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Dungeon-crawlers that have you play as the bad guys trying to beat the adventurers isn't exactly all that novel these days, but it is the tack taken by Legend of Keepers. This game has you playing as a big bad monster who needs to manage their own army of demons, skeletons, and other traditional dungeon monsters to stop waves of clerics, warriors, and their ilk in a game that feels like it's constantly stopping short of taking its ideas to satisfying places.

Monster manager

Legend of Keepers opens with a monster who acts somewhat like an HR representative introducing you to the game's conceit and mechanics. From there, she assigns you to projects that are some variation of protecting a certain dungeon over a period of time, during which you have the opportunity to recruit and train various monsters, procure traps, upgrade your own boss abilities, and–of course fight off adventurers that come by.

Most of this gameplay is purely menu-driven, with time passing by through a “schedule” where each week offers you a selection of buttons that you can choose to be the event of the week. Sometimes, these buttons offer you a choice between seeing a therapist to improve your staff morale or sending a cadre of monsters off on a business trip, and at other predefined points you simply choose between different sets of heroes to fight against, which then transitions to you the game's combat interface.

Teambuilding exercise

Combat is where Legend of Keepers puts all of your preparations to the test. In this mode, you get a predefined set of rooms to lay your traps and teams of monsters in hopes that with the ideal progression of horrors and dangers you can thwart any team that dares to challenge you. Typically, this involves placing a couple of traps and arranging two teams of three monsters. Occasionally, you'll have access to a midboss and some other environmental effects, as well.

Once everything is placed, you then get to watch the adventurers as they try to make it through your dungeon and even control your monsters in turn-based combat to leverage their abilities in an effort to either kill or terrify heroes such that they retreat. So long as your head boss doesn't get killed at the very end of your dungeon, you succeed and get to choose some rewards to upgrade your team's capabilities. From there, you have to rest while also upgrading everything to continue keeping up with the next adventurers who will come your way.

Clocking out early

On paper, I like a lot of what Legend of Keepers has to offer. Team-building, roguelike systems, management mechanics, and a little humor are all things I can get behind, especially in combination, but I found too often that this game doesn't really take any of its ideas far enough.

Perhaps this is because the systems in Legend of Keepers don't quite fit together all that elegantly. This is to say it can be hard to actually capitalize on synergies between monsters and traps because of how variable the game's elements can be. To account for that, it feels like the game doesn't really make them consequential, which ends up meaning you can get by doing just about whatever you want. This, in turn, makes the management decisions feel shallow, and there isn't enough variety to them or frequency of unique setpiece interactions with the HR monster at the beginning to really sell the humor that only ends up hanging out in the margins of the game.

The bottom line

Even when the component parts of Legend of Keepers are moving together in lockstep (an uncommon occurrence), it feels like it is missing a core. Or perhaps a better way to put it is the game seems like it knows that its systems don't line up well and therefore tunes the entire experience to allow you to muddle through it easily enough. It can still be entertaining in short bursts, but ultimately Legend of Keepers feels a bit thin.

Source link:https://www.148apps.com/reviews/legend-of-keepers-review/

Media about writers and writing usually rub me the wrong way unless actual writing is prominently featured and said writing is good. Either that, or have the words being featured be those of a child who aspires to be a professional writer. This is how Lost Words: Beyond the Pageframes its reflective story about loss, and–while I appreciate some of its ambition and clarity of thought–the game overall does suffer from some various little issues that detract from the experience.

Fact and fiction

Lost Words tells the story of a young girl at a pivotal moment in her life by alternating between journal entries and chapters of a fantasy story she is working on. You control an avatar of this girl as she hops from line to line in her journal or acts as the stand-in protagonist in her fantasy land.

Moving through both storylines involves some light platforming and puzzle-solving using a virtual joystick and two invisible buttons that allow you to jump or open a book of words that cast spells based on their meaning (rise, break, repair, etc.). Most of the gameplay is strictly a vehicle for storytelling, though, as there is constant narration throughout the experience that weaves together both worlds to explore love, loss, and coming of age.

Visual novel

One of the most striking things about Lost Words is its visual design. To be clear, I am not referring to the game's graphical fidelity but rather how the game often finds inventive and powerful ways to enhance the narration or words on the page through other elements taking place on screen. Changes in light, pauses in the action, and shifts of perspective lurk around every corner ready to pack an emotional punch into moments that might otherwise land with a thud.

These touches ended up being the primary driving force for me to see Lost Words through to the end, as the platforming can be occasionally buggy and otherwise pretty dull, the story itself is somewhat predictable in terms of its primary arc and otherwise erratic about getting from point to point, and there isn't a whole lot of experimentation happening when it comes to its puzzles.

Stilted stoytelling

For the most part, Lost Words gets away with having some lackluster writing as it is a story told from the perspective of a child. But this only really creates cover for the hackneyed prose and not other issues with the overall storytelling.

There are times when Lost Words seems to meander in circles unnecessarily before leaping to places seemingly randomly. The result is a pace that is hard to get a read on and can make the experience drag out. It also doesn't help that there are some various minor bugs in the game that can occasionally make events fail to trigger and narration lines bleed over one another. And then there's also an issue where a blank menu pops up between every scene in the game, presumably asking you to rate and review the game. I am not sure if its pop up frequency is on purpose or not, but in either case it is quite annoying and doesn't even work.

The bottom line

Despite all of the barriers that chop up the flow of Lost Words, I still found myself enjoying it. The visual touches used to enhance its emotional weight are done with a care that I'd like to see in more games of this nature, and the rest of the experience serviceable enough to make seeing its high notes easy enough to do.

Source link:https://www.148apps.com/reviews/lost-words-beyond-the-page-review/