Legend of Candlewind: Nights and Candles
What can I say about this.. Simply a failure.
The game wanna emulate great games like Legend of Grimrock or similar ones... but it fails for everything.
But now let's see how I came to this conclusion.
An RPG in which there isn't any kind of character creation or opportunity to custom them, in my opinion, is not an RPG.
You start your "journey" with four pre-generated characters, quite similar and without personality. This is everything.
A good RPG game you should be able to travel in another world and become part of an exciting adventure in which everything seems so alive; but as I told before, this game is everything but good and so the plot is exactly ten line of text. Nothing more.
After these ten line of text you begin to explore a dungeon, without knowing anything. You don't know who are two of the four party members and you don't know how to play at all... You just need to use your imagination.
In order to equip an item you have to left-click on it, click on "use" and then drag it on the hand of the character; and if you own many objects of the same kind (like torches) you need to split them before being able to use them. And even if this game is a turn-based dungeon-crawling, the management of your resources is a really boring. Everything here is all but user-friendly.
This game is just a set of images put together without sense.. And without ANY kind of animation... I also tried to look at the options but... Absolutely nothing! The options don't exist. Don't misunderstand me, I love old-school paper games... but here monsters seems made of paper and appear so trivial and false.
About monsters, problems are almost endless. In the first part of the game they are only goblin and orcs, and when you spot them, it will take three or four turns before they reach you. Paralytic goblins of paper. But if you try to hit them with a bow you will always miss them; you can use just few spells before running out of mana. So you simply sit and wait for those paralytic goblins to come near you.
Oh yes...one more thing about combats: enemies will face you one by one.. fat paralytic goblins of paper that can't fight you more than one at time in the tunnel.
Even the doors are a problem: I wandered about twenty minutes just to understand how they work.
I arrived in front of a door and I saw a very big lock; I clicked on it and the game said to me: "this door works with a key". I tried to click also on the door, but nothing happened. So I spent many minutes going around all the level, looking for the key. Then I discovered that the frustration is the key: I didn't know if I should crash a book on the screen of my pc, but I just decided to crash the annoying face of my characters on the door and... .it worked!! The solution was walking forward, just like the door didn't exist at all! Even here the lack of animations is disturbing... Is it so difficult to put a simple animation of the door opening, distinguishing between an open door image and a closed door one? I wont say anything else.
This game has good intentions: it could have been a good deal for old-school dungeon-crawling rpgs, but it has too many problems and really can't be funny or immersive.
The game wanna emulate great games like Legend of Grimrock or similar ones... but it fails for everything.
But now let's see how I came to this conclusion.
An RPG in which there isn't any kind of character creation or opportunity to custom them, in my opinion, is not an RPG.
You start your "journey" with four pre-generated characters, quite similar and without personality. This is everything.
A good RPG game you should be able to travel in another world and become part of an exciting adventure in which everything seems so alive; but as I told before, this game is everything but good and so the plot is exactly ten line of text. Nothing more.
After these ten line of text you begin to explore a dungeon, without knowing anything. You don't know who are two of the four party members and you don't know how to play at all... You just need to use your imagination.
In order to equip an item you have to left-click on it, click on "use" and then drag it on the hand of the character; and if you own many objects of the same kind (like torches) you need to split them before being able to use them. And even if this game is a turn-based dungeon-crawling, the management of your resources is a really boring. Everything here is all but user-friendly.
This game is just a set of images put together without sense.. And without ANY kind of animation... I also tried to look at the options but... Absolutely nothing! The options don't exist. Don't misunderstand me, I love old-school paper games... but here monsters seems made of paper and appear so trivial and false.
About monsters, problems are almost endless. In the first part of the game they are only goblin and orcs, and when you spot them, it will take three or four turns before they reach you. Paralytic goblins of paper. But if you try to hit them with a bow you will always miss them; you can use just few spells before running out of mana. So you simply sit and wait for those paralytic goblins to come near you.
Oh yes...one more thing about combats: enemies will face you one by one.. fat paralytic goblins of paper that can't fight you more than one at time in the tunnel.
Even the doors are a problem: I wandered about twenty minutes just to understand how they work.
I arrived in front of a door and I saw a very big lock; I clicked on it and the game said to me: "this door works with a key". I tried to click also on the door, but nothing happened. So I spent many minutes going around all the level, looking for the key. Then I discovered that the frustration is the key: I didn't know if I should crash a book on the screen of my pc, but I just decided to crash the annoying face of my characters on the door and... .it worked!! The solution was walking forward, just like the door didn't exist at all! Even here the lack of animations is disturbing... Is it so difficult to put a simple animation of the door opening, distinguishing between an open door image and a closed door one? I wont say anything else.
This game has good intentions: it could have been a good deal for old-school dungeon-crawling rpgs, but it has too many problems and really can't be funny or immersive.