Taking a look at what we have available, I have to say, first off, that I LOVE the silly jump button’s animation. The presentation is overall great with a strong sense of aesthetic and character design. Lovely ladies, all of them, and as you develop it, I think that will only improve.
And now we criticize the RPG part. I have a lot of points to make, but I don’t want you to feel like I’m just crapping all over your work. So before I start I want to say that the game itself is almost spectacular, but a lot of the customizations to RPG Maker’s systems make things tedious or too difficult for what should be a tutorial dungeon.
The battle system clearly had a good amount of thought put into its elemental interactions, but I can’t help but feel it might be a bit too balanced toward the enemies, even with the ability to heal if you have the Fattened status. The first random encounter I had with a fairy killed me because it had the power to take me out in three hits. This might be fixed if the main character wasn’t weak to their attacks?
Healing is currently too conditional and gives enemies too much of a chance to whittle you down, since you don’t quite heal back all of their damage with the weakness applied. This is even worse in multi-enemy encounters.
I think the enemies should probably have higher drop rates on items (if they drop things at all) if you’re going to require puzzle solutions that severely limit the character’s movement space in order to get random encounters. The 2x3 area with the chest, the weight circle, and health hazards all around it is straight up outside of my patience, since I used the meat from the previous chest to heal from a battle on my way to it.
Autosaving after every battle is way too often, and the usual standard “per-room-change” rate that I’ve seen is much more usable.
I don’t love that the map has hazard tiles, especially with long enough reset animations for a complete fadeout before replacing you where you last were. The jump feels like it’s supposed to maybe fix this a little, but the jump doesn’t move you past a stationary obstacle, it just plays the animation instead of taking the step.
So, yes, writing has a solid setup, art is all pretty cute, a lot of the ideas here are great, but there’s a lot of mechanical stuff that makes the gameplay unnecessarily tedious, especially at the start.
I’m developing a game called Dungeon of the Devourer. It’s a RPG Maker game about an orc woman trying to save her village from a magical hunger!
Walk-though guide: Dungeon of the Devourer - Walkthrough
Patch Notes