[i]HorrorVale[/i] is an incredible horror-themed (but not a horror) game that is oozing with love and passion. It is clear just how much care and thought was put into it, with so many details littered around. The world is rich and engaging, and the game does a commendable job of making each party member feel unique. Games with an expansive cast of playable characters like this often have issues with fleshing out those not involved in the immediate plot (if you want a recent example of this, see [i]Octopath Traveller 0[/i]. In [i]HorrorVale[/i], each non-core party member has two sidequests and will semi-frequently chime in if they're in your party. Furthermore the game has "moments" which are effectively dedicated party chats for specific party compositions. It's not necessarily perfect - some characters definitely feel more loved than others (example: [spoiler]Kenneth is less of a distinct character and more just a prop for Mask Guy's quests[/spoiler]), but overall the game does well here and puts some big budget games to shame.
The overall story is enjoyable. In particular, I really enjoyed Acts 2 and 3 as well as the ending sequence. Act 1 is fine. It's a bit weaker and has poorer pacing but it lays the groundwork for Acts 2/3 so that's OK. Unfortunately I found Act 4 (defining this as everything between the end of Act 3 and when you get the achievement for beating Act 4, which is a couple hours away from the actual ending of the game) a bit of a let down. One thing that [i]HorrorVale[/i] does well is that in Acts 2 and 3, it does a good job of balancing a story that gets increasingly serious in tone* with a quirky and humorous world and character cast. This is something a lot of games struggle with and often the end result is discordance between the two. It's genuinely impressive that [i]HorrorVale[/i] manages to keep a balance here up to Act 4, but unfortunately I found that's where the balancing act ends. The story takes a quirky and unserious direction - a tone that would have been fine in Act 1, but just felt off in Act 4 when the stakes have been and continue to be raised. Fortunately, this dip in story quality (in my opinion) is rescued by a really impressive (albeit rather long) ending sequence (defining this as everything after the Act 4 completion achievement). Due to Act 4 I don't think the story is in, like, the S-Tier of video game stories, but I think A-Tier is justifiable. I will say the side content is very plentiful and I enjoyed most of it.
*If you are hoping for the entire story to be funny quirky weirdness from start to end, you will be disappointed
I had a pretty neutral opinion on the graphics at first but the charm did grow on me and by the end I quite liked it. The soundtrack is also good. Most tracks are alright, none are bad, and there's a few standout ones that are really good.
The gameplay is mostly pretty standard RPG stuff. I think the only major divergence from that formula are a few chase sequences which require a little bit of reaction time. All encounters outside the dedicated grinding area are overworld and non-renewable, and you have a huge FP (mana) pool from the start, which makes FP management non-existent outside certain ultimate abilities (depending on your opinion on mana I can see this being a good or a bad thing). Unfortunately, the gameplay suffers from a number of small flaws. Alone, each flaw is insignificant, but added together they're probably equivalent to around one major flaw. I will note that some of these are limitations of RPGMaker (I have experience with that engine), but I've seen other RPGMaker games work around some of these flaws. Anyway here is the list of small annoyances:
[17 April 2026 EDIT: Some of these have been fixed in the 1.1.5 patch]
[list]
[*]Vague ability descriptions with omitted information. For example, the ability "Scorpio Shot" says the user does more damage when hidden. It does not state that it also causes the user to exit the Hide state. The ability "Pop Rocks" says it lowers "Defense" - it lowers both defensive stats (DEF and FearDF), not just DEF. Yet the skill "Operation" which says the same thing only lowers DEF. You can sort these out by attacking a training dummy, but this is a boring diversion to a particular location that I should not have to make.
[*]Similarly, I am unaware of any way to tell if an attack is physical (uses ATK/DEF) or "magical" (uses FearAT/FearDF; I don't remember it being given a proper term). A lot of characters have fairly close ATK/FearAT stats as well which really doesn't help. Again, you could solve this at the training dummy, but that's even longer than before since you'd need to test multiple abilities and bring a way to only raise one stat or the other for testing.
[*]The shared party level is cool. The ability to swap party members is cool. What is slightly less cool is having to backtrack to a dedicated party switching NPC when coming across a new moment or side quest that requires certain party members.
[*]No indication of how long a buff/debuff will last (neither in the ability description nor any UI element). There is also no way to tell how many of the same buff you can stack. You can find the maximum through testing but again, I shouldn't have to.
[*]No ability to sort items. This game has item bloat. The game has a [i]lot[/i] of statuses, only a small portion of which are worth caring about, but there are a lot of items dedicated to some form of status cleanse, which contributes to item bloat. This wouldn't really be an issue if there was a way to sort items.
[*]Run speed still feels sort of slow.
[*]Eventually combat falls into the same loop. For normal encounters spam AoE and multi-targets. For (mini)bosses, debuff their stats and buff your own. Not much really challenges this. Normal encounters especially suffer since they aren't necessarily quick with most taking 2+ turns, which might not sound bad but...
[*]There's no way to speed up or skip ability animations. Some of them are pretty long and this contributes to normal encounters taking a lot longer than they should.
[*]RPGMaker assigns the soft-reset button to F12. I lost some progress by accidentally hitting this key.
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Some other miscellaneous thoughts that didn't fit in the above paragraphs:
[list]
[*]It's no surprise that this game contains a lot of references to classic and modern horror media, that is fine. Some of them felt a bit too blatant though such that they felt out of place. In a similar manner there were a few dialogue parts that I found hard to endure. The vast majority of the game's dialogue is good, to be clear. There's just a few instances I disliked.
[*]I never enabled the option but the game has optional content warnings. This is my favourite way to handle this since it lets people who want content warnings have them without causing a bunch of immersion-breaking pop-ups for others. Everyone wins here.
[*]Bosses have some susceptibility to all status effects. I think the best way in these sorts of games that I've seen is generally to make them immune to stun-like statuses after being inflicted once since chaining the stun-like statuses can be a bit silly. But if it's between susceptibility and no susceptibility I'd take the former.
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This was a crazy long review. Honestly it could be twice the length but I have to stop typing somewhere. I want to be clear that I really enjoyed [i]HorrorVale[/i] and this review comes out of a place of love for the game. I have my gripes with it evidently but I really really did enjoy my time with it. In a world where big budget games seem to be getting worse and worse, indie games like this are more important than ever.
