[b]Review copy was provided free of charge via Steam Curator Connect.[/b]
[b]The game has a free demo available.[/b]
[b]This review was written after playing the game on both Windows Desktop and Steam Deck.[/b]
[b]This game does not support Cloud Saves (yet).[/b]
[b][u]This review contains mild spoilers.[/u][/b]
Reindeer Story is a retro-style Holiday themed RPG in which you take the role of a young reindeer Lux, who “saved the Christmas” only to give Jack Frost a chance to steal the Grand Presents. The theft of Grand Presents starts the adventure in earnest. The story is very heavily holiday focused, which is on purpose, and the game aims to become one of the Holiday traditions, like certain movies or a certain song that cannot be avoided during the holiday season.
The game is in a stylish pixel graphics, and you control Lux in the world, exploring different locations with light platforming and puzzles. The game features multiple endings and mini-games to play as well as a new game + mode.
The locations are connected by a Super Mario World style world-map, which you move in to go to the next location. The locations also have a variety of different NPCs to talk with and special collectibles to collect. Some of the locations also offer special ways to navigate, like a sled that you can use to speed your way through a zone.
During your adventure you pick up coins, items, equipment and other items to help with your journey. The battles are initiated by meeting the enemies on the field. You can avoid the battles, so no random battles in the style of the old. Should you fall during the platforming sections, you will lose a single piece of health and respawn either at the start of the current “screen” (the area where you are in the location) or at special checkpoints, should the area have them.
The battles are akin to Mario & Luigi games. Each character has a turn and with a correctly timed button press you can double your damage. When it is the enemies turn to attack you, you will enter in a kind of a minigame, where you move your character to evade enemy attacks and after filling your Z-bar (unlocks after the prologue) you can use Z-skills to counterattack. You learn new Z-skills by levelling up.
Each of the three characters in your party has their own abilities, stats, levels and equipment. Your party can also have quest characters. To make things simpler, the game has a “optimise” setting for both equipment and abilities, that can be used to automatically equip both equipment and abilities to use in the in-game battles.
Whenever you start a new save, be it your first time to start the game or to start another playthrough, you will be shown the keybindings and you’ll be able to select difficulty. You are able to change your difficulty whenever in the game and able to set experience on or off for that beat the game at level 1 achievement.
Speaking off, the game has Steam Achievements, a whopping 36 of them. The game requires multiple playthroughs to get them all and at least one of the achievements is behind a new game + mode. One of the achievements is also bound with the highest difficulty for added challenge.
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[h2]The Tech[/h2]
The game is made on Game Maker and runs pretty much on everything. The game has a FPS cap of 60 fps and the game logic seems to be tied to the framerate as when I set a 30fps cap, Lux moved considerably slower. However, as this game is so light to run on Steam Deck, there should be no need to cap the frame rates below 60 to save your battery.
The game does not support any other aspect ratio but 16:9. Trying to resize the window to any other aspect ratio just adds black bars to top/bottom or to the sides.
The game does not feature any graphical options. On Steam Deck the game ran on full screen, but on Windows it ran in windowed mode by default. Hitting Alt + Enter set it to full-screen mode, but this seemed to set the game to exclusive full-screen mode. Windowed mode screen size is adjustable like any other window on Windows.
The options menu has settings for General, Difficulty, Controls, Language and Dialogue. The General settings screen has options for audio levels for SFX, Ambience and Music and for Text Speed. Difficulty settings screen has options for adjusting difficulty, while Controls allows you to rebind both keyboard and gamepad bindings. Language allows you to choose between English and Jingle (?) and it’s likely that in a further patch the game may add other languages to support. The dialogue option allows you to select between “Naughty” and “Nice” dialogue options, with the “Naughty” being the uncensored option. However, in my brief time I did not see anything really horrible in terms of naughty dialogue.
The game plays best on a gamepad but can also be played on keyboard.
The game supports autosave and offers multiple save slots. Saving is done primarily from the menu, and you can save anywhere. Some locations also feature a checkpoint that allows you to resume your journey, should something happen to you.
The game features a comprehensive soundtrack, which is pleasant to listen to. The battle soundtrack changes based on the situation (are you attacking or defending) and the tunes are generally pretty good. The other audio effects are nothing extraordinary, as in they are good and fit the game.
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[h2]The part where I nitpick about bugs and other stuff [/h2]
The game has some areas I would like to see improved. Especially with the audio and interface. Currently you can not set any of the settings for audio or text speed before starting the game and being granted the ability to access menu. Sure, this is quite fast to reach, but it’s still a mild annoyance. Speaking of the settings, while the settings are quite clear on what they are, in some stuff tooltips or other explanations would be appreciated. The game’s full version has a steam button that opens the game’s store page. I am not quite sure why this exists in the full version, but it’s probably to help keep both the demo and the full version on par with the bug fixes.
The game has some bugs with the audio. When you first start the game, the audio cuts suddenly. In the early game, when you battle enemies the music shift from attacking to defending and back to attacking is incomplete and jarring.
Sometimes you can easily open multiple dialogue windows that overlap with each other, especially with the chests making it difficult to see just what on earth did you pick up.
Starting a new playthrough allows you to set a difficulty, but the game may reset it back to normal in some cases.
The developer has updated the game multiple times, so I’m sure that by the time you are reading this, the above bugs have been addressed.
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[h2]My opinion and recommendation[/h2]
I had a lot of fun with my brief time with this game. At the time of writing this first version of the game, I’ve reached end of Chapter 1 and seem to have pretty good idea on the mini games and exploration. However, the game features 6 chapters and plenty more to discover and I will update my review accordingly once I reach the later parts of the game.
Some features felt like they were not explained to me clearly enough. I might have skipped some important dialogue or the various tutorial mechanics that the game offers.
The controls felt good and the story, while very simple, was good enough justification for me to roam around the world. I feel like the collectible system could have been explained bit better, but if you have played a lot of games, you will figure that one out quite fast. The easter eggs are quite nice to see and I liked the variety of cutscenes and in game events.
[h3]My current rating for this game is [b] 8/10. [/b] A solid Holiday themed retro style RPG, with some fun mechanics and good music.[/h3]
