Prodigal Reviews

This one really surprised me and not even for the reasons you might suspect. I find most Zeldalikes (not all) to do a fairly poor job of capturing that experience with good design, but this one for the most part does. The dungeons are fairly good with mostly interesting puzzles and no real moments of frustrations (outsdie of one REALLY frustrating sliding block ice puzzle, which was way too fucking hard - and I say this as a puzzle game enjoyer), boss fights are nothing really special all that jazz. It's a fun enough game on a mechanical level. No, what really got me to this one was the story and characters, which were genuinely well crafted. First of all, you don't start as a tabula rasa here, you have a past of being a POS who robbed you parents and left town and having to reprove yourself. In this process you help people and can form connections with various people in town and even get married. I found most of the characters fairly well-written with one (River) really far outclassing the other with the writing. The game also features significant post-game content, but since for me what really connected me with the game was the story, I do not at this point feel like pursuing that. I feel satisfied with the base game, although I might give it a shot down the line.

Honestly reminds me of classic Game Boy or Zelda games. Creative puzzles, basic combat but I don't mind for a chill experience, strong story with multiple directions you could go which increases replayability. I'm digging it a lot. Highly recommend!

A great game inspired in the Legend of Zelda GB games, but with its own ideas that make this game feel fresh and original. I loved all the secrets and sidequests and it made me appreciate Colorgrave games.

really really cool gameplay mechanics that allow and encourage puzzle skipping + even cooler post-game dungeons

I love this game. It has old school retro charm, catchy music, and endearing characters. The base game alone is great, but there is a lot of post game content to sink your teeth into, it’s the game that keeps on giving. If you want more, it’s easy to find! Also, THE LORE. If you look, you’ll find lore everywhere and it is so good. Even better, the lore connects with other Colorgrave games, so the deeper you dig the more you’ll find. If any of this resonated with you, give this game a shot. You won’t be disappointed.

Gameplay is good. It's sort of the purest essence of a top-down Zelda game. Unfortunately, the story starts to get pretty old after a while. Yes, I get it, it's called that because you're the "prodigal son." You don't have to spell it for the 85th time.

A very fun game, like all of Colorgrave's outings it oozes with charm. The gameplay wears its GBC Zelda influences on its sleeve with a lot of clever abilities to traverse and solve puzzles for those yearning for more of this older school of dungeon design. What really sets it apart is the cast of characters inhabiting the town, navigating the tense relationships in returning to your childhood home after your parent's death, having fled in disgrace years before.

Prodigal is one of the strongest entries in the weirdly robust "Gameboy [Color] Era Top-Down Puzzle-Adventure Games" genre I've ever played. Excellent music and spritework, an appropriate puzzle difficulty curve with [intentional??] options to sequence break, a solid story with fun characters, and an optional difficult post-game that dabbles in some meta stuff as well. If you're a fan of these types of games I can't recommend Prodigal enough.

Well... I was loving this game until it froze on me and I lost tons of (nonlinear and somewhat confusing) post-game progress because there's apparently no autosave. Which nowadays honestly should be made clear to the player, and I don't think it was. Great game, although I am unlikely to finish it now. Played hours are not accurate, it seems because I played offline for a while.

On its surface, this is a neat little Zelda-like game. Cute GBA-ish graphics, you wander around and kill monsters with your pickaxe, you explore a few dungeons where you get new items that increase your mobility and solve some puzzles, you fight a few bosses and get some items you need to advance the plot, then you beat the last boss and the game is over. And that all takes around five hours. But the game still has >10 hours of gameplay left after that, and at some point you realize that it's not the Zelda-like you thought it was. What this game is [i]really[/i] about is its large cast of townsfolk, who all have backstories for you to discover and tasks for you to do for them, and it's really about you looking for secrets while you trigger events and complete personal quests. This leads to a surprisingly non-linear story, and there are still more dungeons to explore and bosses to fight, but a lot of these can be done in any order or not at all. This is interesting, but sometimes also kind of frustrating, because the game often only gives you vague hints about where you can go next, meaning that often you're not sure what you're supposed to do other than just run another lap around town and talk to everybody to see who has something new to say. The "post-game" content is also filled with a [i]lot[/i] of secrets that were clearly intended to keep the game's community occupied while the game was still receiving new content in patches. They're very well hidden, and some of them are going to require you basically combing through every room in the game with every item you have, trying to find something you missed earlier. It's good if you like that kind of thing, but annoying if you want to be able to find everything without resorting to a guide. All in all, I think this is a pretty neat little game that is a lot more ambitious than it might seem at first glance. It's also interesting coming to this as somebody whose first Colorgrave game was Curse Crackers; there are some connections between the game, but if you're going in blind, they're not what you think they will be, and it provides an interestingly different angle on some of their shared lore.