Frameland: A Binary Tale Steam Charts & Stats

A pixel adventure, love letter to 90's kids Good - Sidequest - Hidden Boss at hidden area - Ultimate equipment Can be improved - Add speed settings, the dialogue and battle text can be lil bit faster - Add "run" toggle - More sidequest but with hint and something like log tracker - More hidden boss - More area to explore - The enemy is almost cannot be avoided, - Hint or warning when aproaching final dungeon could be nice This game is potential to be expanded or having sequels;

Frameland sells itself as a retro-inspired RPG that can be completed over a weekend. It utilizes nostalgic pixel art combined with modern graphical effects and a somewhat barebones combat system to tell a fairly watered down story. Where Frameland succeeds is in the core design of a simplistic turn-based combat system with a unique "weakness" mechanic. This is implemented fairly poorly however. Certain enemies have weaknesses to certain damage types (which seem somewhat rare or unique to certain character's specific abilities, at least until you get access to Remnants). Attacking them with any other damage type is essentially a waste of time as the damage is reduced to marginal amounts. Deal enough weakness-aligned damage to "break" their defense, however, and they are stunned and become weak to all damage for a limited time. What this creates is a very paint-by-numbers approach to combat. Use useless, ineffectual abilities to build up AP, which you can then spend to use the appropriate elemental skill on an enemy. Do this once or twice to break their weakness then dump everything you have on them to kill them before their guard is restored. Every combat will play out this exact same way, bosses and regular enemies alike. Combat utilizes "timed hits", something you're likely familiar with if you played Super Mario RPG or any of the Maro & Luigi titles. Time your button-presses for attack and defense well and they are more effective and earn more AP. Where the system falls short of Super Mario RPG is that it uses the same minigame for every action in the game. Basic attack, combo, plasma punch, even knocking down walls for some reason all require you to do the same exact thing. Press the button when the lines intersect. Don't get me wrong, its a polished little minigame - there's a "hit lag" effect that emphasizes the impact and adds a little "oomph" to timed hits but it gets old well before you see the 50th or 100th perfect hit achievement pop up. It contributes fairly strongly to the feeling that once you've seen combat, you've seen pretty much all the game has to offer. Giving each character's basic attack a unique minigame at least would add some variety and a little extra flavor to each party member. Do the same for the Remnants of each elemental type. Remnants, while an interesting take on a Materia-style system, ultimately don't offset how combat feels like a chore. And when it comes to the timed hits in cutscenes my only advice is to remember a lesson learned from tabletop games - if there's no penalty for failure, don't make the player roll the dice. I'd rather watch the dog blow a hole into a wall in 2 seconds than play out the same timed hit minigame 3 or 4 times in a row (more, if you're not perfectly timing your hits). As for its story, I honestly couldn't tell you much of what happens - the characters are so mind-numbingly boring and one-dimensional that I never became invested in their plight. Decisions seem to be made by characters which are nonsensical at best and the story meanders somewhat pointlessly. Prime plot points ("I need shelter!") are waved away by a talking robot dog and followed up by a life-or-death trek through a mine which culminates in an encounter with a robot that was causing earthquakes, a plot point which should be a concerning factor for a mine but which got little more than a single line of dialogue after it was over. "That puts an end to the earthquakes." Story beats need time to land, to be impactful, and should be resolved in some fashion. I'm not sure you can call it a "gripping story" if the plot doesn't even hold onto itself. This is probably a personal beef, but the combination of admittedly decent pixel art with modern graphical effects is offputting at places. Some of these effects create horizontal banding or "smudge" the screen which turns these crisp pixels into mixels - irregularly shaped pixels. There's a windmill early on which has vanes comprised of a pixel artwork sprite that spins. The system anti-aliases using pixels of a different size, making it seem very out of place compared to any other sprite on the screen. There are several effects like this throughout the game, meaning that you're constantly reminded of how this pixel artwork has been squeezed through a modern day rendering engine and ends up coming out not quite right. Frameland is not a bad game. In fact, I'd actually say its very technically competent - but what little it does have it uses repeatedly, ad nauseam, to the point that it ends up wearing thin fairly quickly. In this case, Frameland is not an RPG I can complete in a weekend as I have no desire to see it through.

Solid 7/10 game. I would easily give this a 8 maybe even a 9 if it wasn't for the way the timing mechanic works in combat. Outside of that this is a nice game. Pros: *Short and to the point game and story. I get burnt out playing 30-40+ hour RPGs. I beat this one in a little under 13 hours. *Good writing. The characters are good and dialogue can be quite cheesy at times but there is charm to it and has made me laugh. *Combat is good and there is slight strategy to it. *You can examine almost anything in game and your characters will have something to say about it. Makes it pretty immersive. Cons: *The timing mechanic in combat is atrociously implemented. The timings themselves are ok but every single thing has a timing "X" you have to watch over your attacks or defending. I couldn't tell you what any of the combat animations were in the game because you have to watch the "X" animation to time your stuff. Every single action. By the end of the game I was ready to quit because combat just became staring at that dang "X". This alone is the reason I drop the score of the game. *Little in the ways of meaningful Gear or customization. There is equipment but only weapon and armor and there's only like 4-5 per character in the game. You have slots for relics but they don't do a whole lot.