Hero Staff

It's pretty good. Some mandatory secrets I've only managed to find with trial and error, and stuck trying to figure out how to progress atm. But I like it!

First hour impression, will update once I've finished the game! Hero Staff is a charming indie game that I would definitely buy again! It has some drawbacks but for $5 you're really just taking one day of coffee money and dropping it on an indie game you'll enjoy. Cons: No controller support. This isn't a deal breaker, I've played many indies that lack controller support but controller support is a nice little feature that makes life a little nicer. (JoytoKey is a great workaround) RPG Maker MV icon, once again this isn't a deal breaker just a personal issue. I could tell exactly what engine this was made in by seeing the default RPG Maker MV launcher icon and the main menu we're greeted by. Fun and great games have come out of RPG Maker but taking the time to make it a little more special would go a long ways. The intro cutscene also plays a little weird, it abruptly plays it then at the end it felt like it cut off abruptly as well. Bad tutorial. The tutorial section with the controls is super easy to gloss over. I almost did, if it wasn't for my old school instinct of reading every sign to hopefully find some funny or cryptic text I wouldn't have read any of the in-game controls. I would suggest to show these controls throughout the entire sequence of getting the staff. Some puzzles are really annoying. The blue temple puzzle with the red switches was really annoying. You can't do it on your first try because you have to know where every switch for the entire long puzzle is and you have to draw out your strategy to get them all since multiple of them you have to walk over to get back to an area. If the puzzle was shorter or more forgiving I would've had more fun with it. Pros: Visually the game is really nice and retro. If it wasn't for the two giveaways I wouldn't even have guessed this was made in RPG Maker. The music is also pretty fun, though a longer loop would be appreciated as the loop does tire out after a 10 loops. I like the zoom ins quite a bit and usage of particles. I do not like the world map at all; it wasn't super easy to understand/nice looking at first. Maybe just scaling the size up and making the player head fit within a tile that' better defined it'd be nicer. Gameplay is minimal and fun, you can casually enjoy it unlike the old Zelda games which were really hard. The puzzles are pretty much everywhere as the game says and fun to figure out without being so cryptic and ridiculous you can't figure them out. I don't wanna spoil any of them but they're small things that make you feel good for figuring them out.

Great game! It plays like Fairune (another fantastic game, check it out). Combat in this and Fairune is like in Ys I&II where you just walk over the enemies and your level decides if you get hurt, how much do you get hurt and whether the enemy dies or not. So some places have enemies impossible to kill but who hurt you a lot, some places have enemies that you can kill but who hurt you for 1 or 2 HP and some places have enemies that you kill with them giving you no damage. The combat is not the main attraction of the game. It's mostly about solving puzzles and figuring out secret paths. There are vague hints to things but the game doesn't hold your hand almost at all, ever, and that's what's so great about it. You will feel you are stuck, but when you end up finding a new hidden path or solving a puzzle it feels really good. Now, at this current moment I finally feel like I'm actually really stuck so it could be that's the end for my game :D Tried to get some help from the forum but let's see if the dev or someone else helps. But even in this situation, while wandering around aimlessly, just going through as many screens as possible trying to see what I have missed, I was able to find a couple of new things I had missed, but neither of them helped with what I was trying to achieve. Still it did make me feel that maybe there is a way. It's relatively fast to go around the world, and you will even end up unlocking some teleporters that help you going through the world faster. The game does look and sound a bit cheap and unpolished and amateurish especially compared to the likes of Fairune, but make no mistake, there's a lot of love poured in to this game. It's fantastic gameplaywise and the puzzles end up getting quite tough the further you go and you have to give attention to what you see in the world or you will end up getting stuck in no time. The music sounds like MIDI music, and it perhaps is. While the initial gameplay music gets a bit too repetitive after a while, there are some very good songs playing during the game. Each new area has its own music and a few of them are REALLY good. And again, there's a bit of "unpolished amateurness" in the music but many of them are actually very good compositions and you'll probably end up humming some of them when you are not playing the game. Deaths are pretty rare in this game. Just be patient, grind a bit, use save/heal points efficiently with grinding and you have no problem. In later game there will be some enemies that are impossible to kill and who kill you immediately upon touch, but you are warned about it. Those are the places you end up seeing the Game Over screen, but those screens are really fun to try to get through (and the game over tune is great!). As said, the main challenge in the game is to figure out puzzles and secret paths completely on your own. I'm playing this with and Xbox360 controller and it works well with it. Sometimes you have to tinker around a bit in the menu screen before the controller is fully working, but it works well after that. And the controller only uses the directional and one action button while menu/map/inventory/etc buttons are usable only on the keyboard, so that design seems odd. If you play with the keyboard only then there obviously aren't any problems with that. tl;dr The game looks and sounds a bit unpolished and amateurish but don't let it fool you, it's a FANTASTIC game and if you love games that don't hold your hand you will love this.

Last I checked, Hero Staff does not do well on Steam Deck. It crashes often. But on Windows it works great. Hero Staff is "a world of puzzles" and tons of exploration. And sometimes it is really hard to find just what needs to be done next. But to me it is well worth the effort, and an excellent game. Hero Staff copies the core mechanic of the awesome Fairune. Run your character into an opponent to battle it. If your level is too low you take big damage and don't harm the opponent. If your level is too high you win but don't gain anything. But if you battle foes at just the right level (or one level higher) you win, you take mild damage, and you gain experience toward leveling up. But Hero Staff is definitely not just a quick little Fairune knockoff. I'm not all the way to the end, but I think it has just as much to it as any Fairune game, upcoming Fragment Isles maybe not withstanding. It is of course developed by a different person than Fairune. You can see a different vision in the story and the puzzles. Not better or worse, but different. As for the graphics, the look of Hero Staff I'd say is less beautiful than Fairune, even though it's got a lot going on as far as tidbits moving around the screen. I'm not going to try to decide if it's better or worse than Fairune, though of course it's less original. Fairune 1, Fairune 2 and Hero Staff are all totally awesome retro games well worth my time. I am currently well into the game, and I am royally stuck at the moment. I am not complaining; I am glad the game is challenging. I'll probably find what I need to progress sooner or later. To me this is an excellent game, worth way more than the price (before I got stuck I was 5 hours in); and if you like this then definitely check out Fairune Collection too.