Curate of Curiosities

So I believe that I've said everything that I need to about The Demon Rush, so I won't bother reiterating my thoughts on it here. Instead, I'll link you to a review of the game that I posted on Backloggd.

Now for the rest of his games. At first glance, Skylight does seem to be an improvement over The Demon Rush's formula, with its more detailed, slightly less stiff character sprites and more polished UI, but it inherits many of the issues that plagued its predecessor, such as a barely comprehensible, exposition-heavy plot.

I did bring up the backstory revealed in John A's reports and their connection to the sequel's plot, but the more I think about it, the more I realize how audacious this whole thing was. A lot of indie games aren't made with a sequel in mind, especially back then, so clearly The D must have though that his vision was too grand to be confined to just one game. However, it's very likely that none of the probably less than a dozen people who played this game even bothered with going through two different submenus to read these lore snippets, and for what? To find out that the secret backstory of several irrelevant bosses?

Speaking of said sequel, making it a strategy game instead of a typical turn-based RPG was a rather unexpected decision. From my personal experience attempting to make one, there are a lot more factors, such as enemy pathfinding, that you need to take into consideration while programming one. That said, I don't have a whole lot of experience with the genre, so I can't tell you exactly how it compares to other games like it. There are some bits that even a total newcomer can tell is poorly designed, like the chapter 5 boss fight.

As for the Skylight Freerange duology, I can't say much about, since I do not have access to the full versions of either game. But I can tell you that, in attempting a pair of open-world 3D RPGs, The D has bitten off far, far more than he could reasonably chew. Sure, an expansive world covering the entirety of a Canadian province sounds impressive, but in practice it only serves as mostly empty space connecting various Skylight 1-style encounter gauntlets. At least there's more enemy variety here.

And the less said about his decision to incorporate sex scenes in Skylight Freerange 2, the better. Though from the playthrough that I've seen, the game allows you to be gay, for whatever that's worth.

Dragooned was never made available on PC at all, so I have nothing more to say about it.

Which brings us, at last, to The Demon Rush: Legends Corrupt, perhaps his most misguidedly ambitious game yet. Once again, I have no idea what possessed The D to create a poorly designed hack-and-slash and attach it to a near shot-for-shot remake of his first game. This is a game where you can have your AI party members lock on to an enemy, but can't lock on to it yourself, if you want to know how well thought out this is. I didn't touch any of the alternate game modes or expansion content, but I don't feel that I'm missing much.

I guess the best you can say about these games is that they're not made with the same cynicism behind them that you'd see in something like, say, Air Control. There's not a single asset flip to be found (unless you count the reuse of visual assets in the 3D games), and from what I can tell, there's no instance of The D throwing a tantrum at anyone who criticized his games. I guess when the first feedback you receive comes from Something Awful, you learn a thing or two about how brutal the public can be.

And yet, going back to Legends Corrupt, you can tell that he seemed to view it as his magnum opus, given the effort involved in incorporating a nmuber of disparate game genres into it. If I didn't know better, I'd say that he did this in an attempt to show up the Something Awful userbase, to show them that his game has evolved from the MS Paint nightmare he uploaded back in 2008. But it seems that they've moved on, and although the remake did receive some attention from the public, practically none of it came from Something Awful.

While The D most certainly had a false conception of his own capabilities, he's still the kind of developer that anyone with even a passing interest in indie games and their development should check out, if only to learn that even if your game's an utter turkey, if you keep at it, you can even end up gaining the attention of big names like Sony, even if you've barely improved at all!