Quirky Indie RPGs - Depression is optional

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I played the House of Necrosis demo. Pretty fun.

If you die, you lose everything you're carrying and your levels, but keep spells you've learned. If you use an item to escape, you can stash things for future use.

Monsters can be used against each other. You can lure a slow-moving zombie into a hallway to block more dangerous monsters, or bait a ranged attack then let a monster move into the line of fire. The first boss takes some careful movement to beat.
 
HiveDull said:
Backrooms RPG is getting a demo, slotted for April 16th
https://youtube.com/watch?v=tcV0G9hJYdI
Dev posted a comment apologizing for the delay as "every year the game has been getting bigger and better." Can't archive right now because mobile fag, but dev also swears that "there has been zero development issues."
If it's not a problem, then when does he feel the need to address it? I can only wait for April 16th to see if it's actually good or not.
Click to expand...

I feel like this game is going through some hell of a feature creep, watching the trailer and it's clear they keep redrawing a lot of stuff and adding more mechanics. It could be worse but we have to see the demo to know.

btw i played

>Slumbernapped

This game is about a boy in dreamworld where you see the person who invented the dream machine and stuff, it feels very old disney fantasy in a sense. After our brother is "slumbernapped" (kidnapped within a dream) by accident after a nightmare drone was trying to steal a dream (they look like gold jellyfishes) we get separated from our dad and must help The First Dream and the guy who made him.

The demo is very pretty and well animated but it feels incomplete and i didn't finish as i was not only not having fun but i got softlocked inside a room where the exit prompt doesn't exist anymore. if i had to complain

1-The game lacks that "juice" that makes the videogame fun. Like, when you win a fight, it just cuts back to moving without ANY TRANSITION. It just swaps back frame zero with no sfx or anything. I don't think there is even a victory fanfare. Another is that you have a "chase sequence" with the nightmare drone that slowly moves to you and if it touched you you just spawn back at the start with no sfx or anything, and after running i feel on the hole (you're supposed to jump far and start a cutscene) and it didn't respawn so it walked backwards to me. I don't know if its just me my the music is so low and my jumps make no noise and neither does the heavy machinery around me so it just sounds like a quiet lame game.

2-The gameplay is kinda weak. You pick one of 3 cards and the starter "deck" is literally just punch 1,2,3, kick 1, 2 3 and slap 1, 2, 3. They say if you execute cards with 1 2 3 in order you "get a combo" but i did and nothing happened (that was only added later in a demo update?). These cards are all basic atacks but in this game you must also press the button at the right time to attack and defend to boost yourself and i have to wonder WHY.

Why does every indie dev thinks this is good. I wanted to play a card rpg, why does it do this. Even when i check the card it says "Minigame: N/A" so why does it have a minigame. That also implies other cards will have more involved minigames and i don't get it, at that point just make a minigame game, not a card game.

3-I don't get healed on saving so i just died. You can revive from the same place you died if you pay half your money but you can disable that. I don't know why it's like this, i know we start with some heal items but i didn't see any healing spot.

4-This is one of those games that talks too much and it's stops being funny. It's weird how it starts with combat tutorial then has you walk and talk exposition on the world for 30 minutes, then it says "go find the 3 slumber cats and turn on the 7 statues".

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(i got softlocked rip. When i just over the door i see the button prompt but i can't enter while on air.)

Either way it's a good reminder that you can't just have some good pixelart on your indie game.

I did watch some fungerlikes but maybe that's better for the funger thread? Some other games i saw were:

Toada Brava is cartoony hand draw turn based rpg inspired by chrono trigger. It does the same mistake all these indie games inspired by chrono trigger does, having timed attacks and blocks to slow down what should be a fast and cool combat. Will have a kickstarter.




Lie of Caelum seems to be a xenocross inspired indie game. For some reason the dev decided to do the game in episodes, which something i think is godawful for indie rpgs not named Deltarune.

It does have a FUNNY AS HELL trigger warning tho, or should i say "extreme trigger warning"



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(this video has 49 views and this channel has one sub)

Thankfully this game (episode?) is actually FREE. It's next chapter or sequel is called Lie of Caelum: Spirit and is in development.


(this is from a different new channel that they post many gameplay videos. The title is a little self jerking)

The gameplay shown on steam is very messy and flashy, to the point you see more bright SFX than the enemy or player character, something i also saw on 5th era.

Next is Granser, from the skautfold series dev. Skautfold is a weird action rpg franchise, i actually played the first game before it was a franchise and the dev decided he would make a different game for each boss in that game cuause they were his OC mascots. This game seems to feature his OCs too???



Oh yes, it's ACT 1. AND it's not finished despite selling itself. Terrible idea. Anyway, it has minigames (thats quirky) and a unique "minimalist" artstyle. It doesn't look great even if it's asthethic. I guess it aimed for PS1 style but accidentally landed on rwby OC fanimation. Despite that, i trust this dev to finish it cause they made many games at least.

This reminds me of another indie jrpg made by one person that released in episodes too and isn't finished. I had to find out and it was Light Fairytale, a game i never played. The first episode released in 2019 and episode 3 released a month ago... in early acess...



It seems inspired by ff7? This game doesn't look that great and the tiny chibis with canned animations look funny. It has a certain "weeabo aura" from the trailers and some jokes. Not helped by the fact i never seen a single male character other than the protagonist.

I was going to end but then spotted at random another indie rpg THAT IS ONLY CHAPTER 1, but this one much qurikier. And it alleges to have no battles. It's only a demo i guess and can be downloaded on the itcho link.



In other rpg news, Look Outside was updated AGAIN and it doesn't look like the dev is done with it.

Oh yeah, i actually managed to finally pirate Silver Daze and i'm playing it. It's very good but also very repetitive as you basically do the same gameplay and story loop over and over for hours. I'll post my thought once i finish it.
 
LucasSomething said:
I feel like this game is going through some hell of a feature creep, watching the trailer and it's clear they keep redrawing a lot of stuff and adding more mechanics. It could be worse but we have to see the demo to know.
Click to expand...
Every single dev update this guy does irks me.
The initial concept, I feel, has been lost at this point. I think the guy had a very solid survival horror RPG about a kid that gets lost in the backrooms, but that's been thrown away to create a amalgamation of fear and hunger, earthbound, and undertale.

For some reason, there's:
  1. Sanity levels
  2. Hunger
  3. Deployable traps (both the player and the enemy)
  4. Forced Shmup sections in boss fights (you're forced to leave turn based combat to hunt down the boss while it pelts you with bullets)
  5. Stealth
I can't archive his posts from TikTok or Bluesky, so I'm sorry for not linking them and archiving properly. Trust me when I say that I'm doing everyone a favor since the guy's voice is a little annoying. Having to hear the same "in my indie RPG, you can do X" is tiring.
Also, just gonna place a bet here: there's gonna be a tranny character in the game.
 
Sorry for the double-post. I went ahead and played the The Backworld Demo and wanted to share my thoughts on the game. I'm not as coherent as Lucas nor am I focused so I hope my ramblings can give insight on the game as it currently stands.

Anyways, with further ado, here's my reactions:
First impression on booting up the game is that the main menu music sucks. I don't think I'll be listening to the soundtrack for this game if the main menu music isn't memorable.

Anyways, here's the choices for starting a new game:
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There's fucking 3 choices to pick. Favorite part is that the choice menu cuts off the text dialogue (seen in my first screenshot). I chose Normal, Adventurer, and Open Map just for ease of access.

After a brief cutscene, we're presented the overworld:
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I will say that I like the sprite work. It looks clean. This is a forced tutorial, you can't really interact with much here and there's only one way forward - Up with text detailing what to do. There's an enemy here and we're prompted to press X to attack. This brings us to actual combat:
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Tutorial voice tells me exactly what all the buttons do which I personally don't like. I wish it just plopped me down into the game instead. The fight is quick, but I noticed that the BATTLE WIN music sucks. Sounds like a dying trumpet. I don't know if that's intentional or not. We'll see.

We talk to some esoteric mannequin and then we wake up in the real world:
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Your friends all go inside the storm drain (they call it a sewer, but I'm like 10% sure this thing is a storm drain). I decide not to go into it and instead climb the ladder which, according to our friends, we fell down from which caused us to briefly get knocked out. I'm fairly surprised that I can actually climb the ladder here and adventure forth.

You can see that there's something a little messed up going on in the town if you explore:
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There's two NPCs that make reference to people watching from the trees, but it's a nice touch that you can actually encounter them yourselves. The balloon is a reference to the backrooms, I think. I'm not a backrooms expert so I'm just going to believe that I'm right.

Moving on, we get more tutorials via text boxes:
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We encounter our friends and they jump in a mysterious hole that seems to vanish and reappear. Naturally, we jump in after them. After going down some sewer stairs(?), we get brought into the dead mall:
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As an aside, I'm really liking the vibe of the game so far. Oh, I forgot to mention that EXP is tied to collecting these floating souls on the overworld.

We explore a little bit, I fall down an obvious hazard, and take damage. Next, without any cutscene or input by the MC, the lights turn off and the music stops playing. This is the best part of the demo for me. I really like that this happened suddenly
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A little more putzing around and we catch up to one of our friends: Heidi. She gets into a speck of trouble and gets attacked by two slendermen. We dispatch of them quickly though.

Heidi mentions that we have to report this to the Hero Agency which I guess are just the psychic cops? We move to the next room and encounter a dead body:
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Our new objective is to find the Sppedster friend to get out of the mall.

This is where they introduce the stealth mechanic to us. It reduces our field of vision while reducing the enemies' awareness range. As mentioned before, we do not level up by defeating enemies. This makes every non-boss encounter a waste to our resources. This wouldn't be as bad as it seems; HOWEVER, you cannot draw enemies from their initial spawn zone since they'll just respawn back. Take a look at this map:
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I'm in the backrooms proper now and EVERY SINGLE corner has some sort of bad lying in wait that I can't just stealth past since they attack once you get ass-to-ass with them. I've opted to just run past everything, but there's also floor and wall enemies that ambush you when you get to close to them.

My sanity is pretty low at this point and I found it cool that the characters start to shake, but I couldn't get them to do it again so I'm not sure if this was a bug or not.

We follow the Speedster's footsteps to this cheeseman(?) who wants us to play a quiz to move forward:
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He wants us to push blocks into their PROPER hole. Obviously every block goes into the square hole, RETARD. DO IT AGAIN >:C

Alright, shortly after you get past this cheese man you encounter a cheese clown. Now, he's different from the other enemies because he's red which means if he grabs you it's an instant game over. He grabbed me and brought me back to the puzzle cheese man. I super duper do not want to any more of this game. If my ramblings meant anything and make you want to play more, sure man. Go ahead and live your life. I just can't play anymore.
 
Cursed nuzlocke roguelite Pokemon-SMT Hybrid, Lost Totem Trajipon! release:
This game was announced 2 weeks ago, and considering it's description there is probably some ARG tied to it.
 
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