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It's easy to look at Sumire and be cynical about it. Everything about it is contrived to build up to an emotional climax that you can see from miles away. Any yet, it's hard not to feel touched by the game's story and its simple message, thanks in no small part to the gorgeous presentation that brings this small world to life.

A day in the life

Sumire starts with the titular character waking from a dream about their late grandmother, who she clearly misses and regrets not doing or talking more with. This leads into an eventful day ushered in by a mysterious and magical talking flower that Sumire stumbles upon in her living room.

This sets off an adventure where Sumire has a single day to show her flower friend as much about her life as possible while making choices on how to learn and grow from her current life experiences along the way. This flower can only live for one day, so it becomes important to Sumire not to waste any daylight while trying to accomplish her goals.

Karmic choices

Sumire's adventure ends up playing out a lot like a linear 2D adventure game complete with some light puzzle-solving. There are some random side-quests you can discover as well, and both those and the main story feature a lot of dialog options. The dilemmas thrown Sumire's way aren't exactly nuanced (most boil down to “do you want to be nice or mean to this person”), but these choices add up and inform the ending of the story.

Despite the simplicity of the choices, it's fun to see what kinds of predicaments Sumire finds herself in. All told, it's a very eventful day, full of romantic quandaries, bully confrontation, familial strife, and more. Most of these scenes are well-written and have a cute sense of humor and earnestness that makes each story beat a compelling read.

Beautiful day

Sumire isn't a particularly long or difficult game, though there are a few times where you might need to wait around for the flower to tell you what to do as the game's initial guidance isn't always very clear. There are also a few moments in the game where the choices laid before you actually aren't clear. I wish I could say it was because of some subtlety in the game's writing, but the stakes are so small in these moments and so inconsistent with the rest of the writing that they feel like accidental outliers rather than intentional departures from the core formula.

Anyway, the story is by-and-large very enjoyable mostly because of Sumire's tremendous art and emotive soundtrack. Even if you don't know where to go or what to do, being in the game is such a gift for the senses. Its presentation also heightens the effect of its story, which–while entirely predictable–is an enjoyable parable about appreciating the time and people that you have while you have them.

The bottom line

There's nothing entirely groundbreaking about Sumire, but everything it does is so beautiful that it's hard not to get swept into its world. You won't regret letting this game charm you, even if a few chuckles and a misty-eyed finale is all you end up getting out of it.

Source link:https://www.148apps.com/reviews/sumire-review/

Jesse Venbrux seems to have a thing for emulating Michael Brough games. 2020's Seven Scrolls was surprisingly novel given how well it worked with a lot of the same basic building blocks of Brough's Imbroglio and P1 Select, but that charm is all but lost on Loopy Wizard, a mini roguelike that not only tries to essentially pull off the same trick again, but does so in a way that feels much more derivative.

Circular spellbook

Loopy Wizard is yet another dungeon-crawler where you control a character by swiping to have them move around on a 5×5 grid. On this adventure, you are a wizard that can blast magic bolts at enemies from any distance, but you can also add special skills to an odd spellbook that forces you to cast them at set intervals according to a clock-like arrow that rotates around the spellbook's spell slots.

Your goal is to earn points by killing monsters and progressing as far through dungeons as possible before dying, which is much easier said than done given the game's quirky spell system. Although it might initially sound neat to pick up the ability to poison creatures, for example, you may run into situations where the only creature available to poison is yourself.

Intricate incantations

There are a few wrinkles to Loopy Wizard's structure and spellbook mechanics that make it a bit more nuanced and replayable than it might otherwise be. This includes things like level progression which reset many of your spells before moving on to the next set of challenging enemies and the ability to drag spells off of your spellbook to activate them off-schedule and remove them from your rotating inventory of powers.

This gives players some additional agency in terms of being able to form strategies for success as opposed to simply having to rely on the randomness of spell drops, while also creating a difficulty curve that prevents you from constantly depending on a particular loadout of abilities that seem to work well together.

Arcane antics

Much like Seven Scrolls, a lot of the appeal of Loopy Wizard is in seeing how effective and wild certain combinations of powers can get while learning to use them to your advantage. The only problem here is a lot of the powers are repeats from the previous game and the circular spellbook isn't as compelling a gameplay hook as the “if/then” logic statements of Seven Scrolls.

It also doesn't help that Loopy Wizard is yet another very obvious riff on Brough's games. Even if it was the most successful and innovative approach to this kind of game (which–to be clear–it is not), producing two titles back-to-back that so closely resemble another creator's work doesn't feel like homage so much as it does imitation, and it would've been nice to at least see some more departures from Brough's specific game formula, even if it was just at the surface level (i.e. visual style).

The bottom line

Loopy Wizard is a neat little Brough-like roguelike, but it's not particularly innovative, nor do its new twists prove to be more compelling than those of the titles it's imitating. They are just different, and barely so. Depending on who you are, you could pick up Loopy Wizard and have a grand time. It's more single-screen dungeon-crawling with crude art and a wacky ability gimmick, and either you are happy with minor variations on that familiar formula or you ask for more. I'm sure at this point in the review you know where I stand.

Source link:https://www.148apps.com/reviews/loopy-wizard-review/