Recent reviews by Daniel

This was my first Siralim game, which I received as part of a bundle.

I thought it would be like a pokemon-style game, but that's not really what it is.

Think of it like a super barebones JRPG with minimal story and lore. There's no real sense of time and place. You live in a castle. Where is the castle? No idea. You can't walk outside and explore (in fact, there is no door!), you can only portal out to a list of small randomly generated map zones that constitute the game's levels.

There's a prologue of sorts, but mostly the game is about going to the aforementioned randomly generated levels, picking up items, and battling creatures with a party of your own creatures. When you clear the map, you go back to the base and set up for the next run. The levels themselves are quite small and just have a bunch of stuff scattered all over them. The areas sometimes have quests to do, like "get x amount of x item" or "Find all 3 tree stumps" or some such thing. You use currency acquired in a particular level set to purchase reputation rewards, and that's the main reason to do all that stuff. Completing a set of levels allows you to progress to the next set, which is typically themed in some way (fire, ice, forest, desert, whatever.)

There are a LOT of monsters to collect and customize. Most of the fun to be had is with theorycrafting, preparation, optimization, and automation. In the early game, you take an active role in the battles because your creatures are limited and the party size is small. Later in the game, you basically don't do anything in combat. The creatures fight on their own based on how you set them up and automate their actions. This is the expected way to play, which differs quite a bit from your standard turn-based JRPG style combat.

If you really like "numbers go up" gameplay and figuring out how to optimize statistics, you will probably like this game. If you're looking for a story, interesting areas, compelling quests, characters, etc., you'll probably bounce off it like I did.

It's definitely a game for a certain type of audience, and that's just not me.

This game is alright, I guess. There's a lot less freedom compared to the other games, though. Traps are very expensive, don't deal enough damage, and the level layouts only allow for certain setups to work. It's not as fun to experiment in this game as the previous games since it's clear that you're supposed to use specific strategies in order to do well. As a result, you're incentivized to just use the same loadouts all the time.

To add insult to injury, tons of the traps have fire-based upgrades that synergize with other traps, then halfway through the campaign they introduce armies of fire-immune enemies that make all those upgrades worthless. No other synergies come close, so it feels like you're being punished for no reason.

I had fun with SOME of the game, and it was kind of nostalgic to use a lot of the old traps and equipment, so I can't say that this game isn't worth playing. It's just frustrating if you've played the first two. The new playable characters are fine and I don't really have much to say about them. The story, as always, doesn't really matter, but it gets the job done I suppose.

I wish I could leave a mixed review, but I'll give it a thumbs up simply because there are enough moments of satisfaction to just barely edge out the frustration and monotony, so pick it up and sale if you're looking for an o.k. way to pass the time on a weekend or something.

Great game, especially for a free RPG Maker title. There's a big world and a lot of content. The combat is a bit simplistic and there's barely any story, but there's enough engaging exploration and charming art to make it very worthwhile. It definitely has an old school feel.

I do wish that it had more substance to the characters you can recruit or perhaps a bit more story. Essentially, you're given four artifacts at the beginning of the game and tasked with visiting the four shrines that make them usable. Once you've done that, you're ready to ascend to the heavens and begin the "cycle" anew. On your journey, you can recruit a variety of characters of different classes to accompany you (but only 4 total party members.) The characters you recruit are basically just stats. They have a portrait that you only see if you open their stat page, a name (which you can change at any time) and no effect or input on the story after they join the party. Aside from maybe one or two random lines (total!) if they're in your party when you talk to a random townie, they're silent for the whole game.

However, the biggest issue I have is that the creator went through so much time and effort to make this game and its big, charming world... and then didn't give the game an ending. There are 3 possible choices you can make at the end of the game that will presumably affect the ending... but there is no ending. So the only thing they do is throw you into optional boss fights, but there's no other difference. No extra scenes. No explanation. No closing story. No matter which option you choose, the game just cuts to credits without any kind of epilogue.

I'm marking it as not recommended, but I think that it actually could be alright with some work. This review is more of a "has potential" than a pure negative. Unfortunately, Steam doesn't have that sort of option.

The game is pretty RNG heavy, but I suppose that's what you expect from a dice game. There's some fun to be had here, but the game suffers from balance and stability issues.

The gameplay is pretty simple, though it took me a few battles to really understand what was happening. If I may make a suggestion here: Make the tutorial happen during actual play. Giving it as a bunch of static images with a lot of text isn't all that helpful. Seeing it all happen in action would be much better.

The actual gameplay is thus:

1. You have a pool of dice (the starting pool is determined by class.) You roll multiple dice during your turn. Sometimes you roll 6, sometimes you roll 4, and I don't know really know why that is. You can have a maximum of 30 dice in your pool and a minimum of 16. It's better to have less dice because you don't really want variable results - more on that in a bit.

2. You roll initiative at the start of every battle, and that determines whether you or your opponent go first at the beginning of each combat round for the entire battle. It has a big effect on combat, for better or worse.

3. You can set up a dice loadout to control what sort of things can come up for you in combat, but that's about the only control you have over anything. You have to manually click the results to use them, and I would assume that this is because automatically attacking would potentially be harmful to you (the enemy might have a counterattack active) but ranged attacks automatically fire without your input. It's kinda weird but you get used to it.

Now for the mechanical issues I have with the gameplay:

Dice probably have too many failures in the early game. It makes for very long and uneventful fights when both sides roll nothing (or things that can't be used.) So it's a lot of just sitting around doing nothing. That could definitely be improved.

Speaking of things that can't be used: Lots of dice are situational to the point that they aren't worth using. Since enemy types are random and highly varied, using dice with lots of melee/magic "steal" on them is basically never a good idea. You also can't use any steal type dice if you lose initiative, making them just 'auto failure' dice because they will never give you a usable result for any battle in which you didn't win initiative. Lastly, if the enemy doesn't use the type of attack you roll steal against, you can't do anything with them. These dice are just a straight up liability.

Ranged attacks in the game fire off immediately after you roll them. This means that if you won initiative, the attacks go through before the enemy can roll their defenses. That's pretty good. However, losing initiative gives the enemy this advantage instead, and that means you'll be taking automatic damage any time the enemy rolls a ranged attack. Not so good. So basically initiative has a big effect on combat but you have no real control over it other than choosing a class that has a larger die. That's yet another issue with the initiative system in this game. To add insult to injury, the final boss gets to roll 1-20 for initiative, but the best you can get as a player is 1-12 (some classes only get 1-8!)

Another downside to ranged attacks is that because they fire automatically, if you roll a heal and ranged attack(s) on the final round of combat, the enemy will die to your auto-shots before you're allowed to do anything, and you won't be able to use the heal you rolled. Boo! I rolled it, I should be able to use it.

You can't adjust your dice loadout without committing to it permanently. You can't just collect dice and decide between battles which ones you want to use because there's no way to put dice into a "reserve" or "inactive" state. If there are dice you don't want to use right now, you just have to destroy them permanently. This makes experimentation less viable and a lot less interesting for the player.

It seems like the only strategy worth using is stacking all of the same 2 or 3 types of dice and nothing else. Because the failure rate is so high early on, you want to maximize getting multiples of the same dice type so you can penetrate defenses (or just deal ANY damage at all.) If you try to do something hybrid with your dice build, it's not gonna work because it's too unpredictable to get enough successes (or any successes at all!) of the same type in order to penetrate enemy defenses. Enemies start using dice with no chance of failure on them (especially bosses) at a certain point, and these are often defense dice, so that just reinforces the requirement of stacking similar dice types in your pool.

I ran into a few bugs and quality of life issues:

At one point late in my first run, I opened a treasure chest that had Healing Touch in it. The game allowed me to pick it up infinitely, so my dice pool had several of this strong healing die. However, once my bag was full, I couldn't burn dice anymore. It seemed to consider me as only having the minimum amount of dice (16) instead of a full bag (30). It did actually show numerically that I had 30 dice and wouldn't let me get more dice, but it also wouldn't let me burn any. This happened very close to the end of the game, and created an annoying issue. I'll talk about that later.

Also, when you open the shop, if your bag is full and you try to buy something, it'll tell you that you need to burn dice to make room, but there's no option to do that from the shop menu. Closing the shop to burn dice will make it impossible to go back to the shop until the next time you randomly get one (and the items won't be the same) so that's not great. It would be nice if you could sell items, but you can't do that either.

I beat the game on my very first run which took about an hour. I was writing this review as I was playing, so I was taking lots of breaks to make notes on what I was observing. The bug that gave me all the healing items didn't occur until 2 or so battles before the final boss, so it didn't affect the run too much. In fact, it probably made it harder because the final boss also heals, so it was a long war of attrition to actually roll enough damage to whittle him down.

With some improvements and bug fixes, I think this game could really be decent, but it's just not there yet. In addition, most (if not all) of the art consists of royalty free assets you can find with a google image search. It's not the most immersive thing if you've seen them before, not to mention the fact that they aren't the same art styles so there's not much consistency to the game's look. I can sort of overlook that, but I thought I'd mention it because graphics and art style are important to some people and they might want to know about it.

I received the game for free (won it in a giveaway) and I don't regret playing it for the low, low price of nothing. If I had paid money for it, though, I think I would have been a bit more critical of the experience.

First impression: Super Meat Boy clone with floaty, stiff controls. I started getting used to them pretty quickly, but it still just doesn't feel as snappy as it should.

I played this game for less than 10 minutes, but every single instance of dialog and text contained spelling and/or grammatical errors. Text is very blurry in full screen, so you either have to just deal with it or play it in a teeny tiny window. Lastly, the buttons in the options interface sometimes have no text on them, and even when they do, the text isn't centered to fit within the borders of the button.

The game recommends using a gamepad, but there's no way to change the button layouts. You're stuck with the default unless you use some kind of third party workaround.

The dev really should hire someone to proofread the English. There are too many errors and a lot of awkward phrasing.
Control customization should be implemented.
Greater resolution support for full-screen (especially where text is concerned) would be a huge improvement.

Pros:
+ Great atmosphere, pixel art, and animation.
+ New scenes with your family play out each time you die or return home.
+ Good music, sound, and voiced narration of scenes.
+ Despite being pretty content rich, it doesn't overstay its welcome. You can finish the main story in around 14-15 hours.
+ Several themed dungeons. Lots of roguelikes just have one dungeon, but this game has 3 dungeons with sub-areas in each.
+ Lots of side stuff to do if you want to unlock some extras -- multiple runs of the the same dungeon are worthwhile due to random quests and events you find on different runs.
+ The meta progression system applies to all characters. In addition, when you level up a particular character, they unlock passives that affect every other character. So there is some incentive to level the less desirable characters if you're so inclined.

Cons:
- The main story is a bit bland. Evil corruption is spreading over the land (literally, it's black goo). We've seen it a million times.
- There are 7 playable characters, but you'll probably only want to play Linda (the archer).
- Melee is completely inferior to ranged, but 4/7 of the playable characters are melee, and one is kind of a mid-range hybrid.
- If you have a favorite character, that's just too bad. The game has a mechanic that prevents you from playing the same character too much. Their max HP will go down by an increasing percentage with each run, and you'll have to play a different character for a few runs to cure it. I found this particularly annoying because like I said before, the melee characters have a much rougher time being successful. They're just not fun to play, either.
- Enemies have a bit too much health. I maxed out the damage trait and I still felt like the common enemies were a bit too tanky.
- Too many enemies. They just rush you in huge fast-moving groups, sometimes with ranged foes pelting you at the same time. This is the reason melee sucks. You have to kite in this game, and kiting as a melee is inefficient and doesn't feel satisfying. Kiting as ranged works great by comparison.

Overall, I liked the game. I managed to complete it during a steam promotion when it was free to try, so it gets some bonus points for that.

Boring, slow, and not scary.

The game is essentially a tedious walking simulator where you have to check the map every 5 seconds because the 2D layout of the levels doesn't correspond well to the actual orientation of the building. It's confusing to navigate and 90% of rooms have nothing in them. The pixel art is ugly and it can be hard to tell what you're even looking at half the time, so you just wander around looking for the pop-up button prompts to interact. That's all the game is. Walk from one interaction point to the next until its over. Sometimes you might need to run or hide from a blob of pixels, but that's it.

For some reason, the game is really laggy in seemingly random locations. I don't know what engine they made this on, but they didn't optimize the game very well for it.

I enjoyed the game for the first few hours, noting that the gameplay was a bit slow, but otherwise manageable. That changed, however, when I started expanding outward on the map. The pace of the game became even slower. Moving units around is like pulling teeth. Each has to be moved individually on the map, but you don't even know where you're going yet on a new map.

Every time you go to a new area, you know that there are enemies there.. but you don't know where they're located. So you have to navigate the entire map in turn-based mode as though you were already in combat. It's beyond tedious.

Combat is a real slog. You'll often be walking around trying to find an enemy, only to have them pop out from behind a tree and immediately have the upper hand. You can sneak around in the trees, but this makes the game EVEN SLOWER because you have to spend double movement points to sneak. Speaking of trees, the maps are choked full of them. They provide cover, but the mechanics of it are not explained. Sometimes you can shoot people who are behind them, other times you can't hit them no matter how high your marksmanship skill is. Even shooting things out in the open can be an exercise in frustration. Your troops miss SO often, but the enemy hits you with little effort. The only counter to this is to get VERY close before you shoot, but you'll take a bunch of damage getting there.

That might be okay if not for the fact that taking any damage at all renders a unit defective for the rest of the day. They suffer all kinds of penalties, and you can't heal their health in the field. You can only stop the bleeding. They're going to have to take a day (or more) off, wherein you still have to pay them. Money is tight in the game and you can lose if you don't expand fast enough, but if you try too hard, your guys will get messed up and have to sit days out. It's a catch 22 -- unless you play (you guessed it) very very slowly. Overall this is just a really tedious game that was probably pretty fun and revolutionary in 1995, but doesn't hold up well by today's standards.

I didn't enjoy this game, but I wanted to. I really tried to.

I'm not going to talk about the graphics, because I don't really care about those.
Gameplay and story are what I care about in a game like this.


You can't directly pick up objects in the environment. You have to walk over to the general area something is in, open your inventory window, and loot the floor. I kid you not.

Most items in the game are entirely useless. There's junk everywhere, and it serves no purpose. 99% of it has no description. It's just a useless thing sitting there, waiting for some fresh-faced new player to pick it up thinking they might be able to sell it (there's no vendor for the first hour of the game, but plenty of "loot" to mistakenly pick up thinking it might have some purpose. It does not. Rope? Useless. Iron Bars? Useless.) Why put so much clutter in the game!? Just make it static scenery or something.

Even some of the items you actually can put to use have no value, even though they most certainly should. Basic weapons like daggers, javelins, trade commodities, etc. There's no consistency as to what has value and what doesn't. A bar of iron is worthless, but a block of incense has value. There's no rhyme or reason to it.

Speaking of value, the economy makes little sense. The game tells you the value of an item in its tooltip, but every single shop in the entire world buys everything from you for only 20% of the listed value. There is no variation to that. Their selling prices, however, vary from person to person. If every merchant in the game buys everything for the exact same value... shouldn't that be the value in the tooltip?


Quests are very irritating to obtain and complete. You have to talk to every NPC and exhaust every dialog option in order to possibly get a hidden sidequest somewhere at any given location. Not that you really have a choice in the matter, since all NPCs have dialog trees that just loop until you've asked everything. You have to exhaust every dialog option of every topic before you can move on to the next one.

Most NPCs look exactly the same. You might see 10 or 15 of the same guy walking around, and you'll have to hold the shift key to see their names and check to see if they actually have one other than "Commoner" or some such. Even the ones that do might not actually ever speak to you or have a purpose. It's kind of frustrating after a while.

Most quests can't just be completed in a straightforward way. You have to wait for something else to allow you to actually do it, but the quest itself should be enough to allow you to have the option to TRY.

For example, you might be asked, in no uncertain terms, to go and do something in a region that is specifically named to you, and given directions as to where it is located. Great! I'll go there right now! Only... you can't. The location is arbitrarily locked behind a progression unrelated to the quest. But it's in the same region you're in... so you start thinking that you should maybe just walk through every exit of the zone to trigger the next zone being available to travel to, right? That's pretty intuitive. No, that doesn't work (except when it does) so basically you have no idea when a quest you get can actually be completed, because the logical next step to take in that quest simply can't be taken yet... for... reasons. Reasons that are unknown to you.

Speaking of side quests, there are a ton of them that you can't do... yet. And the game loves to tell you this. You do a fetch quest for someone, go back, ask them if they need more help... and they tell you to come back later when you're stronger. This happens CONSTANTLY. And it's not like they give you any sort of benchmark for this strength level they apparently think you need. So every time you gain a level, you think "Oh, I should see if I can get that quest now!" and walk alllll the way over to the quest giver and ask: "Am I strong enough yet?" and the invariable reply is: "Nope." and that's it. You just have to keep checking back. Argh. Let ME decide if I want to take on a quest. If it's too hard, I'll make that decision myself to put it off until later. How would some rando even know what I'm capable of, anyway? I'm supposed to be a Hand of Avadon! I can do whatever I want, because I work for the man.


The game really pounds this roleplaying scenario into you at every turn: You work for Redbeard. You're his enforcer. You have big boy authority in these lands and even outside of it, because nobody messes with Avadon. And yet... people constantly mouth off to you and just tell you that you straight up can't do things. It's really at odds with the whole vibe of the role you're supposed to be playing.

Everything is tied to main quest progress. The game is pretty linear in that sense. You pretty much can't deviate from the story for most of it, because your blank slate of a main character is just a lap dog for the clearly evil regime that they've joined for no particular reason, and been given a high-ranking position and authority to speak on behalf of this regime... also for no particular reason that you're aware of for 90% of the game.

There are choices, but most of them are illusions. You can't really affect the outcome of most things. There are lots of people who complain about one quest in particular in which a sympathetic creature cannot be saved no matter what you do, but the dialog options for interactions with it are very misleading, making you think that its possible to affect its fate. In actuality, no such possibility exists. What makes this worse is that an NPC that you consult prior to meeting the creature rather explicitly makes it seem like nonviolence is an option. This sort of bait and switch design/writing happens all the time in the game. It prods you along its linear storyline the entire way, giving you lots of little moments where you think you've got a choice, but you don't. There is one major choice at the end of the game, and it's probably the only significant one worth mentioning.

The companions you can bring with you are hardly worth mentioning. They're a bag of stats that helps you get through combat, and sometimes they'll throw in a little comment that doesn't have any effect on anything. They don't feel like real people. You can't even really progress their stories for a long, long time. When you go back to Avadon, they say the same things they said at the beginning of the game! It takes SO long before they develop in any way, and by that point you don't really care. They're not all that likable, which doesn't help matters much.


It's pretty limited. Skill trees require you to invest heavily in prerequisites to get higher skills, which seems normal, but then you see how they're laid out and it makes no sense. For example, in order to be good at ranged weapons, you have to basically max out two melee skills. You can't just choose to be an archer. This also means that you don't even get good at using a ranged weapon until much later in the game. Why is that, you might ask? Well, because ranged combat is actually vastly superior to melee. You can't move much at all when you're engaged, so your choice of targets and ability to help allies is massively suppressed if you're melee. You also can't move after you've attacked or cast a spell. You can only move before you do that. Why? Not explained. What it means, however, is that you really just want to use ranged options all the time so that you can focus fire priority targets and ignore the endless waves of things that charge you to stop you from moving around the battlefield.

Spells are super limited. You barely get any variety with them, and half of them aren't unlocked until the late stages of the game. To make matters worse, spells have massive cooldowns. I'm out of space, but I could go on and on.

Betrayer is a horror stealth/fps game set during the English colonization of North America in around the 17th century. You play as a mysterious silent protagonist who finds themselves stranded on the shore of the new world with no real direction or clue as to how you got there. Through a series of notes, clues, and other interactions, you piece together a mystery of supernatural tragedy. Along the way, there are several adversaries which seek to destroy you, such as ghastly undead Spaniard raiders. It's definitely a unique take on an underutilized setting for video games.

Each map requires you to explore it in both the daytime and an otherworldly night version (via the use of a bell object that you must ring to make the transition occur.) Some things can only be accomplished or completed by switching from one version of the map to the other.


+ Fairly tight gameplay. Stealth works pretty well in both range and melee, so you've got options. Weapon ranges and reload times are actually a pretty big tactical consideration.

+ Black and white graphics give the game a very stylistic feel, and the few elements of red that are used for most enemies in the game really stand out.

+ The developers give you the option to turn the color on based on your personal preferences. I didn't turn it on, personally, but I always appreciate being given more options.

+ (Mostly) reasonable achievements.


- The story is pretty weak. There are definitely elements of something good in there, but a lot of the notes and dialog for individual characters aren't related to the overall plot -- it feels like wasted space rather than a fleshed out world. Many of the stories also have the same underlying premise (murder, revenge, etc.), so by the time you get to the halfway point of the game, you're already kind of bored of it.

- There are 7 maps in the game, and you do the exact same thing on every single one of them. Look at the map, go to the points that are marked, collect whatever is there, and then once you've done everything you can do during the day, finish the map by ringing the bell and doing its "otherworld" tasks. It's just a lot of running around and collecting items or talking to NPCs in one place so you can talk to them in another. It's busywork, basically.

- Backtracking. You have to do it to complete the game. If you want to get all the achievements, you'll have to do even more. The fast travel system helps a lot here, but it's still a chore.

- The Antagonist achievement requires killing 1,000 enemies. After playing the game and getting every other item and achievement possible, and being at the point where the game was right about to end, I had still only killed 600 enemies. The remaining 400 enemies took an extra 4 hours of grinding because enemies only spawn in groups of around 2-4 each. The larger battles in the game do not respawn, so they can't be farmed. I did find a way to grind out a spawn of 5 of them which I could then reload the game and kill again and again, but that still took 4 hours. That achievement should probably be closer to 500 kills, and it's the only unreasonable one in the game. The rest of them are quite easy to get in the course of normal play.

- The game is really short. You can see that I have 22 hours logged, but I was at the end of the game and had every achievement except for Antagonist completed by 12 hours. After the 4 hour grind to get that achievement, I was at 16 hours played. I messed around a bit with the game after completing it, and toyed with the idea of playing it a second time, but I realized that there was no real difference, and the endgame choices you can make also don't really do anything. If you didn't care about achievements, you could probably complete the game in 8 hours or less.

- The ending isn't very good. It's quite abrupt and then it's over, which feels rather unsatisfying and a bit confusing. After the game ends, it just starts over and dumps you into "free mode" where you can do whatever you want. If you already have all the achievements (like I did) you'd have no real reason to keep playing in maps you've already 100% cleared.

However:

The developers decided to put half of the ending into a dialog that you can only see in free mode, which is such an awkward way to do it, not to mention it's highly missable as a result! It's such a bizarre design choice. It doesn't even really explain much, either. It really just adds to the unsatisfying feeling of getting to the end of this game and realizing that there just won't be any answers or solution. It's almost like you were never even there at all.


Despite its flaws, Betrayer is an interesting game if only for the novelty of its setting and some pretty fun combat/stealth mechanics. If you're looking for a game that can give you a few hours of entertainment and some (relatively) easy achievements to complete, it's absolutely worth playing. If you're looking for an atmospheric horror story, this might not satisfy you as much as other titles in the genre.