Recent reviews by plumnight

Omocat and her team have made such a surprising, tender, and terrifying game. It's a creative triumph and the less you know going into it, the better.

Marie Antoinette simulator! This game is incredibly cute, and it's fun, but for such a short game, there are some problems with its replayability.

The idea is that you play as Princess Elodie, attending various classes to gain relevant knowledge and skill to be a leader. At the same time, you have four types of moods on a sliding scale: angry vs. afraid, cheerful vs. depressed, and so on. Various things you do in court will raise or lower these moods, and the strongest mood you feel influences what classes you're best at studying in. For instance, if Princess Elodie is feeling lonely, then she won't give her all with reading history books or learning accounting, but she'll be happy to practice her conversational skills. Raising the skills is very fun, as you get flavor text about what exactly it is that she's learning in her studies.

The game mixes up the routine of skill-raising by making the world around Princess Elodie pretty kill-or-be-killed; you have to always think about the political advantage gained by choosing to study one skill over another. For instance, if you're going on a parade, you may need a polearm skill to defend yourself with, because you're all dressed up and holding a royal scepter--archery may sound cool, but is it really what you need to know to survive as the crown princess? The game has a good sense of making you ask yourself, "What skills will I need to survive?" while still throwing you some curveballs.

The downside to this is that the game is short--it takes place over the course of 40 weeks, where each week is one turn of gameplay. This means that you have to be focused and decisive about the skills you're going to study, because while your stats can raise to 100 very quickly, you can only raise so many of them in the limited time you're given.

To me, this is the game's biggest downfall. It takes about 2 hours to reach week 40, but if you hit a dead end it might take a couple retries to beat the game--still, that's 4, 6 hours max to play this game to its ending. Theoretically, the replayability should be high since there are so many skills, plot deviations, and costumes. But in practice, after you play through the game normally, a lot of the skills lose their appeal because of how limited their applications are, and how focused you have to be in training Princess Elodie. Ultimately, after the first time you play, it feels like you're in a rush to raise your stats.

The game is so relaxing and cute, and it has a lot of charm. I really wish that it were two or three times longer than it is, so that you could spend more time exploring the different skills instead of feeling like you have to rush to a specific build. The short length of the game also makes it feel like there aren't really any characters besides Princess Elodie, because you never interact with any one of them long enough to see more than one dimension of their personality.

A fun rythm game. Once you choose a song to play, the game lets you know how good of a job it's done in converting the song into a stage. If a song scores a 70% or above, it will be really fun to play and you'll totally get the sense of rhythm that the game is going for. At 40-50%, it'll still be fun to play. But if a song receives a score of 30% or below, then it will feel chaotic and messy to play.

At its best, Melody's Escape feels a lot more rhythmic than Audiosurf does. But it does have some drawbacks. The visual cues are confusing at first because they're based on the Xbox controller's button layout (a yellow symbol means press your "up" button, for instance, while a green symbol means press "down"), and I was using a PS3 controller so it didn't really connect with me. There aren't many options in the game yet, and hopefully they will offer more color palettes as the game is developed. The "rosy" color palette, I noticed, was far too fuzzy-looking and it hurt my eyes to play.

Ultimately though, it's a fun rhythm game with a cute graphical style.