The Remake of the End of the Greatest RPG of All Time

shows its hand early but becomes interesting remarkably late. for a game about exploring and pushing its boundaries, you get stuck or glitched too much. many of the puzzles are resolved the same way. it does not require note taking; you are almost never expected to maintain information for multiple minutes.

Reading the reviews, this game seems very divisive. It appears to have carved out quite a narrow niche for itself. Without spoiling too much: if you’ve played and enjoyed Daniel Mullins’ games, such as *Inscryption*, you may find yourself wondering why the game’s tags are what they are. It’s not quite an RPG, which seems to have confused some people. The game also wears its inspiration (e.g.[spoiler][i]Tunic[/i][/spoiler]) on its sleeve. Almost literally. But I’ve gotta say: I was hooked from the beginning. I fully enjoy the niche this game occupies and what it is trying to do. For me, this is one of the greatest games of all time. The developers’ work is creative and fresh in a way I’ve rarely seen before. While the game isn’t perfect, I’m eager to see what they cook up next. It’s a commentary on remake culture, overly attached fanbases, game-development culture, artistic vision, nostalgia, and so much more. For example, how far can a “fix” go before it becomes intrusive and compromises the spirit of the original game? The meta elements are handled beautifully, especially at the very end ([spoiler]And wow, kudos for the undercover GDC talk! I sat there with my mouth open, watching the chaos unfold!! [/spoiler]). You never know how many more layers are going to be peeled back. If you dabble in game development (even as a hobby), follow the industry or development scene, or have ever played a game with developer commentary enabled, this game is absolutely for you. I know this game is for me, and I’ll be telling my grandkids to go play [i]The Remake of the End of the Greatest RPG of All Time[/i].

A sort of very cautious recommendation. It is not BAD - a lot of ambition has gone into the game in a lot of ways - but it very quickly sort of throws away any real pretence of being about the game and gets very enamored with a layered meta-narrative on game design that, frankly, isn't as brain-♥♥♥♥♥ as the developers probably hoped it was. I was thoroughly unimpressed with the long, long ending sequences. If they had stuck with a Tunic-inspired game of slowly developing your strategy based on the manual, combined with a stronger meta-story and better characterization of the two developers and their relationship, I could have seen this as a strong 8/9 out of 10. As it stands, it is a 6/10, enjoyable but get on sale.

It's a pretty neat premise, but over time it becomes bogged down by its own structure. The gimmick fights are fun at first, but in the end of the game they've begun to feel tedious - the combat isn't really fun in a JRPG sense of having a lot of variety in moves (since enemies have 1 weakness each and only that will hit them) nor in the Puzzle sense (the amount of animations that have to play per round just so you can test a combo is a bit too much and there is no way to speed it up) Storywise, it feels somewhat like it's not sure what it wants to say. The Greatest JRPG itself has a very thread-thin plot and characterisation, and while I get this is an indie project and it's supposed to be largely out of context, I still never really got invested. Spoilers for mid and late game [spoiler] the search itself for what the game was and finding secret codes was really fun, but then it got spun into a "Redittor tries to break the game open to prove his superiority" and honestly the search stopped having any appeal to me. And the ending itself felt like such a rehash of what had already happened, with the game's combat being the same thing again and with the story of Noah just... ending without much of a point? What was this game trying to say about nostalgia or remakes?[/spoiler] Overall it feels like this game is trying to be meta but it hasn't really a direction it wishes to utilise it. Feels somewhat meta for meta's sake.

I was ready to give this game a negative review until I reached the third act. Look, if you compare yourself to Inscryption, if you try to be Tunic, if you follow in Blue Prince's footsteps, you're always, *always* gonna fall short. The nods to the game's inspirations were cute but they just reminded me how legendary those games were in comparison. And where this game shines the most is when it *doesn't* try to be those other games. The combat system that's in reality a puzzle, the glitching out of bounds, the meta-narrative. The FMVs. The actors almost cracking up after their purposefully-cringy lines. Noah's whole character. The story of two friends. That's where the game's at its best, when it does its own thing. If you're having doubts about this game, please stick with it until the end. It's worth it.♥

I think I'd narrowly recommend this. There are a number of interesting ideas at play, and it's always interesting to see a game take inspiration from Tunic (the dev is actually wearing a Tunic shirt in the first live action video in the game). It also reminded me a lot of The Magic Circle, though I don't think the game necessarily drew inspiration from that. If you like meta puzzles and things that poke at the 4th wall re:game development, I think this is an interesting example in that space. That said, I do have a host of critiques. The puzzles in the game, while interesting, are very direct - often the information you need to solve a puzzle is given to you right before you encounter the puzzle, and there's very little space made for inductive reasoning. Often you just have the info, or you don't. Also I found a number of bug/implementation errors in the game that were definitely not intentional, which in a game where a large part of the experience is playing an intentionally buggy game led to me running into a lot of frustrating unintentional red herrings. I almost got progression blocked a few times, but fortunately there were often some very roundabout workarounds that could get me back on track. I'd also agree with the critique of animation length that others have mentioned. At some point you realize that all combat encounters are just puzzles where you try to implement the right combination of actions to pass them. However, since it's still framed as an RPG battle, it also means every wrong solution takes 20s or so to fully animate, and even correct solutions can take awhile to resolve. It started to get tiring towards the end of the experience. Still, all told, interesting title. If you think you'd like the game and have played a bunch of meta puzzle games before, then I think you're likely to enjoy this.

There is a lot to love about this game, but ultimately there are just a few too many points of frustration to recommend the game outright. This game is a love letter to metagames and classic RPGs, but in trying to be Inscryption it loses a lot of the heart that made many RPGs classics. The pixel art in the game is *gorgeous* and the Tunic-inspired "real manual" puzzle mechanic is executed mostly cromulently. There are a few types of puzzles that are truly well executed (such as the inventory puzzle), but there are just a few game mechanics that are truly frustrating. First, the combat can only be won by solving the correct puzzle. For bosses, these puzzles are unique, well sign-posted, usually easily solvable, and fun. However, many of the random mobs that you encounter are not as well-designed. I spent over an hour on one "random" encounter just working my way through a list of puzzle solutions because I did not have enough information to figure out which attack to use (and, sadly, brute force was enough to win the battle). I feel like having failed attacked do some very small amount of damage to feel like progress would at least assuage this issue a bit. This issue is vastly compounded by the fact that you *cannot* skip or speed up the turn attack time. A set of six attack animations might be twenty or thirty seconds long, and having to wait through that just to find out that you had the wrong solution... it's honestly painful. There were fights that went on for eight to ten minutes of me just inputting the wrong solutions. There are YT videos of this game being finished in two hours, yet it took me a dozen and most of that time was in just getting the wrong answer in combat puzzles. The second major issue that I had was with some of the meta puzzle solutions. You will find *copious* post-game meta puzzles throughout that all seem like they're part of a puzzle solution, but it can be very difficult to discover whether they're the solution to some other puzzle, or part of the main story. This is frustration and blocks progress, and I don't really see how they could signpost this better. But man it's deflating to spend a bunch of time trying to get past a wall only to figure it out and find out it doesn't matter. Even more frustrating when you leave for hours, get a new skill, then come back to that wall to again find out that it doesn't matter to the puzzle. There are other small complaints (some of the FMV acting is a bit too on the hokey side for my tastes, though I don't hold that against the game; the villains interjections during "the gauntlet" are somewhat non-sensical and detract from the game, some of the meta narrative stuff at the end game took me out a bit too much in thinking about why they decided to film it that way instead of what it meant for the story), but all of it really pales in comparison to one singular decision made in the game development. HUGE STORY SPOILER WARNING, but there is a moment later in the game where attacking an enemy causes the to crash to desktop. This is a terrible design decision. It doesn't crash to the title card, it fully force closes the application. I walked away from the game when that happened and only when I finally decided to retry the fight did I discover that the story continued. This decision made me think *constantly* that the game was just going to close on me again. I became extremely mistrustful of every screen hitch or pause (of which there are many in the end). I lost a bunch of the emotional impact in just wondering if it was all going to crash again (intentionally or not). Overall, The Remake of the End of the Greatest RPG of All Time is a heartfelt, relatively enjoyable puzzler love-letter to the RPG it invokes. It looks great and the gameplay can be fun, but some of the frustrating puzzle design and the clumsiness of the meta elements at the ending are reasons enough to not recommend the game.

Me: Mom, can we get Inscryption? Mom: No, we have that at home. The game we have at home: