Pixel Noir

Let me start this review as clear as I can be. This game is a passion project - with all the highs and lows that comes with that status. I will break this review up into several parts - World, Gameplay, Story, Music and Sound, concluding with an overall section. -- World -- When I started playing Pixel Noir, I was immediately struck with the melancholy tone of the world - It reminded me of those old noir novels such as Sam Spade. The pixel art gave me fond memories of rainy days, playing Shadowrun on the Super Nintendo. The city that you explore is depressing, run down, and as the game states, slowly dying. As a private detective, you will solve cases throughout the city and hopefully uncover the biggest secret of them all. Needless to say, the world has me enthralled and immersed. -- Gameplay -- Pixel Noir's gameplay is divided into several sections. At its core, Pixel Noir is an turn-based RPG - you explore the world and engage in battle. The battle system is a lovely cross betweem Super Mario RPG and Grandia. You will have the ability to perform timed attacks, giving you the chance to deal significately more damage. Also, as the battle rampage, you and the enemy will have a turn order - if you can attack the enemy while they are performing an attack, you will cancel their attack and resetting their turn order. Conversely the same can happen to you, so be aware of the enemy's actions. There are also skills you will learn through manuscripts scattered through the game. There are times when you will have the option to solve cases. This will require you to search for clues and deduce the truth. This is recommended as you will receive points, which are used to level up your skills that I have mentioned above. As you explore the overworld, you will have the ability to use Detective Sense, which will allow you to sense out hidden items. This can range from common healing items to more valuable items, like attachments for your weapon. So it's advised to check every location. You'll also have the ability to upgrade your weapon (via buying it from the shop or Black Market) and customize it with attachments that'll not only improve the stats on your weapon but also may improve related skills. -- Story -- You play as the Detective who is haunted by his past - a bit cliché, but one small twist that I do enjoy, is that the haunting is literal - as in the good Detective has hallucinations of monsters. To avoid spoiling much, you ultimately embark on a mission to uncover the truth of what happened the night it all went down. You are joined by a wide variety of characters who all have their reasons for wanting to assist the detective. The characters are colorful, if not slightly stereotypical. While the story does not have multiple endings, it does have a branching storyline; so it has some replayability if you would like to see how a decision would have turn out differently. The game *does* feature a New Game+, so all of your items, skills and levels will carry over. -- Music and Sound -- Pixel Noir comes with, in my opinion, one of the better - if not the best - soundtracks I've heard from an indie project. The music, if separated from the game, may sound generic to some, but in the game, it fits the world like a glove. The sound design is fantastic - for example, when you walk into a building, the music is filtered slightly to reflect the fact. When a car drives past you, the Doppler Effect is applied realistically. It's the little details like these that makes their dedication to the package that much more inspiring. -- Overall -- Now I do need to address the proverbial elephant in the room. This game had a very rough launch - the save corruption bug that made many players lose their progress, to name one. The good news is that bug has been finally squashed as of patch 1.5.1. However, there are still a large number of bugs, text errors, and odd but usually harmless behavior. The developers have been been transparent with the players and tirelessly working on patching these bugs. I believe that as an indie group less than ten people, we should not use the same standards on these developers as we would a triple A company. That being said, I feel like this game has the potential to be my game of the year. I would encourage people to pick this game up and give it a try - Steam does have a two hours refund policy.

It's too buggy to be enjoyable. It's a shame because the story, graphics and the music is there. The battle system isn't enjoyable either. Even Mario RPG on the SNES felt less clunky than that. This is unfortunate; it really feels like a great project that was meticulously prepared but then ruined at the programming level.

I can forgive buggy games (game freezes, crashes whenever you going down a particular alley in the Industrial District, won't load character portraits, etc). But when an RPG can't probably remember saves, that's a deal-breaker regardless of how cool the concept may be. I would have to replay cut-scenes and story-beats anytime I would revisit that area (The showdown with V-Money in front of the armoury, scenes that were part of the tracking Sheng case in Little Shanghai, and more). Equipment would get entirely jumbled upon loading a save and my CRDTech cards would have entirely new attributes every time I'd load a save. I tried to be patient with the game because I love the concept and I really wanted to play it, but an RPG that can't properly save is, in my opinion, an unplayable RPG.

I was following this game and was looking forward to trying it out. Despite seeing it at mixed reviews I liked the concept of what the creator was trying to do and decided to play it regardless. Things started off good. I enjoyed the basic gameplay loop and didn't mind the emphasis the game puts on exploration and grinding to get higher levels. I was disappointed because I thought there would be more to do with the detective office (like it could be a base that you could develop, get more staff, cases etc). About halfway through I was still invested in the story line. However after chapter 5 I started to find the gameplay loop very tedious. Enemies fall to the ground with blood coming out of their head, yet once you come out of a door to the same enemy they are up on their feet. IT made exploration tedious. One piece of advice to anyone playing this is TO SAVE OFTEN. Sometimes there are game breaking bugs as well as constantly respawning enemies that can catch you off guard and kill your party. Anyway, going into the endgame I just wanted the game to be over. The game loop lost all fun and was just tedious, grinding to get higher levels in order to survive against the bosses, picking up some glass cannon additional party members who are weak and require more grinding to level up. And the cherry on top was the final boss. You have to fight the exact same boss twice. First time with 2 adds, second time just the boss. It's not a fun fight and it requires A LOT of grinding which by this point I was not prepared to do. I understand having a two phase boss fight, but to have the boss fight once, kill him and then he gets back up and says 'ok one more time' is just lazy and cheap. TL/DR:Music is serviceable, constant saving gets you around the odd game breaking bug. Game runs out of steam and replayability hard after the halfway act. 5/10

The writing is solid, the atmosphere is fantastic, I really dig the vibe. But there's two things that make me not want to play: 1) The common thug battles last too long. They aren't necessarily hard per se but they take too long. I get bored. That is until you get OP for them in which case they go down very quickly which while nice, I shouldn't feel like I have to grind to make normal enemy encounters tolerable. 2) The enemies don't disappear from the map but get up and charge at you. They are at full health. You are are at whatever health you were from when you last fought them or any enemy battle since. This makes it tedious to get through a map. I guess you could say it's like random encounters except random encounter battles usually last a few turns for a reason. I think a enemies respawn when you re-enter a map would have been the way to go. If the battles weren't tedious and boring, this could be a great RPG.

I backed this game on Kickstarter and was pretty excited for it. There was a lot of potential here, but two things caused me to put this game down after a few hours. The first are the constant "unavoidable" street battles you encounter while traveling around the city. They just become a massive hindrance and waste of time preventing you from what you actually want to be doing. Additionally defeated enemies only get KO'ed, and they will wake back up and attack you again if you pass their same encounter spot. Going into a building immediately respawns them too. Walk to a shop, fight a guy positioned right next to the entrance, walk in the shop, buy stuff, walk out, immediate fight. Very annoying and poorly designed. The next thing was the multi-character battle mechanics. It's all based on a timer, and there are gaps in time between command inputs, command execution, and animation time before the actual attack. Add on top of that a timed additional input for critical hits, AND another for blocking enemy attacks. Now, multiply all that happening by 3 for your party, and none of the actions really wait for other actions to be completed. It's a massive ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ that ends up not being fun. Character attacks and blocks are literally overlapping each other, and when it comes to the timed inputs you really have no clue which character it applies to. Just plain sloppy design. I'd like the play this game to completion, but would only do so with some pretty significant mechanics and deign overhaul.

It's a pretty cool RPG, i waited till the 1.10 patch to start playing, as I had read that there were a lot of bugs. I encountered 1 freeze so far (8 hours of playtime as I write this review), but no other bugs. The only minor issue is that a very few NPCs slide somewhere when we walk on them (very strange indeed) and maybe it'll be a good idea to add a vsync option. But anyway, the game is pretty cool. I'm hooked on the story, I like the side missions, and the combat system is nice. The game might be rough around the edges, but you can tell that the developers poured their hearts into it and are committed to resolving the issues as they release patches frequently. So maybe it's not perfect, but give it a try. It would be sad to miss out on a nice game like this.

Yes.Goob!

This game is great. I backed it on Kickstarter many moons ago, following it through development (even though there was a very real fear that it may never materialise into a final version), but the end product is absolutely ace and exactly my sort of jam (a gritty, crime-filled JRPG). Yes, as of the time of writing, there are still a few bugs (PROTIP: save often), but nothing completely game-breaking and nothing that I'm assuming won't be fixed in future updates.

Great art, great story.