I highly recommend this game to all those who want to have a more wholesome game and bemoan that so often we can just solve things by violence. In fact, that is one of the main ethical points of the protagonist: he doesn’t want to use violence. The problem is just, the world is ending and a hero is needed. And what is a hero who doesn’t wield a sword and uses that sword? Well, play this game and find out if the protagonist can stay true to their convication or not.
The protagonist is a bard or in fact The Bard, no other name given. Every problem the bard encounters is solved by what the bard can do best: singing. This is represented by you selecting the note for his singing via a radial menu, using either mouse or gamepad stick. The developers managed that this simple mechanic didn’t feel annoying to me over the roughly 10 hours playtime. Instead they reused/recontextualized it in different ways multiple times, so that it doesn’t felt overused. In general this is an easy game without really difficult parts besides some rythm parts. But even then you don’t need to hit the right note by ear, it is shown which note to hit like in other rythm games.
It is sometimes a silly game, but silly in a wholesome way. Where I often couldn’t stop smiling due to the siliness. Like who has ever heard of singing coffee pirates? Or the fact that there is a dedicated dance button, which you can press nearly at all time, making some cutscenes a bit less serious. It feels similar in a way to Night in the Woods regarding the atmosphere and talks between the main characters.
This game is not however for people who want to have action sequences, a realistic graphic or can’t stand some silliness in their games.
I’ve recently been thinking of how I hate RPGs where if you have a choice, it’s between obviously bad and obviously good outcome. Bonus points when it’s determined by a single dialogue option at the end.
So I came up with a concept of an RPG where every quest has multiple solutions and every single one of them turns out disastrously for everyone involved. Like I’d love to see some real gut-punches there. The only way to avoid that would be to not accept the quest in the first place. If you don’t, after some in-game time passes you get to hear how the situation resolved itself nicely without your involvement. The kicker? Most if not all XP would come from quest rewards, so in order to not cause harm to everyone you meet, you’d have to essentially do a challenge run.
Definitely an interesting concept. The hard part would be to make it still interesting for the player to continue or better restart and also to keep it hidden, so that the player will reach this conclusion by themselves. Too oftena nice mechanic like that is already given in the marketing material, underscoring every emotional impact it could have ever had.