Recent reviews by Smalls The Kobold

I can't in good conscience recommend this game if you want a story in your story-driven RPG. 6.5/10, recommend if it's about £25 or less.

The combat is pretty good on paper but ends up pretty one note when you learn the best tactics that defeat most opponents. The limitation to 4 skills feels unsatisfying, but I enjoyed the occasion when you were promoted to dive into other vocations for their passive buffs.

The gameplay is fairly fundamental, rarely doing more than it needs to, combined with a handful of niche, unused or easily forgotten mechanics peppered in. Enemy diversity is also fairly lacking, heavily relying on variants and even repeating unique bosses at the end.

Also make your pawn funny, a reference, or unique and hot. Unironically, the Pawn popularity contest is a huge part of the game's currency.

it's hard to express my frustration with the story without spoiling everything> The first half is solid, the latter half loses its mind, and at the end, the game will repeatedly and shamelessly insult your intelligence if you don't understand the vague nonsense. The only exception is the last playable cutscene, which is so blunt about it's stupidity that you'll lose brain cells trying to make it make sense. A weird, ironic twist where the true ending is objectively a worse ending despite the intended message. I hope it's a wild translation error or something.

This game is a labour of love that actually got me using arrow keys to play it. I've never felt top-down combat feel so weighty, fun, and hides how high the skill ceiling is. It makes grinding for rare drops so fun you only realise you've been in 1 zone for an hour because the podcast you had on ended.

It's also got the most beautiful pixel art animations that keep the entire world alive and evolve the in-world cinematic cut-scenes to be fun to watch and a story worth its time. There's a reason why so many of us have hundreds and hundreds of hours despite it taking about 30 hours to complete everything.

**If the negative reviews are scaring you**: I understand people are rightfully wary about indie scams, but this game is a polished labour of love where the developers publish weekly updates about development for the entire duration of the game's creation. There's is no scam here, just slow, amazing workers, and the work is almost done!

Also, don't play hard mode (or arcade) for your first play-through! Even if you're a mega-pro gamer, or at least be prepared to be ready to go into the settings and lower the difficulty again, especially at the final hurdle.

This game is stress turned into gameplay and I can't get enough of it. It makes intense micromanagement deeply engaging and gives you so much agency over everything that's going on while still making you feel helpless, combined with lots of tiny quality-of-life perks that make this game a gem.

Its ability to turn the grim fate of this world into the actual mechanics is incredible. The only time you’re on top of all the issues is if you’ve won. It’s sometimes beneficial to be racist for a bit and show a racial preference so they report your success or don’t leave. “Cursed” options are so beneficial that it’s hard not to pick them. If you dare use technology you have to burn the rot and corruption away. It’s awful, stressful, and an uphill fight to keep everything just “Okay”, and it works so well.

And don’t let micromanagement scare you! Its complex yet intuitive systems are tutorialed in a safe and fun way that makes it easy to pick up the basics, and it only expands on these ideas when you’ve spent enough time tinkering with the systems. That said, I'm a little scared how, even after a day, how much I’ve still got to unlock and bloat the large RNG pools even more. Thank god there’s a pause button and an in-game wiki… but I do wish it had a search function.

The only criticism is the time sync. You need time to play this game. It’s taken 24 hours to complete 2 storms, consisting of 12 towns. I’ve completed 2 of 4(?) seals and unlocked roughly 1/3rd of the game, excluding an entire race type? If you’re a busy person, you will not see the end of this game by this time next year. There is an option to play at 3x speed, but between moving buildings, assigning job roles designating trees to cut paths through and events, good ♥♥♥♥♥♥ luck!

Strongly Recommend. Raven and frog villagers when.

(Review Mid Game (Chap 4), spoilerless)
TL:DR ***All*** the polish went into the gameplay. Freedom of movement lets you yeet yourself around the map while knocking people out. Why is parrying so unforgiving?

If you're looking for a planed, high-difficulty, sneaky backstabs only where you skulk around in the dark like the Original Aragami, you might be a little disappointed, but if your open to new ideas, this game takes the Aragami foruma and lets you fly with it.

The game doesn't show its best cards immediately, the story is unclear and confusing and the combat tutorial just highlights how clunky it is (and you can’t change controls anywhere?). However, it's obvious the time and effort went into polishing the movement and stealth gameplay to high hell rather than giving the story the attention, and the sword fighting is clearly a “In case of emergencies.”', and you're not meant to run into a 1v20 sword fight.

Gameplay this thing is a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ goldmine for 1 main reason: Freedom of movement. The only ability downgrade we got from OG Aragami is that we can now only teleport to ledges rather than everywhere we want. However, we now have a double jump and a dash, and the importance of shadows has been reduced.

Why is this a good thing? Insane movement techs combined with the fact you can knock someone out at any time, in any direction, as long as they're not on full alert, is very very fun. Dash into a jump to soar through the sky and ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ BODY some poor dude across the courtyard, teleport to a ledge and smash a dudes skull on the fence, and double jump then dash to get vertical height with your distance to get back to the roof unseen. The game is as fast and flows as quickly as you want it to and it excells at making you feel powerful without being unbalanced.

The final note is the note of the “♥♥♥♥♥♥ cascade” where being caught by 1 guard causes all of Japan to know your exact position and tuned it a little too far to the other side of the scale. Guards are blind, dumb and basically never call reinforcements further than 20 meters away. In exchange if you do get caught, they can chase you down basically as fast as you can run unless you're good with teleporting. Treat them more as the game's puzzle pieces than actual guards.

Good game. Bring up to 2 friends.

Extra tidbits:
• Don't look out of bounds too hard. Especially in the capital.
• Don't throw important people into black end-of-map voids, they are unrecoverable.
• Do throw people off cliffs because it's funny.

I had way too many problems with this game to really enjoy it, i'll summerise everything below (without spoiling anything) on what I did and didnt enjoy about the game.

Gametine: 75 Mins
Highest level: 3

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Levels and level design

First off, the randomly produced maps are incredible, from a technical standpoint the complexity of the genaration system is amazing! Espeshally with some of the featurs in play.

It's a shame they are WAY TO LONG. I was playing through the second level (killing and collecting everything I could find) and ended up thinking "Ok, this level has gone on for a while, lets just rush to the exit as im getting bored of the same scenery and enemys. To my surpise I had only cleared about half the level, ~IF THAT~ after beining to feel bored of the enemys and deisgn (and wanting to bank the loot I got becuase of the damage I was taking from all the fights). The levels need to be shorter for me to enjoy this game as much.

Also, Expect to see the same enemys if diffrent levels, just diffrent types.

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The Enemies

Fantastic and clear mechanics exept for the Defender. All the monsters I fased had clear animations and warning to show what attack they were going to do and gave you the opertinity to advoid them. Really well made

The defender monster highly irritated me (In short its a monster that makes other monsters nearby immune to damage as far as I could tell)
The combat seems to like having small groups of managable enemys, but the defender feels like I have to rush in, aggroing everything to even have a chance in a fight, which is chaos and unmanageable for somone without goiod weaponly or knowlage of the game, and these are found commonly in the second level.

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The Combat

Its pretty fun I guess, the bow seems next to pointless due to most enemys your fighting are on the same floor as you so stabbing them does more damage as doesnt require long animations, and the sheild was the most boring and hard to use item from the start, after i used it once I never touched it again.

The range of weapons at the start is so low that it feels really boring, and even when I unlocked blueprints by finnaly reaching the end of the level I just unlocked upgrades for weapons, such as adding a bleed effect or freeze effect, nothing I obtained ever interested me much.


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Upgrades

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH............
Right, so enemys have a chance to drop a soul orb thing, and you can use these to upgrade your weapons. Makes sence.
But you can only upgrade your weapons at the end of a level, makes sence.
The UI is so confusing over what im upgrading/unlocking/whatever I think I was doing that it was just overwelming!
and the levels are SO LONG that banking the sould you've obtained isnt possible!

And you dont upgrade "Swords":
You need to upgrade swords with the bleed effect,
OR the one with the freeze effect?
OR the one without any effects...?
Why arnt these all the same option?
Also how come I can't remove soul points from one thing into another?

I have a feeling the 50 or so weapons and skills are actually about 20, just with diffrent buffs on them...


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Death

Holey ♥♥♥♥ death is the worst in this game.
You get to see all the loot you lsot becuase you couldn't bank any of it drop to the floor and you cant get it back in any way, death isnt fun, it isnt a chance to start a new run, its a dumb punishment that taunts you for ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ up even tho its your first few runs or its your 5th run and your 20 mins into level two and you've died becuase THE LEVEL IS SO LONG.

"Oh but Smallsplat, of course death is ment to be a punishment"
obviously, but other rougelikes dont splatter all the goods you've collected out of your body when you die on the floor to taunt you about all the loot you couldn't store, and then give you no way to collect them. Its like a big middle finger to the player.


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Abiltys/passives

Bleed is useless
Freeze is useless
Posion is pretty useless

Enemys arn't strong enough to make tick effects worth it, by the time you've stacked enough tick effects to be good their already dead.

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How would I improve the game?

First of all, SHORTER LEVELS... PLEASE.... Or at least some way mid-way to bank my current loot.
Make diffrent varations of the same weapon upgradeable in the same catagory
Actually explain stuff to the player instead of just expecting them to understand.
Don't punish new players becuase they can't get to the end of your levels, souls should be kept on death so that players can feel like their actually achieving something.

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TL:DR

Levels are too long (But well made)
Enemys are really good execpt one or two that ruin the flow of the game
Weapon varation early on are limiting and boring
The upgrade system is obnoxious and horrible
Death is a massive "♥♥♥♥ off" to the player

~Story~
The Quailty of the story is crap. scan items for species X, do the dugeon for species X, repeat 5 times.
"What do you mean 5 times, there are 7 species?"
For some reason the Novakid and Humans dont deserve a dungeon, Hell the novakids dont even get a stone.

The dungeons themselves are actually pretty neat and scale pretty well if you go up an armour teir per dungeon, and its honestly how I would suggest playing the game because else it becomes way to easy, and your only doing it becuase you've ran out of other things to do.

~Worlds~
The worlds are amazing and you will spend hours on them. the first time you pick up this game just from exploring and looting alone there is hours on entertainment and new things to find. The minibiomes make the landscapes for when your not dungoning very interesting and can provide quite good loot

~Building~
Pixel printer.
Break every block alteast once
Scan everything.
Once you;ve taked to mrs grumpy-pants in her hover chair your scanner becomes a torch and everything goes blue. If its blue click it. When you then unlock the abilty to build the pixel printer, you can just buy all your funiture. Its honestly the greatest thing for after you have done the main storyline. There is SO MANY ITEMS that building anything is possible

~Crew/Quests~
Cap yourself out so you can get the highest teir ship, then fire the usless/unwanted ones (Soilders, outlaws, janitors) If your crew have nothnig to interact with they will just stand near the teleporter and look dull. having less crew is easier on your PC and looks better. Questing is really medioca and dont do it unless you want to get crew or easy loot.

~Modding~
Starbound and mods are like lovers. The vanilla is a pretty damn good game but with mods you can add so much cool as hell stuff, or just give yourself creative mode and spawn things in to make building even easier. Strongly suggest.

TL:DR
Scan EVERYTHING, Upgrade a startype after each dungeon, Give yourself tasks to do and get creative. Mod when you run out of things to do

Overall
Brillant a game for creative people
Alright game for explorers
♥♥♥♥ game for story

The only time this game is good if your someone who has alot of friends and alot of time. Its the same dugeons over and over, tehres no twists, theres no danger, the dogeons can be compelted in 4 minuits. the minions they have you can run past untouched, and all the bosses are melle. Theres no FUN to this game.