Review: The Black Heart of Exile

Spoonweaver · Post by **Spoonweaver** » Sun Feb 19, 2012 4:58 am

The graphics and music for this game were bad.So first thing first, I understand style design making the game red and black to mimic the old Virtual boy graphics. But perhaps the developer should have considered that the virtual boy failed in part because of the very graphics they sought to mimic. The red and black hurts my eyes a little and I ended up adjusting my screen before actually playing the game in any sort of depth. Secondly, The The music is kind of annoying to me. I'm not sure where the developer got the music, but they should have left it there. It just sounds like a bunch of random noises that together vaguely make a musical rhythm. I know I'm being a bit harsh on the music choice, but after downloading such a massive file I'd like to at least be presented with a good reason for the file size.

Now let's move on to gameplay. This game seems to be like one of those popular roguelike indie games, in the way that you make your character and a bunch of other choices like gear and such at the beginning and then hope for the best. It's too bad the dungeon isn't randomized at all. However, I guess that would only serve to raise the already high difficulty rating on this game. The first couple of fights I ran into I lost, I wasn't even really sure what I did wrong. It took me about 4 tries till I really understood that I was simply going too far too fast. This game seems to just be designed to be as hard as possible. It's very unforgiving and basically expects you to reply it many many times.

Beating this game would truly be a feat, but as of today I have not achieved that feat. I just have no real urge to play the game. It's just not a fun experience. The game smacks you with crude graphics style, and then laughs at you with it's strange music. Then, it taunts you with it's character choices, while finishing you off with it's difficulty curve. This is not a good game, it's an evil game.

I wouldn't recommend this game to you, unless you hate yourself.

SCORE: 2/5