Re: Summon Reviews

A charmingly ambitious indie game but it is unfortunately held back by inconsistent quality and lack of polish. The game's performance is suitable in open areas, but abhorrent in buildings; dropping to 15 FPS in the starting house and crashing the first time I launched and got past the initial dialogue. The narrative takes a while to get to the adventure, starting with a series of trivial tasks preparing for Gemini's birthday which require you to go between the town and home a few times. There is no skip button, so dialogue can feel slow if you read quickly or need to replay a section. There is one little peeve I have where it said to go to a forest in the South, but the actual objective was on a plateau to the West. A nice touch is the quest objective UI which helps the player keep track of what to do. The level design relies on giant walls and nonsensical fencing to corral the player through a lot of areas and makes what would otherwise be a nice field feel claustrophobic and unnatural. The minimap is a bit of a crutch for the aforementioned level design. Since you cannot turn the camera, various obstacles will obscure the view or nudge the camera. The only bug I encountered was during combat; my creature had 4 mp left and the move I was trying to use, Stone Hurl, costs 4 mp; instead of using the last of my mp, it behaved as though I did not have enough mp to use the ability. I assume this is a logical error where instead of "if ( mpCost <= monster.mp )", it uses "if ( mpCost < monster.mp )". BG Audio does not use seamless loops, so there is a noticeable gap when it restarts and footsteps don't always match the animation. The game does include some basic audio settings. The visual style is wildly inconsistent and simply serves to get the job done. The art style swaps between using flat colours and detailed textures, feeling like a bunch of assets mashed together. Edith's character portrait randomly changes styles after the first time you interact with them. Attack animations are pretty basic and uninteresting. There's also this funky little thing when the character blinks their eye pokes through the mesh which I found amusing. The drawn chibi portraits are really cute but feel out of place juxtaposed to the character models. The UI is functional but heavily relies on text which isn't always relevant and adds some clutter that could be simplified with more clever use of colour coding and icons. The attack descriptions are not ideal for determining which one to use in combat. Had the scope of this game been a lot smaller, I feel like the dev could have spent more time adding juice to make the user experience much nicer. If you're in the mood for a humble creature capture adventure, I can recommend it on sale.