The Dungeon of
Naheulbeuk: The Amulet of Chaos
This game is a satire of computer RPGs. It's played from a birds-eye
point of view and has two modes: (1) running around the dungeon talking
to people, and (2) turn-based combat.
THE GOOD:
- Decently fun and funny original story, if you don't mind the writers
breaking the 4th wall constantly.
- The angry dwarf and airhead elf are quite funny.
- The designers thought of toilets, cleaning staff, and administrative
offices! That's a first.
THE BAD:
- The problem with making a game that mocks bad games is you kind of
have to make your own game bad to have something to make fun of. The
game starts off quite awful, although it does get a lot better fairly
quickly.
- The camera angle is annoying and there's no way to fix it. You are
unable to see things properly no matter which zoom level you pick.
- In combat, the facing mechanic is really weird. Your
character is basically frozen facing one direction until their next
turn. It's bizarre. If they dodge or parry they will turn around to do
so, and then turn back the way they were facing before!
- The front-rank characters have a really hard time stopping enemies
from destroying your back ranks.
- Ranged weapons have improbably short range, putting your weak
back-rank characters at high risk all the time.
- Critical misses in combat are pretty frustrating.
- It's hard to land abilities because NPCs often dodge or make their
saving throw.
- Late game damage effects like poison or fire scale with HPs, but
healing doesn't, which is annoying in the late game.
THE UGLY:
- In combat, I didn't know what buffs or debuffs characters had for
most of the game. It took me forever to figure out that I
needed to middle-click on the character to enable the feature.
- The game froze up once in a shop screen, requiring a restart, but
was otherwise quite stable with no major bugs.