A Plunge into Darkness Reviews

big fat nope from me. Not enough healing items.

It's a decent and short horror themed RPG only real issue is the kinda abrupt ending, but overall a fun experience.

First time playing a horror-style game that I loved every second of. ❤ The music and sfx was spot on, giving me chills and scares every so often. 😰 (And those jump scares... 😱) [b]Gameplay[/b] The game was quite linear and the pace suited the anxious urge to get out of the place asap. I played the illusion (easier) difficulty, and everything was smooth until the last few bosses. Though i did 1K damage sometimes with a crit, it was still hard managing my party's health while keeping up the damage. Especially when the bosses were immune to most of the debuffs. (But I guess this is to enhance the nightmarish aspect of the whole game, which it certainly did. 😨) The whole skill upgrade after defeating a boss was very intriguing 👍. Picking up the right upgrades makes the overall battle experience that much better. The ending was quite bizarre (that's good), which suited the whole nightmarish theme and left a lot of questions whose answers were left to our imaginations. Overall it was a thrilling experience! 😄

This is an interesting game and it has a lot of interesting points but I am not super into JRPGs. The art is nice as are the music/sfx, and the characters seem decent! Good job on the game, and if you enjoy JRPGs give this one a try!

Not wild about ending and last boss battles were a long slog but i liked it . Fun game

Great graphics and artwork. Fun to play, but the game was a little short.

I can not in good faith recommend this game. At multiple points the game forces the player painfully search multiple maps desperately trying to find how to progress. The dev has made every effort to hide how to progress, either relying on the paid for guide, or in an attempt to force players to buy the guide. At no point is the progression spot for entering the underwater passage HINTED at in game with text- no clues are given, no sparkle or marker. It is purely progress through the entire map to date attempting to press action on every square- and that is the 5th time such a thing happened in my playthrough. I wanted to enjoy this game. I truly wanted to recommend it. However with the for sale guides, combined with this horrible game design failing- I can not. I hate to give an indie developer a negative review like this, but it is frankly completely earned by said developer's actions and choices.

A plunge into darkness is a short horror game made with RPGMaker. It took me a while to digest this game after I played it as I don't really play horror games, but overall I liked it in the end. Overall I felt the game had an interesting story about 6 people as they tried to find a way out of the place they had entered, and as you played you got to watch how the events slowly affected them. Only thing I didn't like is I felt the last two boss battles went on a little too long even on Easy mode, and could probably stand to have a little less HP in the end. Overall though worth checking out if you need a short game to play for a day or so, and like horror games.

As typical for Aldorlea Games, this is an RPGMaker-built game, but with pronounced survival horror elements: Your party spends the entire game trying to escape a haunted mansion, with no stores, a limited supply of items to acquire, and no inns or other cheap ways to restore HP (though skill points recover during battle, and some skills can heal HP). The gameplay offers quite a bit of fresh air. You have the usual leveling up by getting experience points from battles, but you can also choose a special upgrade from a selection after defeating a boss, such as increasing a certain stat or increasing a skill to a different tier. The skills themselves are delightfully oddball while also useful. For instance, one does extra damage if the enemy is afraid, and another does a whole onslaught of hits to randomly selected foes. Oh, and you have a whopping six party members. I've played dozens of RPGs over the years, but this is the first time I've seen that outside of a Tactical RPG. You'd expect having that many party members would make the battles too slow or too easy, or both, but the design avoids both those pitfalls. As many as your party members are, enemy parties at times outnumber them, and they can throw out plenty of hits. Once all commands are entered, combat animations play out so rapidly that it can actually be hard to follow what's going on. If you like being able to keep track of every move in a turn-based RPG, that may be a problem, but it certainly keeps the pace of battles nice and fast. There are two difficulty modes, Illusion and Terror. Illusion is a bit easy once you figure out the game mechanics, but even then it's not so easy that you don't have to think about what you're doing. I wanted to try the game on Terror before writing this review, but life is so busy that I can't commit to that in the near future, and assuming there is a significant difference between Illusion and Terror, it's safe to say that this game offers sufficient challenge to those who want some. In fact, in one sense the challenge is too steep. While the game involves little backtracking, there are a couple parts where it's difficult to figure out where you need to go next. In particular, after beating the spider boss you must return to a previous room, to a specific generic tile, and press the action button - without any hint whatsoever that you're supposed to do this. In fact, the resulting cutscene opens with the party members basically saying "What the heck do we do now?" That's too obscure even for a secret area, much less a required task to progress. And wandering around long corridors, fighting enemies you've since leveled beyond while you search for where to go next outright kills the pacing - a big problem in a horror game. Which brings us to story and atmospherics. You can already see in the game's trailers that it has strong, distinctive character art and doom-laden music, the latter of which you may recognize as the same stock music used in Aldorlea's earlier Fortress of Hell. In fact, a number of assets are from Fortress of Hell, including the battle pacing, so if you've played that game you'll feel right at home. On the downside, it may be *too* familiar, and the character art could use more images; some party members only have one facial expression. This is all the more a shame because the characters do have considerable depth. As you wander through the murky halls of the haunted house... or is it a castle?... you're increasingly teased with the characters' relationships and the mystery of the macabre world they've fallen into and why they're seemingly trapped there. However, without spoiling anything, none of it ever pays off. At all. The ending is frustrating rather than scary, offering neither triumph for the characters you've worked to defend nor the slightest explanation of where they are or who their enemies are. I realize that copping out of any why or wherefore is a commonly accepted foible in the horror genre, but it is a foible nonetheless. Still, the game has to be given credit for atmosphere. After viewing the disappointing ending, I turned off my computer, brushed my teeth, and strangely started to feel a bit... on edge. As I opened the door to my bedroom, the plastic covering for the suit hanging on the door rustled, and the sound made my insides clench with dread. Stepping into my bedroom, I seriously considered whether there might be something evil inside my closet. It was a relatively cool night, so I turned the ceiling fan off. I got in bed, pulled the sheets over me... and soon conceded that I had to get back up and turn the ceiling fan back on, because the silence was just terrifying. I'll leave you with that: Despite some considerable flaws, A Plunge into Darkness offers a spooky, often surrealistic, and haunting experience. Since that is, after all, its advertised selling point, it's worth a buy for those who want a horror RPG.

So 6 friends set out to explore an old, supposedly uninhabited castle just for an evening of fun. Only it is a huge, creepy, strange, and interest grabbing castle that is a complex, maze-like adventure that presents multi-layered challenges in order to figure out just what has and is going on and what will be the final fate of the 6 adventurers. Simple starting out, the castle grows more complicated with various twists and turns that will keep the player guessing ---- yet there is a certain logic to the sprawling layout that will keep you going for just one more area or room. Save frequently, and explore everything and everywhere as the castle is loaded with rewards and surprises ---- always fully investigate your surroundings completely. The art is fantastic ---- from the castle layout to the enemies ---- all are very well done. The characters are mixed from serious to strange yet keep the story moving and the interest up. One of the best aspects of the game is the challenge level ---- never too easy but not such a challenge that you get discouraged ---- it strikes just the right balance. I'm having a lot of fun with this one, and I believe it is one that any rpg fan will enjoy. Recommended!