A linear review

[Nathan Karr]

I warn you, there will be spoilers.

Still here? Okay, good.

In this game a stick figure with a crown gives an unadorned stick figure exactly enough money to buy a weapon and some armor, instructing him to go beat up the person who stole his kingdom's prized treasure.

To the player's right there is an inn which serves no purpose beyond that of wasting money which should be spent on equipment. To the player's left is a shopkeeper who sells exactly two items.

Here, I believe, is where the game's design fails. You see, all but one combination of options available to the player are trap options, and the one non-trap choice is so blatantly obvious there might as well not have been a choice. The game might just as well had the king simply give the player his weapon and suit of armor, then either open up the equipment menu or run a script to auto-equip the things.

If you stay at the inn, you won't have any money left over to buy both the weapon and the armor. You have exactly enough money to buy the weapon and the armor. If you don't have the armor, Boss will kill you before you can do enough damage to beat him. If you don't have the weapon, you can't damage him enough to win before he kills you in spite of your armor.

There are no tradeoffs between buying a high offense or a high defense, with mutliple types of equipment to choose between. There are also no random enemies to grind in order to become more fully prepared for the fight; mathematically you are either fully equipped and capable of winning or under-equipped and incapable of winning. There is no way to recover from a mistake and no risk of a minor foe wearing you down along the way to fight the boss.

So basically, this is the kind of game which you're either going to play for the graphics or for the plot and the game's submission page tells you all you need to know there.