[THE THUMBS DOWN IS ONLY FOR THE TECHNICAL BUGS, NOT THE ACTUAL GAMEPLAY]

The game's UI, character design, artwork, music, action, and environments are all charming and I really want to like this game but the software itself really needs heavy working on.

It's basically a roll of the dice what goes wrong with each time I restart the game
-Sometimes the music doesn't play at all
-Sometimes the game chugs a bunch during combat
-It never seems to remember whenever I change the inputs or audio volume, every time I either load a save or start a new game, the controls go back to default
-When I press A to show the full dialogue in the text box, it ends the voice audio. Sometimes it doesn't even advance the dialogue but it still ends the voice audio.
-The list of places that the game's stopped responding from both controller and keyboard/mouse range from in the "skip cutscene" confirmation box, in the change input menu, way too many times in post-battle rating screen, etc.

🔲 No story
🔲 Not main aspect
🔲 Bad story
🔲 Average
✅ Good
🔲 It'll replace your life

🔲 Lifeless/static
🔲 Poor
🔲 Average
✅ Good
🔲 Excellent

🔲 Playing asleep
🔲 Some brain usage
✅ Easy to learn / Hard to master
🔲 Difficult
🔲 Dark Souls

🔲 Nothing to grind
🔲 Isn't necessary to progress
✅ Average grind level
🔲 A lot of grind
🔲 Too much grind

🔲 Low
🔲 Average
✅ Good
🔲 Beautiful
🔲 Reality 2.0

🔲 BleedingEar
🔲 Bad
🔲 Not too bad
✅ Good
🔲 HeavenlyEar

🔲 Kids
✅ Teens
✅ Adults
🔲 Everyone

🔲 Potato
🔲 Decent
✅ Fast (4 vram at least)
🔲 Rich boi
🔲 NASA

✅ It's free!
🔲 Not recommended
🔲 Wait for sale (dirt cheap on sale)
🔲 Worth the price
🔲 Best investment ever done

🔲 None / Not discovered
✅ Minor bugs
✅ Can get annoying
🔲 Frequent crashes
🔲 Complete mess

This game has a lot of bugs. There's a lot of forced encounters, but those encounters assume that you have been killing literally everything you come across, or else you just die and reload the last save you made... (there is no autosave!!)


- The audio cannot be muted or lowered for some sounds. there are SEVERAL sounds that are just really loud.

- I cheesed all my battles by turbo spamming right click and doing the despair flash ability to kill everything instantly. that is AFTER being stun locked multiple times and dying in one hit to some random ability

- I don't think the EP meter updates visually? I can do skills when its empty

- I got stuck in the results screen and I could turn in it??

- I got stun locked and died in a battle with a bunch of slimes after getting knocked down once..

- I came across some random sword at lv 5 and it teleported me to a VERY hard boss battle that one hits me. Why is that enemy there? Theres nothing harder than a level 5 slime around me at all times...

- I died DURING the beginning combat cutscene with that water jelly lady, It switched me to the jelly dude and he just got blown up immediately.

- There is no autosave in the game. There needs to be one if you are just randomly throwing the player into a battle they are not prepared for.

- The game's help shows something about an adjustable difficulty setting but its simply just "not available" in the menu

- Why is there a sun lens flare in the cave?

The art is nice and the voice acting is serviceable. Maybe if the bugs are fixed, the game would be worth playing through, but the amount of bugs and weird game design decisions in this game makes it not fun to play.

Take my words with a grain of salt till the developer spends some more time optimizing the game and more updates come out. I'm just posting my impressions and thoughts.

I'll be honest, this game conceptually absolutely rocks and is right up my alley. It's like if someone said decided to fuse Devil May Cry's combat and the Atelier series' aesthetics and visual design, with hints of NIS and the Tales games. There's also the fact that this is free, to which my experience freeplay games on Steam aren't always the best, so this came as a surprise. I love Character Action Game style titles and this scratches an oddly specific but still enjoyable itch. Good on the dev, I would pay for more stuff like this.

As of when this review is posted, the game is getting continual updates that increase its stability. I've played so far only on Steam Deck and its slowly eased out over time, although it's still a bit of a roulette when the game will croak. I've had some issues with the menus and viewing certain things like moves and so on, so I'd hope that's fixed soon.

All in all though, I would say that this game looks damn cool, and its got a quality charm to it with the amount of stuff right out the gate like voice-acting, a style meter, turbo mode, etc. Try it out once the developer cleans up it after awhile, it's a pleasant, if small (and kinda shaky) surprise.

As it says in the title, this game is a prototype and as such is rough around the edges and understandably might have some bugs here and there as well. While the prominent things that happened to me were mainly just the characters getting stuck in places and having to reload old save files, it's clear that this game still needs some time to cook and work out its kinks. Once it does work out said kinks, this honestly has a lot of potential. Between the beautiful world design, realistic and heartfelt story/dialogue and a combat system that has a lot of depth to it (none of which I found myself really able to fully grasp honestly), this is a game that's worth keeping an eye on as it continues to get updated.

⠀

This is a neat little demo, with a nice graphical direction, two well fleshed out characters for how little of the game exists so far, and some fun combat. The art style is pretty without being overbearing, the effects look nice even if it's hard for me to tell what kind of attack the enemy is trying to use. The environment is needlessly large, and the very indistinguishable environmental objects make it easy to get turned around from a camera reset after battle. The main character is given enough dialogue to make a very "ragna the bloodedge" kind of character, at least from the initial look at her, and the slime friend cements their role as a silent companion foil to the talkative protagonist. The voice acting is well done, though the battle voice lines are a bit too frequent with how basic attack heavy the game seems to be. On the topic of combat, it feels really good when you're on the offensive. There's very little feedback when you hit something making the combat feel floaty, but the basic attack chain is satisfying. Being able to reposition as needed during it or interrupt with special attacks gives the feeling that you should always be basic attacking, using specials and charge attacks when you feel it would help when you need to stunlock something. Being able to dodge mid combo without interrupting but also dodge at the end of a combo to remove end lag feels really good, partially because it feels rewarding to learn when to dodge to maximize that sweet sweet DPS, but it doesn't feel excessively punishing to miss the window. Defensive combat gets a lot more rough, unfortunately. If you get knocked up at all, there's not really anything you can do, no dodging out of laying on your butt and no invulnerability frames when you're waiting to stand up. For slower line AoEs, this can lead to you getting juggled across the battle arena from full to dead, which would be less of an issue if it wasn't for the needlessly complex warning system. As of right now, enemies flash one of four colors to indicate what they're going to do, and keeping track of this while maintaining your attacks is certainly a system that's learnable, but the colors can be very difficult to see amidst all the particles from your own attacks. While this may encourage a more reaction based playstyle, every other aspect of combat promotes extreme aggression.

Overall, I'm excited to see how this project turns out.

The only game breaking bug I found was an issue where I paused the game and it wouldn't accept any other inputs, just after the tutorial fight but before being told our little slime friend had joined the party

cool:)

FIRST THING FIRST CAW CAW, THE PURPLE HAIR LADY REMINDS ME OF THE SHY PURPLE HAIR ICE LADY FROM THE VAMPIRE ANIME CAW CAW.

NOW THE VOICE JUST OUTRIGHT DOESN'T MATCH THE VOICE FOR THE MAIN HERO CAW CAW. CALL ME INTOLERANT AND FRENCH CAW CAW.

YOU HAVE YOUR OWN SLIME TO BATTLE OTHER SLIMES CAW CAW. IT EVEN HAS THE DEVIL MAY CRY RATING SYSTEM TO SHOW HOW AWESOME YOU'RE DOING CAW CAW.

I MUST BE DOING SOMETHING WRONG THOUGH AS THE ANIME LADY WITH CHILD BIRTHING HIPS KEEPS SAYING "TRY AGAIN" CAW CAW.

Aside from some minor technical issues like menu names buggering up, it seems most of the bugs have been fixed, hence why I gave the game another go as of late.

First of all, I love the aesthetic and tone. Yelette is a wonderfully fun character. She absolutely reeks of early 2000s deviantArt edgy JRPG OC energy—she's the "Lord of Nightmares" and has a single black wing that pops out for special attacks, for crying out loud—but she's also keenly aware of this, even having pages in her journal dedicated to awful one-liners and phrases to say to her enemies to sound cool. They do not sound cool at all; they are too long and lack eloquence and flow, and my trained literary eye does not determine these flaws to be on purpose. However, since Yelette trying too hard to be cool is part of her character, it actually turns out to work, so props to the devs.

I like her monologues. I love her awesome clothes. I even like the brief interactions she has with others that make her seem gracious and good-natured without being an idiot that makes a fool out of herself, nice social traits that a lot of JRPG heroes of the early 2000s lacked. I especially like that she's a world-saving hero and this lil' prototype is about her on a fetch quest for the sake of her sister. Yelette takes it all in stride and it's fun. She is the sort of character that I've come to want to know more about just from reading about her journal entries. I'm captivated.

Combat's not bad but it needs an overhauled control scheme. I see the Devil May Cry influences clear as day but these bloody direction-sensitive controls aren't working for me and I can't pull off the attacks I'm trying to pull off. What especially doesn't work is the tutorial system. I do not care who you are; I am not going to start a game and patiently read and try to memorise nine pages of basic combat mechanics. I'm especially not going to do that for six tutorials in a row! Please, tutorialise us on mechanics as we are introduced to them, not all at once. We also need examples, because a lot of the mechanics do not make sense upon first reading.

Sadly, I found myself losing interest rapidly after a certain point. I gathered all the ingredients, returned to camp, and was graced with a long cutscene before something happened and I was taken straight to a boss fight. I don't know why I couldn't have been made to travel there, perhaps save my game and prepare my equipment and perhaps do anything else that I wanted to do beforehand because the autosaves don't work right, because now I was up against a boss that was killing me in a single hit and I didn't know what I was doing. I'm not particularly invested in the idea of going back.

It would be nice if we could jump around the world map. There are times when I'd like to jump up and down a ledge or a slope or over a fence without having to need to run around it. This would also open up the world design a bit and make exploring more fun. That said, I think there might be a crafting system and that fills me with dread. I don't like crafting systems in general but that's not helped at all by the game's user interface, which requires me to make a few too many clicks just to navigate menus; there's an awful lot of going in and out of menus that I'd rather not do.

Speaking of, when the game starts, you're introduced to the Options menu. It would be nice if the top left of the screen wasn't covered by a "Start game" button so I could see what's being obscured under there because I figure it could be important. Heck, the first time I played, I skipped it because I thought "I'll just get to the area map and go back to the Options menu from there and figure it out". Then I had to go through two cutscenes, a tutorial fight (complete with the nine pages mentioned above), and then TWO MORE CUTSCENES before I could finally access the Options menu again. Like I said with the boss fight above, it could've helped if I could've travelled a bit between the two cutscenes so that I had a moment to get my bearings in-game.

Horizon to Crinoa has a strong foundation for its writing and tone. It's the mechanics and programming that most concern me. But I am eager all the same to see where this goes.