |
The final piece of note are the death sequences, I cannot tell you how many different ways I died due to stupid choices. I starved to death, was strangled by snakes, speared by a Manticore, bludgeoned by “Elvens”, poisoned by a witch, crushed by a stone, and I know for a fact that I still missed more opportunities to die. Seeing the death scripts almost became a game in itself, I wanted to find out how to die. This changing story arch gives you ample opportunity to mess up and experience everything the world has to offer, it goes as far as to allow different paths for your entire adventure. My first go I missed 2 towns since I was captured, and ended up meeting a bridge troll. Play through number 2 I went the opposite way ended up skipping a small town, missed the bridge troll and somehow muddled my way through to the end.
The $4.99 you spend on this game is wasted if you only play through it once, your repeated play throughs should only take you 30-45 minutes unless you thoroughly inspect every piece of the game. I left this story excited to see part 2 release. This is a unique new genre, that has definitely been done right.