Crimson Shroud

[DANGERMAN]

I'm only a couple of fights in to this but it seems like it's going to be complicated. Firstly the way it's told, it's written like a novel, it took me longer than it should have done to work that out, so I wasn't sure who was talking for a while.

It's a dice game, ish. You get in to a fight and take a turn, mostly you'll be selecting to attack, ending your turn, selecting to attack with your next character, ending their turn, selecting to attack... Where it starts getting complicated is that you earn magic by attacking, unless the character is the mage, you select her skill 'meditate' and then she gets a dice roll, how much you roll is how much she gets back. I think you can use a skill whenever you've got the magic points to use it, plus you can attack still, so you select the skill to increase your swordsman's damage, then attack with him.

If you manage to sneak up on an enemy then you roll some dice to see how many turns they're surprised for. A turn is 1 character's movement, so your team is 3 turns, plus the enemies turn, so a roll of 7 meant for me that the goblins I was fighting only got 1 attack in where I got 3 because their turn was first. When you end a fight, depending on how well you do, you get points to spend on dropped loot. You can't level up in the game so loot is the only way to improve your character. If you don't have enough points for all the stuff you want then you can trade in a dice for its sides to count as points (this is where I started to lose the thread a bit)

There's a combo system, I'm not entirely sure what this does, but each move has an element attached to it, unless it doesn't, you need to keep attacking using different elements, if you reuse an element then the combo ends.

It seems decent, but it also seems like the sort of game you can't leave and come back to without forgetting everything

[DANGERMAN]

I've gone back to Crimson Shroud this week and sure enough it's still really complicated. What I'm not so sure about is how much half of it matters, like you can get dice (used for certain attacks for bonus effects) by chaining a combo together. Every move has a 'type', so your healing spell might be water, your defence boost rock, your attack lightning etc, one beats the other beats the other, doing this creates the chain and gets you a die. The thing is I couldn't tell you what beats what, I'm more concerned about not getting killed, yet I never run out of dice.

The story isn't particularly well told, it's very teenage pulpy. I'm not sure how else to explain it really, it feels like someone not able to write olde dialogue trying to write it, it reminds me of the Vampire Hunter D books, but I'm not sure if anyone else here has read them. The bit I'm on at the minute I need a key, and the only way to get it is to keep doing the same fight over and over until someone eventually drops the item I need to get the key. Bit shit if I'm honest, if it wasn't for wanting to get some of my backlog cleared I'd probably would have put it down for a while

[DANGERMAN]

I finished this tonight, it's pretty good, certainly unlike anything else I've played in a long time. The ending is great too, the script for the plot isn't very good so I'd kind of switched off on the plot, but the ending is really well done.

It's not for everyone, I know Spatular has it and I'm not sure he'll like it, but it is good. The difficulty is about as perfect as you could want, I always had to focus, one mistake could lose a battle, but I barely died and yet was never over levelled

[radiofloyd]

Have you played Attack of the Friday Monsters?

[DANGERMAN]

I bought it yesterday to start today, I don't really know anything about it other than it's supposed to be good