Nadia Was Here Reviews

Nadia Was Here reminds me somehow of a Gameboy game that could never have been made. I mean, besides the colors, it's definitely best played with mouse and keyboard, due to the battle system, but its style and uniqueness put me in mind of that era of strange sequels and spinoffs, where games absolutely had to try something a little different to make it work within the format's limitations. Though it may look at first glance like a fairly typical JRPG, Nadia is to me more compelling and subversive than the other JRPG-on-its-head games people like to point to as examples. Part of that is the complete lack of typical progression and party dynamics. There's no levelling, scaling health, scaling damage, meaningless number creep. Most enemies have about the same amount of health and do about the same amount of damage from the start of the game to the end, but have more troublesome attacks or tricks to correspond with your party's greater flexibility and refinement. There's a little bit of customization in the form of three accessory slots per character, which you can fill with equipment that provides a very powerful, but very singular buff, like faster actions in combat or immunity to certain status effects. Combat is central to Nadia, not because there's an awful lot of it, or because it's an especially violent or tactical game, but because combat is how each of the three main characters express their roles. All combat takes place on a field of three lanes, and each party member stands opposite either one enemy, or an empty space. Every action besides consumable item use and summoning has a casting time, and you can see everyone's progress on their next action simultaniously. You can also freely pause, shuffle your party into different lanes, choose different actions for them, or throw consumables around. Within this, each character acts impressively differently. Nadia, the thief type, starts out only being able to steal items from enemies or hit them for a small [but reliable] amount of damage, but her options expand as she steals weapons from certain enemy types, the only way for her to get the weapons. The fighter always hits with the same weapon, but his defenses and attack properties are affected by what shield he has out, so he is generally the one that gets the most micromanagement, especially if you're moving him in front of enemies that are about to attack to take the blow for other party members. The mage can also steal spells from enemies, but only if he can get in front of them while they're casting it, and he is also the only character that can heal others [or heal at all without consumables or slight lifesteal on hit]. Once you get far enough, you can probably afford to brute force a lot of the combat with consumable items, but I did almost all of the combat without any. The dungeons are also very puzzle-heavy, and this could be a drawback for some, although I found the puzzles to be just the right difficulty where I was challenged but never felt like I had to look up a walkthrough. The game is consistent and clear about how each element works, although the hint fairies vanish forever once you speak to them, so if you set the game down mid-dungeon I can expect you might forget some crucial detail of how the puzzle elements work. There's a lot of nice incidental dialogue with NPCs in towns, and plenty of side content too. I finished the final dungeon and boss without getting one of the major puzzle solving items, and haven't photographed all 50 flowers yet either, though I plan to at some point. Nadia Was Here is a fantastic pickup as long as you aren't put off by a decent bit of puzzling in dungeons. If you like unique and interesting RPGs, this might turn out to be one of your new favorites.

An interesting story with a satisfying conclusion that departs from the usual "the chosen kids save the world" tropes combined with great puzzle design makes this a solid recommendation. Combat was an interesting novelty, fortunately for the game there's no random encounters and grinding to do because the novelty wore thin fast due to the amount of micromanaging needed. I ended up switching to half speed simply because I couldn't keep up with managing all the lane positions and skill selections and hit point healings fast enough to keep everyone alive. Fortunately saving is automatic and losing in battle just means restarting the room you are in. One thing to note about the combat is that compared to a lot of other RPGs (most) debuffs *matter* (except Sleep, which ends after a few seconds whether hit or not). It may not be Shin Megami Tensei where you will die without them, but if you don't apply them and manage them, you *will* have a harder time in battle. Speaking of solving puzzles, they range from fairly basic to brow-furrowing, but for nearly all of the cases you can see the end goal you need to achieve, and work backwards to figure out how to get there. I may have needed a few attempts to find out what doesn't work (or to find which bush the rock you need to push is hidden under) but I never needed to refer to a walkthrough to solve a puzzle for me. Once you solve the puzzle, most have a bypass you can open at the end that will remain permanently open even when the room is reset (larger ones in the end game may have separate "stages" like this. To get 100% you will need to backtrack as you get new abilities to solve puzzles in earlier maps but the lack of random encounters prevents this from becoming a drag. The developer most recently updated the game in the Summer of 2020 and a lot of the quality of life things mentioned in some of these reviews from years ago seem to have been fixed (for instance, the D-pad worked just fine on my F310 in XInput mode). I did hit a few bugs, mostly due to using skills in places or ways the dev didn't expect, but none of them crashed or otherwise broke the game, and the "reset the room" skill works even after riding a lily pad through the wall if you manage to line one up with an obstruction preventing you from docking on land.

Initially I liked the game a decent amount, but the game tends to get rather repetitive and stretched out. The dialogue and story isn't very interesting, but it's not bad. The combat is unique, but it doesn't have much depth most of the time. There are seemingly a lot of options, but 95% of the attacks and spells and items are pretty useless. You can super micromanage the fights in order to make them go faster, but there is generally 0 chance of dying if you just leave your mage on casting the heal spell, which ends up trivializing the combat and makes it kind of boring. The dungeons are very big, but the size often isn't justified. And it is very frustrating that most of the extra chests that you have to go out of your way to get just have potions. Overall not a bad game, but I wouldn't recommend it.

My playtime is fairly low and, full disclosure, I requested a refund. The game doesn't seem *bad*, don't get me wrong. The pixel art is pretty decent, but the perspective on the game world layout was just.. strange. The way doors and walls and such are rendered makes it hard to get a real sense for it all. They seem to be kinda stuck between NES/SNES, rather than really nailing something down as far as what they were going for. The characters are so low resolution pixel-wise that they're kinda distractingly non-distinct. The sound effects were sometimes fine and sometimes kinda jarring and harsh, in a way that pulled me from the game. In particular, the end-of-battle sounds for gold/xp adding up were oddly kinda harsh, and the sound that played during NPC text was kinda more annoying than anything else. Maybe it's a bit loud or a bit too sharp? I'm not sure, but it kinda bugged me a bit! A bigger personal, but your-mileage-may-vary complaint, is that you can't use a dpad.. Even though it's a cardinal-direction grid-based movement game, so you may find yourself often going up or down when you try to go left or right because joysticks just work that way, and bumping into things you dont' mean to. The combat is unique and novel, but kinda just seemed needlessly fiddly rather than especially drawing me in. If it were a bit cheaper I might hang onto it and play it aynways, but for $12 I'll refund it and maybe look again later at a discount and/or when some control improvements or other changes have been made. Speaking of which - no control customizations exist, having a controller plugged in locks out mouse/keyboard *entirely*, too. Ultimately I think folks who are interested in this game should try the demo with the combat - if it speaks to you, then grab it, if it doens't, then it doesn't look like there's a lot else that really goes too far outside the box here, as far as I can tell from my (relatively short) playtime, other reviews, etc. The dialog and story didn't exactly draw me in, but maybe it needed some more playtime for that.. but even still, the voice of the writing based on the initial characters and such didn't lead me to believe that'd be the case.

I normally prefer making more in-depth reviews and only doing so after at least beating a game, but Nadia Was Here is leaving the Steam store on February 1st, 2024 (tomorrow as of posting this review). As such, I'm putting up a quick blurb to promote the game for anyone who might be interested before it's gone for good. I'm around three hours in so far. I really like the battle system, it's active without feeling stressful. You can easily pause when needed to think out moves, but you also have to be alert to move characters around for dodging/reacting to enemies. It's a cool take on classic turn-based mechanics. I'm enjoying the characters so far, there's some good humor and the game makes use of each one having their own niche along with having some different interactions with NPCs. Plot seems fairly standard but that's fine by me since the characters and dialogue are entertaining. If you're in the market for an old-school-inspired RPG with an interesting battle system and an enjoyable experience overall, I can say that I've been getting my money's worth so far. I'd recommend getting it before it goes off the store unless you're certain it's a genre you're not going to engage in.

Understandably, I did not play this game for too long, so I cannot expand upon a lot of details for the game. Hence, this review is not quite an expansive one to judge everything. In all honesty, the style of the game turned me away really quickly, which is somewhat ironic. But I will explain why. I had some argument with myself that I wanted to play the game and try to enjoy it, but I found myself feeling like I just wouldn't enjoy it given by some clear signs right away. I bought the game over one of the trailers due to the music and the way battles looked, among some other details. I thought the artistic style was weird, even for something trying to do NES/SNES (with some mix of Atari-like colors) from the pictures... But that didn't bother me too much when I first looked at the game. So my mistake in purchase wasn't over the looks at all. It was more for the audio and gameplay. I knew from the beginning that the game would have some retro sound effects; but the trailers had some interesting, mixed-up music, so I was hoping for it to be a bit different. Instead, I do not think much of the music that I was hearing was like that in the trailers (which play 3 different songs). That sort of disappointed me at first. But even worse, a lot of the basic sound effects are really annoying and are even more exaggerated than they were on retro systems. The static sound when you switch screens particularly kills my ears, and I cannot tell if it is just the way my speakers are handling it or if the game intentionally plays it that way. I have played video games my whole life, and retro systems [i]never[/i] made me squirm when I heard certain sound effects. This game did, however. Then when it comes to the gameplay, there are a few small details plus a bigger one. I do not like the way the control system works, nor do I like how you navigate by repeatedly walking into objects and people to interact with them. That definitely felt odd for me. Maybe I played games decades ago that did that, but I can't quite remember. Besides that, the battle system made me feel like I would like it less than I saw in the trailers. It showed that it can be interesting at first, because you can swap around and move characters in front of certain enemies (or rather avoid other ones). But even with that, the battles seemed like they went in slow-motion. I had the 100% speed setting on, and even noticed a button that seemed to slow battles down or keep them at "normal" pace. Even at normal pace, it seemed like it would take forever for turns to occur, and I felt like I would spend large amounts of time waiting in battle. I am sure battles get more complicated, but I usually do not find many turn-based RPGs complex enough to absolve really slow timers. Because of the above reasons, I figured that I wouldn't continue with the game.

Nadia was Here has a fun, active battle system, and more puzzles than you can shake a stick at. Nadia's battles are fun from beginning to end. You control three characters, each with their own specialty, which together make up and odd but satisfying party. You have a defender who spends a lot of time jumping in front of enemy hits while trying not to disrupt your party formation too much, a thief who steals weapons she can then use in combat, and a mage who learns spells from other casters (and is otherwise helping do damage or heal). It's a game without excess battles, and it rewards you for doing more than just winning - stealing/learning is your main way of improving your characters, so you might have to spend some time figuring out how to goad a boss into doing an ability at exactly the right time, so you can learn it yourself, then scrabbling to win the battle. The combat system is definitely the reason to get this game. You spend most of the rest of your time doing puzzles. Your puzzle-solving isn't interrupted by combat very often, and you earn more tools to solve the puzzles as you go through the game, which I'm usually a fan of... But you do spend a lot of time sitting in front of puzzles, more than I expected going into the game, and a few of the puzzles feel quite similar to each other. Be ready for each area to take a decent chunk of time. You should definitely play this game if you want to try out a more active RPG battle system, and/or if you like puzzles in your RPGs.

Great RPG with a unique ATB lane based combat system, excellent music, plentiful dungeons with solid puzzles, and a good amount of side content. No random encounters and no grinding (there are no levels to even be gained, just equipment to sometimes steal and spells to learn). The implementation of ATB can be a bit hectic but it both freezes when taking an action and there's also the option to reduce it the overall speed in half if need be. Puzzles have a good amount of variety and make good use of the various tools you get throughout the game, there's even a bit of Metroid DNA with going back to old areas with new stuff to access previously unreachable items/etc. Quality story with some good character beats. Great and easily readable visuals that really pop. Honestly one of the best RPGs you can purchase on the platform.

At it's heart, Nadia Was Here is a puzzle game. The description might say it's an RPG, but if you don't like lots and lots of puzzles, then thanks for your time, but this game is not for you. For everyone else, let me tell you about this awesome undiscovered gem. Nadia Was Here has two major gameplay features: the dungeons and the combat, which are both puzzle based, in my opinion. First up, combat. Combat works like a typical Final Fantasy Active Time Battle system in that each character has a gauge and it fills up. Once it's filled, the character takes an action. The difference with NWH is that there is no pause once the gauge is filled for you to select your action. All the characters will continuously do whatever action is selected until you switch them. Instead, when you want to switch between actions, you just select the character, select the new action (which pauses the game), and that's it. The character will now continuously do the new action. Another part of combat is lanes. You have 3 characters arranged in a vertical line. Each character faces an enemy arranged in a similar vertical line. Each character can only hit the enemy in front of them. However, you can switch you characters around at any time. So if your physical attacker gets paired with a physical immune enemy, just swap him with the mage. You can also see the enemy's attack gauge, so when you combine the two, you get some neat puzzles to solve. Do you want to steal something with your squishy thief, but the enemy is a strong physical attacker and will ice her in one hit? Wait for her attack gauge to fill up, switch her in for the hit, and then switch her with your tank so he can take the enemy hit. Let's talk about the characters, because they're all unique. First up is Nadia. She's a thief, so she steals stuff. That's it about her, right? Nope. She steals enemy weapons, which she personally adds to her arsenal. So, eventually you'll stockpile a huge pile of weapons (really, just special skills) that she'll use on the enemy. Need to poison an enemy? Use the fang. Health is constantly low? Use the claw which does more damage depending on how low your health is. Next up is Hogan, your physical tank. His specialty is shields. Some of them will reduce physical or magical damage, but others will increase his attack or inflict status ailments when he attacks. Last is Tereshan, the mage. He's actually a newbie mage, so you'll have to learn them from enemies by having Tereshan complete his study action while an enemy is casting the spell you want to learn. He'll be your main magic and status damage dealer, along with your healer. Speaking of healing, any items you need to use don't take an action for the character. They're done real-time, by you. Do you want to chuck 5 small potions on your characters in 5 seconds? You can do that. Dump a bunch of charms (magical damage) on one enemy before their turn? Go for it! If you're feeling overwhelmed by the battle system, don't worry. You can always pause the game at anytime to see what's going on, or set the battle speed to 50% if it's going by too fast. Aside from getting weapons/skills/shields/magic/etc, from the enemy, the only other piece of equipment to worry about are amulets that you'll find around the world. Each character has 3 slots for amulets, and an amulet can be upgrade 3 times for better and better effects. You can get more HP, a better steal chance, or just more money and dust (currency for upgrading amulets) from battle. That's it for accessories. No armor or weapons or whatnot to worry about. In addition, there are no random battles. Either you'll see the enemies in the dungeon (and the only respawn in one dungeon in the game), or when you move to a new area for the first time, the game will pop up with a window saying that you'll have to fight X battles in a row. Once you do that, that's it. If you want to fight some more, you'll have to find some new areas on the map or go in the arena. That's a lot of words for the battle system, but that's a major draw to the game for me. The battle system is amazing. Every battle is fun and exciting, and once the game starts ramping up the enemies, they do really become a puzzle to be solved. Is an enemy kicking your teeth in? Then you better change your strategy because there is no grinding and no levels. You might worry about the "no levels" bit, but the difficulty curve is so good that [i]I didn't realize there weren't any character levels until near the end of the game[/i]. In this game, I'm constantly looking forward to new enemy encounters because of how fun they are. What new weapon and/or magic will I get from this enemy? What kind of new strategy do I need to defeat this group? The second major draw from NWH is the dungeon puzzles. In each dungeon there are multiple puzzles to solve before you can progress, eventually you'll get items which are used to solve more puzzles in dungeons. And then you'll get more items that will combine with your other items in puzzles that need both items to progress. The first item you get is the Earth Flute, which is a bit boring. You use it to grow plants. I didn't find many interesting puzzles using it, but the second item you get is the Fire Bongos, which let you set the space one square in front of you on fire, which is used for burning plants that block your way. Notice the limitation of one square in front of you, and not directly in front of you. There are a lot of puzzles that take into account the fact that you can't just walk up to a plant and torch it. The other two items you get are equally as awesome and interesting. Because there are no random encounters, the puzzles become quite elaborate, but that's OK because you're never interrupted in the middle of your puzzle. The game also has a couple of quality of life improvements for an RPG. While there are save points that refill your HP and remove any status effects, the game also saves on every screen, so it's easy to put the game down for the night when you're in the middle of a dungeon. To talk to people or search objects, you just need to bump into them, no mashing X required. There are also hidden items everywhere, so it's fun to walk around and bump into things and see what you get. You can also switch characters on the fly, and NPCs will sometimes say different things depending on who they're talking to. The story has an interesting hook, once it gets going, and the characters are pretty interesting, but they could be fleshed out a bit more. If you're playing this game, it's a lot more for the gameplay and less the story. It's been a while since a game hooked me like this, especially a psudo-RPG. I've got 21 hours so far, and I'm taking on the side quests because I don't want the game to end. I'm planning on getting all the achievements too (they're pretty reasonable). I love the chiptune music, and something about that weird colour pallet just draws me in. This game definitely needs more love, so if you want to solve puzzles in dungeons with a cool battle system, go pick this up! There's also a battle demo, so you can check out the battle system if you're interested! Go for it!

The game is absolutely brilliant. I wholeheartily recommend it, especially to anyone who likes puzzles or pixelated RPGs. The gameworld is divided into sections, each of which consists of many rooms, full of clever puzzles. Over the course of the game, you unlock various new methods of interacting with the world, that allows you to reach previously unreachable places. The puzzles themselves are usually not too hard, they are well designed and some of them require quite some thinking, but it's never frustrating. Lots of them are optional - they offer additional rewards, but are not necessery to progress in the game. This is the core gameplay loop. The other gameplay element is the battle system. It's quite innovative thing really, I prefer it to all the battles we are used to from RGP Maker games. Here the battles are real time with pause, based on 3-lanes system. The goalis to switch your heroes positioning and their equipment (during battle) so they kill enemy efficiently and aren't hit hard themselves. It's quite fun, but can be sometimes a little frustrating. You can check the battle mechanics in free demo available here on Steam. The art is beatiful and very original in style, just check the screenshots. Music is great as well. The story is quite interesting, the dialogs are short and good enough, with some humour. The mechanics of finding flowers gives you motivation to go to the previous areas (as some flowers cannot be accessed during the first-run through the arena, as you don't have the powers needed to reach them) - and it's actually quite fun to figure out how to reach the flowers. I just finished the game and only managed to find 42 or something, while there are 50, according to an achievement. And you are not just doing that for the achievement, there are rewards in game as well. The game lenght - while the devs said the game takes about 10 hours, I think that is only possible if you know precisely what exactly to do and you don't try to get everything. I finished the game with about 21 hours on the counter in game. Quite some of that was when I was stuck and figuring out how to solve some puzzles - but as I mentioned, it was very fun and not frustrating. So, overall, I really recommend it. The author did a really great job..