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

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

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.

Excellent game! If you like games line Tunic or the Hex or meta-narratives in general you are in for a good time. Also if your in game dev at all you will find this extra funny. Try to go in blind!

As a lifelong fan of the games being parodied/homaged I really should have been the target audience for TRotEotGRoAT. I love the general concept of a puzzlebox/mystery centered on a remake of a classic JRPG, but unfortunately this one really crosses the line from "challenging and requires looking through everything at your disposal" to "actively hostile to the player" with the combat challenges. At the point where I was told to use a specific element to advance, with no indication that any of my available attacks were of that element and no way to leave the area I was in to try to get more pages of information that might tell me, I decided I was done. I really don't think the general concept of the combat puzzles was even necessary given that there's nothing like them in the 90s games and I doubt anyone would have much enjoyed a traditional turn-based RPG that had them. I certainly don't recommend this one.

A fun game with great writing and a presentation I really enjoyed, some frustratingly obtuse puzzles but overall worth playing

Satisfying puzzle game set in the greatest RPG of all time. Attractive 2D HD visuals, fun meta story, solid puzzle mechanics. It is a little easy to accidentally sequence break, but the developers have updated the game to allow players to recover from these scenarios.

About everything I expected, the game wears it's inspirations on its sleeve and I found it endearing. If I had to complain about something, it was that some of the attack animations got to be a little long at the later parts, with no option to skip them. Loved the overall nature of the ending, and I will be keeping eyes on the ARG as it progresses

In a word; ambitious! In another; creative! I'm not sure it's everything it could be, but it's surprising and satisfying in more ways than I was expecting. If you like games about games then this is something you should get on the list. If you're looking for a classic RPG style game, then maybe look elsewhere, but honestly, I would play a more traditional story-based RPG with this battle system. As you might expect, there's more going on here than what's on the surface.

So I'm a kickstarter backer who just never noticed the email saying the game was released. I was just looking through my emails for something unrelated, saw the release email, and I was like OH, whoops. So I got to it a month late with zero expectations, literally having forgotten it existed. I feel like that might be the optimal method for enjoying the game. I feel like had I actually been looking forward to it and built up expectations for it, I would've had less fun. As is, I just kinda got on a random rollercoaster and had a fun time with the twist and turns. I'd recommend it to people, but I wouldn't tell them to get hype or excited for it. Just go in and let it do its thing and laugh along with it.

Extremely fun meta-puzzle game. While it's a bit rough around the edges in some elements like UI, there's a ton of ingenious ideas, cool moments and frankly brazen (yet respectable) decisions in the 4-5 hour runtime. Most puzzles manage to hit a nice balance of not requiring out-of-field logical jumps while still being fun to figure out, although especially toward the end of the game it becomes harder to differentiate between what's meant to be the "main story" puzzles and what's part of the extended ARG. As for where it falls flat, I feel like the combat can be a bit hit-or-miss (sometimes it's extremely satisfying to figure out, sometimes you'll slowly go crazy at having to watch and rewatch animations to test if your combo worked out) and the narrative loses steam towards the end of the game. Without getting too much into spoilers, the mystery that starts the game is super engaging, but the new characters that are presented, the explanations that are given and the emotional payoff in the later half of the game don't land as strongly as you'd hope after all the intrigue in the first half. Either way, I'm super glad I played this until the credits (will leave the ARG stuff to the experts...) and looking forward to whatever is next from the team.