(I would like to thank Spearpoint Reviews for allowing me to review this title. As such, it was given to me free of charge.)

The Village Story is a brief RPG where you play as a character named Jorah, an up-and-coming adventurer with humble beginnings as a farm boy. The game was created utilizing one of the RPG Maker suites, so gameplay and visuals are somewhat straightforward: the perspective of the camera is of a third-person over-the-head view with a simple control scheme consisting of the directional keys on the keyboard for movement, the zero (0) and escape keys to bring up the game menu, and the spacebar is used as the “action” and “select” key.

Now, I want to get into the story briefly before touching on the writing itself later in the review. As I had stated earlier, you play as a young would-be adventure named Jorah who is trying to live out his “Destiny.” I regret to say it but the concept is far better than the execution. For a large majority of the game I found myself talking to an NPC on a small and feature-baren map (littered with geometry errors, including the ability to walk through most people, foliage, and even walls) only for them to instruct me as the player to complete a task, often times given to me as an exact location. After completing the task, I would return to the NPC, in which I am then teleported to another featureless map only to complete the exact gameplay cycle over and over again. I could honestly see the potential of finding X,Y or Z item around a larger map without hints, however, most of the maps are essentially giant squares and rectangles ridden with bland objects scattered about in that the NPC who gave me the task will instruct me of the exact location of the item anyway, making every objective in the game a tedious fetch-quest with no physical or emotional reward upon completion.

As far as the writing goes, I don’t have much to comment on unfortunately. This short experience is extremely generic and, as far as the story goes, I was uninterested roughly ten minutes into it. The pacing of the plot felt extremely rushed and uninteresting character dialog didn’t help me to stay immersed in the slightest. Complimenting the story is a decent amount of grammatical and punctuation errors, which removed myself personally from the ambiance.

The best compliment I can give to this game is its music, as I had found myself trudging along simply to listen to the game’s soothing, if not somewhat generic, soundtrack. Although, it is rather unfortunate as I cannot condone the $4.99 pricetag based solely on the music alone. The Village Story is a game that can be walked through in well under an hour, so it doesn’t pretend to waste your time, but I can’t say that I found my time within the world very riveting based on the gameplay and writing.

(I would like to thank Spearpoint Reviews for allowing me to review this title. As such, it was given to me free of charge.) [i]The Village Story[/i] is a brief RPG where you play as a character named Jorah, an up-and-coming adventurer with humble beginnings as a farm boy. The game was created utilizing one of the RPG Maker suites, so gameplay and visuals are somewhat straightforward: the perspective of the camera is of a third-person over-the-head view with a simple control scheme consisting of the directional keys on the keyboard for movement, the zero (0) and escape keys to bring up the game menu, and the spacebar is used as the “action” and “select” key. Now, I want to get into the story briefly before touching on the writing itself later in the review. As I had stated earlier, you play as a young would-be adventure named Jorah who is trying to live out his “Destiny.” I regret to say it but the concept is far better than the execution. For a large majority of the game I found myself talking to an NPC on a small and feature-baren map (littered with geometry errors, including the ability to walk through most people, foliage, and even walls) only for them to instruct me as the player to complete a task, often times given to me as an exact location. After completing the task, I would return to the NPC, in which I am then teleported to another featureless map only to complete the exact gameplay cycle over and over again. I could honestly see the potential of finding X,Y or Z item around a larger map without hints, however, most of the maps are essentially giant squares and rectangles ridden with bland objects scattered about in that the NPC who gave me the task will instruct me of the exact location of the item anyway, making every objective in the game a tedious fetch-quest with no physical or emotional reward upon completion. As far as the writing goes, I don’t have much to comment on unfortunately. This short experience is extremely generic and, as far as the story goes, I was uninterested roughly ten minutes into it. The pacing of the plot felt extremely rushed and uninteresting character dialog didn’t help me to stay immersed in the slightest. Complimenting the story is a decent amount of grammatical and punctuation errors, which removed myself personally from the ambiance. The best compliment I can give to this game is its music, as I had found myself trudging along simply to listen to the game’s soothing, if not somewhat generic, soundtrack. Although, it is rather unfortunate as I cannot condone the $4.99 pricetag based solely on the music alone. [i]The Village Story[/i] is a game that can be walked through in well under an hour, so it doesn’t pretend to waste your time, but I can’t say that I found my time within the world very riveting based on the gameplay and writing.