Curate of Curiosities

While the RPG Maker engine is designed specifically for making, well, RPGs, some of the most popular games made with it contain very little RPG elements. This doesn't take away from the fact that the vast, vast majority of RPG Maker games belong to the titular genre. However, it is with that very genre that the engine's one major drawback comes into play.

The engine is designed with a built in turn-based combat engine, that, from personal experience, most developers don't bother to modify in the slightest. As a result, for the most part, combat is not something you have to really think about.

Ordinarily, this isn't much of a problem, as most RPG maker developers--at least, the ones capable of turning out finished, competently made products--would rather focus on some other aspect of the RPG experience.

That doesn't mean that there aren't any developers that focus on the combat instead. For example, a developer may choose to make the combat fiendishly difficult in order to illustrate the cruel, oppressive nature of the world the game takes place in, or maybe because they simply have no idea how game balance works.

This brings us to our subject, I Hate You, Please Suffer, developed by scitydreamer.

How did I first find out about this game? Um...probably from a link on some blog post about how brutally hard old-school RPGs were, I guess. But that's not really important. What is is that I downloaded the demo off of Itch.io. What's even more important is that it was every bit as brutal as its title implied, with battles that seemed designed to force the player to use up nearly all of their healing resources, before rewarding you with a pittance of money that, more often than not, is just enough to recover whatever you just used, making it difficult to use what little you've earned for more substantial, permanent things like equipment upgrades. And no amount of level grinding would save me, as enemies scale to your level. It got to the point where I had to restart the entire game just to escape getting ambushed and forced into an unwinnable fight as soon as I loaded the save file.

This was on purpose, of course (okay, maybe not the part where you get jumped as soon as you load your save). As mentioned above, the RPGs from the 8- and 16-bit eras that popularized and codified the genre (and which include the very first RPGs I played) weren't exactly known for being easy, after all. Furthermore, the game was conceived while the world was still reeling from the socio-economic impact of the Covid-19 pandemic. In fact, as I later found out, the game was partially inspired from the creator being laid off while the pandemic was in full swing.

When I first played the demo, it was still in active development. and although it had already gone through a number of updates, it would be a while before even the release date would be announced. So I don't think I need to tell you what happened when the game came out in December of 2023. Of course, the first few hours were already well-trodden ground for me, with only a few barely noticeable differences.

The further I got through the game, the more the game's message and themes stood out to me. This came to a head in one particular quest line, which felt like a manifestation of the creator's frustration at the world.

Sections:

1. Adventuring Is A Racket
   Still might be easier than applying for unemployment benefits, though.