Hello again! My personal life may be big question marks right now, but gaming is forever! That RPG Maker 2025 Jam is still going through its voting period, so I thought I should go back in before the month ends! Check out my previous dive if you haven’t yet before continuing on!

One game I checked out was Road Trip to Hell, by LiminAce. The game ties into the creator’s larger game, The Cardinal Park Case, and you know, making a side game for a game jam seems like a smart marketing tactic.

Adalyn and Evan are out on a road trip, and they decide to pull over to get some food. The cashier overcharges them for the food, which is kinda insane if they’re just a random cashier and not the owner.

Evan decides to be completely normal about it and murders the shit out of them. And Adalyn? She’s loving this shit. Hell, she even thinks about eating the corpse.

The Road Trip to Hell is a short romp with pretty alright art about a toxic – but very loving – couple and their child that happens to be a major character in the dev’s larger game. Now, the game was meant to go beyond expectations with a couple that nobody expects. I will say that I certainly didn’t expect the couple to be in true mutual love with each other in spite of how awful they are as people. Ordinarily, you wouldn’t expect a couple to match each other’s freak, so I guess it goes beyond expectations in this regard.

But here’s my criticism: I love this shit. This is horrible (complimentary) romance. I recently rewatched Bacanno, and Adalyn and Evan feel like if Isaac and Miria were murderous assholes, or maybe if Lua was as kill crazy and active as Ladd. I feel that a greater defiance of expectations would be made if I hated the couple, but they rule. Maybe you’d call loving horrible people a defiance of expectations, but come on, I’ve seen people on the internet love way worse (sometimes real) people.

This was short, but the creator’s other stuff is definitely on my list of things to check out in the future. It made for a nice first impression.

Another game I checked out was Lemonade on Main Street, by Moonwood Games. You got accepted into college, but alas, even in 2007, college tuition is a lot. But you’ve come to a genius idea that your mother doubts: making money through a lemonade stand. And so, you must go beyond her expectations by getting on that lemonade grindset to afford college and prove her wrong!

I chose this game because it was a genre that I don’t really see a lot of in RPG Maker: business sims! The game has a distinct simple look with little people waltzing around, and sometimes they’ll meander over for a drink. Sometimes they’ll plainly state what they want, sometimes they dress up their wants in more flowery dialogue to lend the game some character and might give you some pause. Get the drink prepared and you then give the price. You’ll definitely make profit still with the default price, but eh, that won’t do, you need college money. You can get away with asking for a lil’ bit more if you’re popular and do things quick enough, or hell, risk getting hated for asking for way more. On the flip side, you can give a little discount, which would be good if you couldn’t prepare the drink properly. You’re trying to run a fair business, not a scam (in my ideal world, anyway). And of course, after the work day, you should keep up to stock on ingredients.

I think Lemonade on Main Street’s nice and it’s neat that it was pulled off on RPG Maker, as simple as you might find it. I wish that the workdays were shorter or went faster, but eh, I mean, we all wish workdays went faster, huh? Really, it’s a true simulation. Still though, faster days would have been nice.

AlloveraVT brings us SoldierSlain, a different take on monster collecting RPG action. You are Eztli, and she wants to prove herself as a quality Beasthunter at the upcoming Ceremony of Quetzalcoatl. Within a few in-game days, you have to fight and train up a party of monsters to be the very best!

First thing to note is the aesthetic of the game. SoldierSlain defines itself with a strong Mesoamerican look from the human characters designs to the monsters. I can’t personally speak to its accuracy, but regardless, it’s a unique look that I don’t see a lot in games. The monsters look cool, and the humans carry a lot of energy, which is backed up with fun writing. SoldierSlain may be one of the strongest games in the competition when it comes to style.

Speaking of competitions, Eztli has to get ready for hers! She sets out in the morning to a dungeon type of the difficulty level of your choice and she ventures forth with her beast party. Run into a monster, and a battle starts where Eztli fights alongside her recruited beasts. If she gets downed, the whole party gets sent back to the healing point. Eztli getting downed may be the preferable choice, because a day doesn’t pass if she’s downed, so you may wanna let her get beaten up so you can grind things out. The day system’s kinda weird regarding her.

You’d definitely prefer if she goes down, though, because if one of her beasts go down, sorry, this game’s on Nuzlocke rules – they’re dead as hell. Down an enemy though and you have the choice of finishing them off or sparing them. The former gives you their experience and drops – while risking scaring future enemies too much – and the latter recruits the enemy – while also risking future enemies becoming more bold.

Besides gathering experience for the party, you also get Star Beans, the local currency. You can buy items to sustain the party and equipment for Eztli, but you can also convert Star Beans into skill points so you can outfit the beast party members with skills. It leads to a nice resource conflict, asking you what you want to prioritize.

My biggest criticism of the game is sparing enemies. Finishing off too many enemies may lead to future ones running away, so if you want to get experience and loot, you’ll need to do some sparing. However, when you spare the enemy, you’re required to put them in the party, and the issue is that there’s no reserve party member system. You’ll have to swap out a party member, which becomes an issue when you’ve already invested resources into them. Personally, I fall into sunk cost fallacy too easily, which is part of why I’m not too invested in monster collecting RPGs. Shin Megami Tensei is the only exception for me because, well, future demons/Personas really do be better than your initial guys, and sacrificing guys to get stronger is very much in that franchise’s thematic wheelhouse – and even that franchise still has a reserve party member system. Now, it’s good to swap someone in to replace a downed ally, but alas, you’ll have to build them up from scratch. I just feel that this system that readily swaps people in and out kinda fights against the intended goal of building up a strong party.

If you could spare enemies without having to recruit them or if there was a reserve party member system? SoldierSlain would jump up in my rankings. Even then though, it’s still a strong showing, and you know, cool to play an RPG Maker game that’s actually an RPG sometimes.

Now, talking about RPG Maker, a strong part of that culture was Yume Nikki. So in honor of dream exploring escapades, I checked out The Dream Is Dead by LumiTDog and CallMeDJ.

You are Koma, a woman that can dive into people’s dream worlds to resolve their problems. Today, she goes to resolve the dream of David, who seems to be having mundane relationship problems. There’s something else wrong with the village, however. There seem to be glitchy entities in the world, though, Koma has nothing to say about it. David’s house is locked, so she goes to find his key…

But it’s not an ordinary key. It’s a debug key.

My expectations were subverted as the game goes down the same meta hell that dax812’s file_you_wanted did, Koma having to dive into the game’s debugging to solve puzzles and explore the dream world. The new question though is what is the nature of this dream? And whose dream is dead?

Speaking purely from The Dream Is Dead’s base layer, it subverted my expectations of a Yume Nikki-like by being fairly talkative. Things are chatty to help establish atmosphere, and there’s an explicit story – though, what that story is, I’ll leave that to you. Comparing it to file_you_wanted is kinda comparing apples to oranges, because while they play with the same concepts, they both take things in different directions. I may prefer The Dream Is Dead, though, because dang I like its pixel art.

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….And I’m leaving this dive off here! I’ve actually been pretty stressed lately because of my health and big changes in my personal life, so I just reeeeally want to relax right now. Maybe I’ll dive back in when I’m feeling better, and I’d definitely be up for checking out the winners of the jam (assuming I haven’t pre-emptively done it already). Fuck it, thank you, I love you all.