Black River Reviews

I hit many game-breaking bugs. I only managed to get around them by saving constantly in multiple files (after each map) and making use of the auto-save feature. When I wasn't dodging bugs, I was furiously grinding at whatever fountain I could find, but even that left me too low-leveled to take on most of the bosses. I did beat it though, finally. I enjoyed the story, but my victory was spoiled by characters teleporting and appearing where they shouldn't, cut-scenes replaying, and wandering around the map trying to figure out where I was supposed to go next. Thankfully, there was a walkthrough, but I gave up on trying to fight the extra bosses. Even with maxed out healing items, I still couldn't beat them.

I hit 'Page Up' and made the game crash to desktop. A broken mess, I'm surprised it's not been taken off of Steam yet. Not been tested at all extensively should probably be taken off the store with how broken it is.

Like other games by this developer, it's atmospheric and reasonably well made. No random encounters so far, which was nice. It's not easy - I got Game Over'd - but there is an auto save. The other reviews indicate that the game is severely bug-ridden. That's disappointing. Maybe they got fixed? I guess I'll find out. I did run into a bug early on and a typo, and it's pretty weird that you can find and equip an item which makes you immune to poison, and then you get poisoned as part of the plot anyway.

This is a truly fun rpgmaker experience. It's rare for horror games to hit the mark quite like Black River does, and it has an excellent quest guide which gives you very clear instructions. There ARE some glitches though.At one point 'Bobby' chased me down on to the pier after i'd come out of the crypt and it reset my progress back to everyone being lvl 1. Fortunately this can be overcome by beating Bobby and phasing through his stunned body. Not an easy feat though but it would've taken about an hour of my progress away.

I played this game for 9 minutes and Bobby has killed me 20+ times. Bobby, stop. Please. ---------------------------- Originally I couldn't progress as theres no prompt to tell you to run when Bobby the bear is ordered to attack you, so I ended up perpetually stuck fighting him on 1 hp, the game doesn't end when he kills you, its an endless loop and eventually I got curious and walked around with the bear following, I realised eventually I could leave the Inn to progress.. this needed better prompting as I almost totally gave up playing. The story is pretty confusing so far, something with witches and wizards, zombies and a strange village/town with murder?.. It seems very random currently and as you go through its honestly difficult to know where to go or what to do at several points, you end up having to just wander randomly and hope for the best. I've written a guide but honestly this game is buggy, doesn't help you find where you need to go and the achievements are broken. I can't recommend this game.

This game promised to be scary, but the only thing scary is the character design, as some enemies look rather troubling. The rest, is a mess: 1. Can't interact with the environment, except chests or highlighted items. No secrets here, sir, no interesting or funny interactions. 2. Story makes little sense, mixing scary town with scary manor with scientific and/or magical experiments that create zombies or something (other monsters aren't explained) with necromancers that cast white magic spells, some sorcerer that wants to gain power somehow, a scary inn with a scary innkeeper that has dark secrets... 3. Monsters don't seem to respawn, but you'll want to kill all of them in order to be of a decent level (most can be avoided) because some fights in the game are very tough. 4. Characters mostly say "..." instead of actually talking and look around a lot, like a bunch of disoriented morrons. Spoiler A character gets mauled by a bear and doesn't die and other times gets mauled by a bear and dies and sometimes you lose a fight and die and someother times your health goes to zero after the same enemy catches you on the map, forcing you in a fight over and over again... I have no explanation for this, is just meaningless.

TL;DR:I will say this. Just don't buy this, it's not worth the money on sale. Even if you only spent a penny on it, you would want that penny back. Pros: -Graphics are alright since they mainly use the RTP or objects derived from it. -Some of the monsters concepts, while not new, are interesting to see in rpg maker. Cons: -The fights are punishingly hard for a majority of the game. There's fun hard and then there's bashing your head against the wall in a fight of attrition hard. This is the latter. Only after the lady raider earns the arrow attack that hits all enemies twice does the game become bearable. -Characters are just bland. They're all very flat with the only one being vaguely developed is Thorne but even he comes off as "generic edgy rogue #3005798782" -Story. What the fuck even is it? First we're saving one character, then another, then we have to save Thorne (which outside of the one character all the others hate/fear him so???), and then we have to save the world from a mad necromancer? I mean outside of the one character dragging everyone else along to save Thorne there's no real reason to do anything? The story is barely held together and there's no real motivation keeping the characters there. -Glitches/Terrible eventing everywhere. +The maze with the girl and dogs getting stuck, the dogs just end up ignoring the light mechanic altogether. +The docks north of where Bobby and the innkeeper are. If you run up them later in the game it reactivates the cut scene with the lady bandit, starting you over with just the one character back at level 1! That even should have been turned off. Bobby also respawns in that area and I can't tell if that's on purpose or not. +Leaving the dark maze will have you pop up outside the room where the scorpions flooded out to attack the player. -Difficult story progression, and I mean this in that a lot of times the game doesn't tell you where to go. At all. So you're left wandering around with the monsters just whittling you down. -Items are basically useless. They only heal maybe 20-30% of your health, and at later levels you're just shoving Skyrim levels of food into the characters to keep them alive. Add on the hard fights and you're basically running low on health items at all times. The merchant fixes this as you can FINALLY buy and sell the shit you've collected the past 4 hours or so. You've also got more than enough gold to spare. -Bad maps. They look pretty but are very badly designed to where it's hard to tell where you're supposed to go. I almost gave up at the ending because I didn't know I was supposed to go to the left of the in because there's a path there. There is NOTHING there to indicate that. No path, no sign, nothing.

The visuals are lovely and you can clearly see that it takes a lot of cues from the 16bit JRPG genre. I would just love to play this game and finish the main quest if it didn't crash-all-the-time. Accidentally pressing a button that doesn't have any assignment: crash. Press F12 for a screenshot in steam: restart the game. Look funny: crash. I would love to see this work, but it doesn't. Please fix these weird crashes and I will replay and recommend this game. :)

While it wasn't the worst RPG Maker game I ever played, I still can't recommend it. The story was really nothing special and I didn't find any of the characters likeable or at least memorable, but it was good enough to keep me going for the five hours it lasted. Well, the ending was underwehlming, like 30 seconds without any closure, so meh. But what's even worse is the technicals issues. The game froze one time and anothoer five or six times I got an error and it closed itself. I could at least reload and eventually got past the dungeon that caused the issue. And if that wasn't bad enough, some of the achievements seem to be broken. I don't think that's all right for a game asking a price of 7€. It's ridiculous, because I played better games that were much cheaper or even free. And were working properly, too. So I'd suggest to avoid this game even on sale.

Here is my 3rd (and final) update. Previously the game crashed on me twice, after 1 and 5 hours of gameplay. Each time the game crashed, it also corruptted the gamefile and the only way to proceed with the game is to start from New Game. I have sent details and my gamefile to the developer to fix the problem. To be fair to the game, I decided to give the game one more try and start from New Game again, after the first 2 crash. I played my 3rd game for another 5 more hours before it crash again. After the crash all the savefiles were again corrupted and I can no longer play the game. Now I already replayed the game 3 times, and all 3 times I had crash and courrpted files. I really think I have been very fair to this game by spending 11 hours on it to make sure that it is really buggy. It is and so far I have been unable to finished the game after 3 tries, so I do not recommend this game at all (even though I loved RPG Maker games and have hundreds of them in my library). -------------------------------------------------------------------- Here is a second update, written 6 hours after playing the game. After the crash there was a problem with my game file, and I cannot even load it without it crashing directly. So, I have to start a NEW GAME and was able to play it for 5 hours. However, after 5 hours I got another crash again, with the same error message (but different line number). As usual, the crash somehow corrupt my game file again, and it cannot be loaded. I posted screenshots, etc in the game forum. This is really FRUSTRATING!!! If I have to restart the game from scratch and lost 5 hours of gameplay, I am done with the game. I just count my $4.89 as a lost cause and do not want to continue with this game. If this game is crashing, it is really not ready to be release. Again, more testing should have been done, and this game really make me disappointed with Aldorlea as a indiscrimate publisher, publishing games without even testing them. -------------------------------------------------- Here is the first update, written 1 hour after playing the game. I bought this game, hoping to have a good time. However, I did not get very far into the game when it crashed with some cryptic error message that says NoMethodError occurred. Undefined method "x' for nil:NilClass Aldorlea, you have been publsihing a lot of games that are very buggy. You previous games were all high quality but lately the games you published does not seem to be tested and either crashed or have many achievements not working. Please fixed the bugs, as these games are definitely not worth my $4.89, if it crashed so soon after starting the game!! Aldorlea, I am very disappointed if you keep on publishing buggy games without making sure that they work.