The Elementalist

Just barely started this, but let me ask you this one question... Q) How often does someone put EIGHT YEARS of their heart and soul into anything and then offer it for sale for a measly $5? To any old school RPG fan... this game is a MUST BUY... Pass on this game and you're missing out on a real indie RPG GEM!! With over 10 hours of content including hundreds of screens and dungeons to explore, tons of quests, and NPCs to talk to.. for $5.... The VALUE is through the roof here! My value aspect of my scoring is worth 40% of every score I calculate... VALUE: 40 out of 40 .. 10+ hours of old school indie RPG goodness made from the heart. Easy 40! FUN: 28 out of 30 - This game isn't just a casual turn based RPG, Oh no.. this is action RPG stuff right here! Love it! CONTROLS & BUGS - Controls flawlessly and can be played with a keyboard and mouse OR a controller. This game even allows you to customize your keys to whatever you desire. EASY 20 out of 20 here. GRAPHICS & SOUND - For the type of game that this is, the graphics and sound are top notch. 10 out of 10 MY FIRST IMPRESSIONS SCORE: 98% And with only 9 Zaxtor's Indie Gold selections so far in 2019 (Out of about 80 games reviewed).. this game seems the PERFECT ZAXTOR'S INDIE GOLD to make #10 this year! A 98% and a helluva bargain for the amount of work and heart this developer put into this little gem! This game deserves to be a top seller on Steam and help this developer buy a new house.. or at least a new car. No kidding! Please give it a try and when you love it.. as you definitely will.. be sure you tell ALL your friends about it too! To the developer... A sincere "thank you" for offering eight years of your work and heart here a five dollar bill. What a steal! ..I only wish more indie developers.. and more importantly.. I only wish ANY triple A game company were more like YOU! Not only is this game "Highly Recommended", this game is a "MUST BUY" to any and every RPG fan out there!

An addictive throwback to a bygone era! This game came up in my queue and reminded me of games I had played on the C64 and Amiga back in the 80s. Adventure games written by one man, in his den or bedroom and released for the world to enjoy. Graphics and sounds are simple and representative of the era. There is more detail than the screenshots show, the characters are animated well and the magic effects and battle gore are a modern touch that brings it all to life. The music changes with each location - I found it a little harsh at first, so I lowered the volume a bit so it stayed in the background. I liked for the sound effects to be louder than the music. The game focuses on exploration, puzzles and fighting a good variety of monsters. The battles can be quite frenzied as they will attack with melee, missile and magic weapons, even firing off magic in multiple directions! Some of the creatures are quite fast and you almost always have to run and gun. Your mana pool is limited and you must keep moving while you replenish it or you will get cornered and be unable to fight. The monsters have varying attack patterns and weapons. You need to study them in order to figure out the optimal strategy. Your health points are not plentiful and you will likely die often. Death is not heavily punished. You will be teleported back to the last teleport point, or dungeon entrance, without losing items or quest progress. There are set points where you may save the game. The worst part of death is travelling again to the battle after reincarnation. The author cited Zelda as an inspiration. I did not play any of them so I can't attest to that. Basically, this game has puzzles, monsters, items to use, quests and lots of exploration. It does not have deeper RPG elements like skill trees, experience points and levelling or crafting. It is light and agile fun, with an open feel. It does not feel like I am trapped in a linear progression. It is action packed, and insanely addictive. The feeling of progress and discovery is very satisfying. It feels like a lot of work and love of the genre went into this. Edit: Having finished the game I just had to come back and say this game is an incredible value. You may not get the almost 50 hours I got out of it lol (I tend to suck a little), but you will easily get your money's worth many times over. The puzzles keep getting better and require you to experiment and use new skills and tools that you discover throughout the game, the fights get quite intense and the dungeons are hair pullingly fun. I haven't sworn at a game since my days on the Commodore Amiga. It was fun to feel that level of frustration and ultimate satisfaction again.

This game is fantastic! You can definitely tell the dev put (eight years of) love into this. Nice old school open world vibe with day & night cycles, nice puzzles and some good action! Really Impressed. This game is a real gem, support this dev! My Video: https://youtu.be/WfvGy94Brxo

♥♥♥♥... This game's Creator must be some kind of Legends... Gift from heaven! Isn't it!? It's so magical you know, and so legend of some kind of ... new zealand !? or Ninten... oh yeah , I mean , My heart is beating! My courage is rising! new Magical Advanture! and actually , I'm making game as similar concept of this game... Not Action! It's strategy , but it is game of elementalist. I'm on it already 1.5 years... you know, I'm not copy cat. yeah just say it in this small corner space. It's just coincidence... please don't stub me when my game be appeared.

[h1] <-- Review written for [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/35180752/] 3 Point Play [/url] --> [/h1] I once saw a video title in YouTube back when I was really into Synthwave; for those that don't know, Synthwave is a music genre (talking about modern synthwave) that uses electronic sounds and bass to create songs that reminisce of the 80's, specially the "nerd" aspects of that age, such as the concept of retrofuturism. Going back to the video, it was a mix called "Nostalgia for a time you've never been in" or something like that, a cool concept if you think on it, because, how can you be nostalgic for something you've never experienced? With that said, I was born in the late 90s, so while I did play some classic RPGs, my first "true" game was actually Fallout 2, and I missed the 16 bit RPG era by some years. We ended up receiving The Elementalist on our Curator page and I got into reviewing it. So, that's where we are now. The Elementalist is a pretty cool game; there was some sort of trend a few years ago with indie devs posting a lot, and I say A LOT of those cursed "indie 8/16 bit rpgs that feel like you are back in the golden age of gaming (?)" and then you'd boot them up and they were either a badly programmed, lackluster nostalgia-bait game or straight up a RPG Maker game in which they had forgotten to write up a decent story to make up for their chosen engine. You'd be happy to know, if you had to suffer through these dark days, that The Elementalist is not part of that trend, which hopefully, is dead by now. While featuring 16 bit graphics and appealing to the kind of gamer that actually enjoyed these on their childhood, The Elementalist goes the extra mile and does things that those games actually did back then. So, that means, no handholding, no minimaps, text-based storylines, simplistic gameplay, puzzles, but even then, it's not afraid to add things that you'd expect nowadays, such as different dialogue choices, enemies with certain gimmicks (such as rat swordmen rolling away to evade your attacks) and a teleport stone. For the graphics, you have either a "Classic" or an "Ultra-SD" mode, with the first one looking (and running) pretty much like an old-time game, and the other featuring crispier looking aesthetics. I've managed to play for some 40 mins, while there are over 10 hours of promised content. I have to mention this is truly a must have, specially considering the price, for any old-school RPG lover, because, including everything I've mentioned so far, this game has something that comes from that era: passion.

Author did not skimp on the world building. This game could be going places.

Really fun game! There are lots of interesting mechanics to kill monsters and solve puzzles and a plethora of items to hunt down!

I just like this...

At first glance this game instantly made me think of Animal Crossing, WHAT YOU ALL SAY!!! when it clearly looks like Zelda!? Ok, so it does look a bit like Zelda, but I fancied being a bit awkward. Besides, comparing any game to Zelda would be a little unfair to anybody… The game starts off straight at the game screen with none of those irritating introductions that you can’t skip. That’s right folks, none of those “here’s what happened 4000 years ago and here’s another cinematic that you will watch without the ability to skip it because I spent a good 5 months rendering it… So damn it, you will watch my introduction… It then quickly and polity prompts you for your first name, it then secretly starts uploading a virus to your system and it orders 40,000 baby wipes from the Amazon pantry. Ok lets be serious! We start off in the cute Pixel world of what looks like your bedsit, but it turns out after getting a brief tutorial on the control system that it’s actually a mini pocket ….not going to spoil it for you… The tutorial then polity informs you that its WASD to move about and C to interact with the world… left mouse shoots a nice fireball and right mouse is a bigger fireball… both these buttons can be held down… this doesn’t charge your fireballs to make them bigger, but I assume to get the timings right when you release to hit something moving at speed… more on the fighting later… The initial intro story / tutorial... This gives you a quick heads up on the control and explains why your playing and your objectives… It seems quick without to much messing about. The first screen in your bedroom; This had a nice little detail, as I accidently moved the chair… why did I mention that? Because I like small details like this, I wasn’t expecting the normal chair at the table to actually move when I touch it…. This shows to me that the Developer has used some imagination here… You can also interact with a couple of candles in this room too by pressing c, then once you have your hands on them and you move your character it slowly drags them around.. Another one here is the illumination effect from the pixels around the candles moves too.... A nice touch! Some nice lighting effects here! The second room, well this is a little quick tutorial teaching you that lighting the two candles that I accidently did in the previous room opens the door… LOL Then you get to the next room… here’s where I’m going to leave it…all you need to know is the mouse wheel allows you to select different items in your inventory and there is lots of things to pickup and use and collect. Ok, this didn’t meant to end up being a tutorial on the tutorial, it just accidently happened. Lets talk about the game… It has those great little retro graphics with those nice little pixel effect things, to explain what I mean is example you shoot a tree and when your fire hits it, it shows little sparks from the blast, now all this combined with the nice little NES sounding music track that changes when you start fighting / exploring really adds to the atmosphere. You see, games like this give me a nice little happy feeling that sometimes trigger nostalgia wave memories, yes, those same memories when I used to play Sword of Vermillion…. NO I WILL NOT MENTION ZELDA! Yes that’s right, this is an RPG, its a really really good RPG. It is well made game and I don’t want to give to much away here but the worlds give an impression of a big world to explore featuring lots of interactive conversations that seem to travel in the direction of your choosing. The fighting system… So with games like this there’s always going to be a fight on the next screen, but that’s not true with this one… The fighting system is real time and not a turn based system, from what I gather also none of those surprise attacks when your walking about…. You can clearly see your enemy and chose to fight / run away. Throughout the world you do end up in fights, quite a lot actually, like today…. some angry monkey start running towards me, out with the fireballs, zap zap.. It ending up with him exploding into a very minor non offensive blood splat where all his limbs dismembered... Now… I know, I know, that sounds really really bad, but I will say in my eyes it was an appropriate explosion and experience for all ages to witness… and hey, he deserved it for firing and running towards me… I noticed that said monkey did not irritatingly respawn when I went back to that screen… however, when I did irritate a mouse on the next few screens in who was throwing grenades at me, when I dieded… the said monkey had respawned… I’m not that far into the game, I’m at about 3 hours In exploring and writing a review, so I’m not sure if said monkey would ever respawn after an amount of time or if its only when you die. But anyway, when I died that really made me wanna go back and finish him off… well because fighting isn’t mundane like it is in “Zelda”… When you fire at certain enemies they might do a sneaky side step avoiding your fireball… (I like this, I really like this!) So I fire a few more, then you realise your actually on a mana based count system, so after about 4-5 shots you need to let your mana recharge… this added a cool element to the game that made me want to play it even more… That’s another thing I want to say about this game, the health, mana, coins.. are all cleanly presented on the screen and after you figure everything out it becomes second nature to know what your doing. The only minor irritating aspect for this game for me is the ability to support super high resolutions… But don’t let this put you off!! I know three quarters of you don’t even know what screen resolution is and how to change it and the benefits of it and probably 8 out of 9 people on steam don’t even use the high resolutions like those i use myself…. But it does beautifully go up to 2560x1440! Sadly it doesn’t seem to want to go higher than that, but note, the option screen does have A LOT of changeable editable options for sound/music/control alternations. Direct x Open GL… lots and lots and lots and lots.... great job developer, bloody great job! OK, I am going to stop reviewing this game now. I am going to give this 4 out of 5 stars. It’s a fantastic game, its been well thought through and without ruining the plot for the price of a Big Mac you really cant knock it. Like i said the worlds are bloody huge and theres lots of exploring and conversation to have. Please DO NOT copy or paste any part of this review or publish it anywhere online without consulting me first.

It's not a good game.