Get To The Gate

+ Dialogues crack a smile on my face. - You may find yourself running for a few minutes to a place you died last time and... die the very same way... a few more times. Well, if you are as dumb as I am :)

I like this game, I give it a thumbs up, but if I could put a giant asterisk next to it, I would. I enjoyed the gameplay. It's all over the place, but it comes together. It's a dungeon crawler... almost. You have finite mana, enemies are in fixed locations, and there's no combat RNG. Going back to town refreshes your mana but it also respawns all the enemies. So, in a way, it's a puzzle game... almost. How do you get through a fight while conserving as much mana as possible? You have a shield that reduces damage from the front-only, so you also have to avoid getting surrounded. And boss fights are their own puzzle. You'll also gather equipment that upgrades your shield, your weapon, and gives you spells, which gives you new solutions to the combat puzzles. So it's also an RPG... almost. Equipment management isn't very deep, But what's there is still good. And because of the gameplay it has a "just one more time" quality to it. The first map is very good, quite non-linear, lots to explore. The later maps are not as good unfortunately, they get more linear and there's just less to explore. As a silly metric, there's like half as many keys for level 2 as there are for level 1, and basically no keys for level 3. Took me 8 hours to complete the game. Now, the reason I would put a giant asterisk next to this game is because it is extremely janky. There's a lot: - Basic settings like audio volume and key rebinding are not present. - The UI is pretty clunky to navigate and look at. - There are a lot of map quirks. A lot of fake doors. Sometimes the map will stop you from walking off to instant death, sometimes it won't, it's very arbitrary. There's a random door on map 1 you can walk through one side, but you can't go back, even though it's open and there's nothing blocking you. None of these quirks are game-breaking, but you will be noticing them a lot. - The game only allows auto-saving, and it only autosaves when you enter town, so you will lose a LOT of progress to oops sudden deaths. - I do like the silly tone of the writing but I wouldn't say it's good writing. It needs some editing. - The aesthetic is very generic and feels mishmashed together. Basically, you should pick up this game if you really like the gameplay (and are willing to overlook everything else for the sake of gameplay). The demo is a good representative of the game, give it a try if you're not sure!