Just finished the third installment of the Rain-slick Precipice of Darkness and it was good. Even though I’m not particularly impressed in the faux 16 bit graphics, the mechanics were solid and the game was enjoying to play. With that experience in mind, I tried playing Cthulhu saves the world, which comes from the same developers and I got disappointed. The game is missing all the improvements that made the RSPoD game enjoyable and just turned into an annoying grind. I tried playing in hard to have a challenge (because in RSPoD normal was too easy for me) and quickly found out that hard in this game doesn’t mean more challenging encounters, it merely means one needs to grind more to proceed. I just spent 1 hour sitting in one spot in the map and doing random encounters until I realized that the game is just not interesting enough to worth doing that. The battle is not even as interesting as RSPoD. Half the time I didn’t know why I lost, and that, combined with the fact that you can actually lose the game and thus from minutes up to hours of play as well (if you forgot to save and didn’t have “continues”.) Combine that with the fact that mana points carry over from one battle to the next and first town was so designed that I needed to travel one minute to refill my MP, and it was just an exercise in frustration.
Perhaps the game would be not so annoying had I not played in hard, but if your only difference between the modes is how much grind you need to do, then that’s bad design right there. I hope they reuse the engine of RSPoD to more games because the ones they had before just don’t grab me in the slightest. Not in gameplay, nor graphics not even story.
Meh.