If you grew up in the 16-bit era this is a must have. Let's face it, there are loads and loads of games on Steam right now trying to pull on the nostalgia chords. Loads of pay for roms and emu packages of games you know and love, and tons of indie games developed in the likeness of games you know and love, but what those games can't deliver is what Dorke has in mass quantity; an authentically new SNES experience. This isn't a game like a SNES game. This isn't a SNES game you've beaten countless times. This is an authentic SNES title you never got to play. If it was unplayable it'd still be a wortha few bucks to check out, but given it's actually a decent game it's a gem of an experience. I'd say the closest thing to Dorke and Ymp is when you find a game that never came to your nation online and in your language or at least a fan patch.

So what's the game actually like? It's decent, but nae great. If it did come out during the SNES days it definately wouldn't have excited me as much as it does now. It's slow, and hard, and some things are kind of lost in translation or just all out weird, but it's not horrible. The pair of characters over one PC is pretty neat. It may not be the only game to do something similar, but it is an interesting take and easy to do. You never have to think about which one you're going to use, just what you need to do and the pair takes care of the rest. My favorite thing about the game is the in game animations. There are quite a few animations that remind you not to take the game too seriously despite is being seriously difficult. The cutsenes are long, but I enjoyed them. I'd rather have them than not, though skipping would be nice sometimes.

I'm not sure what Piko did to finish the game. It's clearly another rom+emu package. It's a bit of a hard game and I wasn't so taken with it that I wanted to prove I could beat it without cheats so I took the rom and uploaded it to my Recalbox build to play Dorke and Ymp with fast foward, rewind, shaders, save and load states, etc. I'm not sure why pay-for emulators have less than free ones, but they do and that's the case here. I definately advocate buying the rom to support Piko for bringing it to us, but once you have it play it on your favorite emulator because the one it comes with is bogus.

I encountered an issue when trying to launch the game. There's an execution error, but fear not fellow gamers! It's an easy fix! It turns out the filename is misspelled—instead of "ymp," it's "imp." Simply navigate to the game's directory (for me, it's C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Dorke and Ymp) and rename "dorke and imp.exe" to "dorke and ymp.exe." Voila!

Despite this hiccup, I can't help but recommend Dorke and Ymp for its nostalgic value alone. Happy adventuring!

I was struggling a bit with my opinion on this game.
Right from the start, I was greeted with a choppy music and ugly characters in an overly long cut-scene, that after a while I couldn't care less about and then promptly skipped (well, it's not like anyone plays old-school platformers for their story anyway.) Then I had to wrestle with awkward controls and clunky mechanics, accompanied by ridiculously annoying enemies that drain all your health away before you're able to kill them. I died so many times it's not even funny (THOSE DAMN BEES!)

On the other hand with what I've seen so far, the level design is rather good, although a little bit obstructed by the limited view distance, forcing you sometimes to do a leap of faith. Thankfully, they forgo the classic 1-hit, 3-lives style of difficulty that the old games liked to do, and allowed you to do a lot mistakes by giving you 50 lives from the start and a bigger than normal amount of hit-points, which also helps at the beginning, when you're still getting used to the controls, which can take a while.
It's nowhere near as good as the best of the genre from SNES era, it makes me think of something more akin to Lester the Unlikely. But, after spending a couple of hours in it, I can see myself playing more of it.

It's not a game I would recommend to most people, but if you played a lot of SNES platformers (other than Mario and Megaman,) you'll feel right at home. So if you're looking for that nostalgia fix, this might be perfect for you, despite its faults.

Tags: Platformer
Additional Tags: Delete Local Content & Remove from Library
Note: Steam-Refund

TLDR: Controls are broken out of box. Rebinds on Xbox360 works but is still broken. Had to press down on joypad to act as enter even though it was bound to start. Engine spazzes out in display settings permanently.

Not much to say. Even getting a game started navigating the menus was hard. Despite a custom rebind I have to use an odd combination of keyboard and controller to be able to access all of the UI. (e.g. inventory uses keyboard, parts of movement keyboard another part uses remote)

To make things worse the game has some news/update info about going in display modes to test with blurry aspect of game. So I tried pixel smoothing and it resized the window, got rid of the title/toolbar menu making the display function no longer accessible (its not an in-game feature more of an overlay toolbar from the window of the game)

The game is blurrier with smoothing and I cannot resize or fullscreen. I tried reinstalling the game from scratch and the settings are somehow still being remembered.

I decided to ask for a refund. I realize this is a dosbox port but the state it is in is not acceptable. It is a shame too because the goblin/demon sprites looked lovely, the music was charming, and the core gameplay looked like a good formula.

Dorke and Ymp is a formerly unreleased game for the SNES brought back from the dead courtesy of Piko Interactive.

Getting around is reasonably alright, though the controls cannot be configured ingame, so you have to rely on rebinding the controls emulator-side. I set running to X (default is Y, despite ingame saying it's X. The game goes off of SNES button layout) to make running around much easier.

There's some places where careful usage of items and currency are needed, as there are points where getting stuck can be a thing (and requires restarting the level, if not using save states). The start is very forgiving with the starting amount of lives, starting you off with 50, even with using passwords to skip to the later worlds.

The largest problem with this game is that it still feels unfinished in places, even if it's possible to reach the end. The final normal level of the dwarven mines before the boss is missing a bunch of tiles and is impossible to backtrack for missing items if they were skipped. Sky levels have wind tunnels that are messed up (the one near the end of the first sky level is least troublesome, but the ones in the second to last level are messed up and will never carry you back to the top), and finally, reaching the exit of the final sky level before it's boss is out of reach by normal means. For the latter two situations, an exploit with the flutter (grab button) is needed that takes a long time with timely presses (and savestates) in order to get back up.

This would have turned out to be a great game if it weren't for the incomplete feeling in certain parts of the game. Reason for the large amount of playtime is because I played all the way through offstream and again all the way through onstream on an April Fools day. I can't really recommend this one :(

Fun old cartridge style game.

I like this game it's dorque and imp that cancelled snes game but dorke and ymp is good so ya i like this game

Not bad, pretty good nostalgia for SNES platformers

Pros:
+Nostalgia
+Unreleased instant classic game
+Good Price

Cons:
-suffers from the same emulation problems as Bubsy Two Fur
-Audio is the specific problem, they used the same emulation engine as Bubsy Two Fur it seems and the audio is really choppy

I had to guess the controls, pressed all the keys before I managed to start a game (the magic key being "X").

this game is terrible and it is clear that zero people like it