The Golden Pearl is by The Mighty Palm, a game that’s very much in the vein of Link’s Awakening and the Zelda Oracle games. Your character, a blue-haired caped fellow by the default name of Arty, decides to go look for the powerful wish-granting Golden Pearl. For some reason. To gain access to it, however, Arty must clear through the temples of fire, water and earth and get their rings. And so, he sets out to look for them.

…That’s pretty much the general plot, actually. The story’s mainly an excuse plot, at least until near the end. How’s the setting? Is this place a mythical dream land? Honestly, it probably doesn’t matter, let’s go exploring.

The general gameplay is a sort of distilled version of the Game Boy Zelda games, with a larger emphasis on exploration and puzzles. A good chunk of the map’s open to you and the items required to access the rest are easy enough to get. There are plenty of small quests from the game’s quirky NPCs, a lot of them offering Power Pommes (the game’s Heart Container equivalent), so there’s a good amount of stuff to do. You can gun straight for the dungeons, but you’ll be missing out on a bunch of content that easily puts the game over the contest’s one hour limit.

There are enemies in the game’s overworld, but for the most part, you can’t properly fight them. Thus, confrontations typically have you, the guy decked with unlimited bombs and arrows, running away from a boar. That said, there are boss battles that you can properly fight, which were kinda hit-or-miss for me. Watching the boss of the earth temple repeatedly get stuck certainly showed me that having proper combat throughout the game would feel kinda off. A later boss also throws out a whole bunch of projectiles during the fight, which ended up slowing my game down, which I feel also could have been a concern if combat was prevalent through the game. Other bosses do try to work within the engine’s limitations. My favorite’s definitely the one for the water temple, mainly because it does something I didn’t expect and gives a creative use for one of your tools.

As for the game’s puzzles, they’re pretty easy to get, especially if you’re a veteran of these Zelda-type games. If you’re looking for some real challenging puzzles, forget about it. But if you just want to have a good time, they’re welcoming and won’t be a frustration.

The game is buggy, which you can expect from a jam game, especially one that defies the engine’s limitations. Now, focusing on the game’s main goals, you aren’t likely to run into bugs, at least, ones that would obstruct you. A lot of the concerning bugs that I did run into were relegated to the game’s side areas, the most frustrating of which being a transfer bug taking me out of a cave immediately after I entered it and pretty much rendering it inaccessible.

As for the presentation of the game, it’s real solid, its art staying true to the Game Boy games it’s inspired by. The music is also pretty nice and I love the contrast of between the adventurous overworld music and the oppressive, slower dungeon stuff. The track for the final dungeon’s probably my favorite, carrying a nice sense of finality and hyping you up for the end.

Also, the opening animations with the title screen and a nice pixel version of IGMC’s mascot are real good and a nice thing to open the game with.

The Golden Pearl is a nice game and it does try its best to follow the spirits of the Game Boy Zelda games. Exploration and puzzles were great, while the fighting that wasn’t non-existent’s hit-or-miss. Some bugs might make going for 100% completion frustrating (and impossible), but I generally had a good time with The Golden Pearl and I think it’s a nice contender for IGMC.

And so, I continue looking through IGMC stuff. You know, when I first started this blog, I promised myself that this wouldn’t just become an RPG Maker appreciation blog, but as that meme says, life comes at you fast. So anyway.

PALETTA is brought to us by Cosmic Latte/Team Cola. Now, this game showed up in my feed when it first released because I’d been following the development team beforehand. The development team had previously made the demo of XV, an entry from the Dream Diary Jam and it managed to be one of my standouts. This is the first game the team had finished, so I was excited to hop into it.

A quick opening eases you in. A king ruled over the land, wearing a crown blessed with magical powers. However, a thief  tried to steal it and ended up breaking the crown into shards that scattered across the land, causing the death of the king, the disappearance of his daughter and creating unrest. A girl named Paletta, born of the moon, is told to head down to the world and look for the scattered shards to reunite the land and make things right.

The story has Paletta heading through the formerly colorful towns, seeking out the denizens who were fortunate (or cursed) to get one of the shards. You get a shard, the shard gives Paletta a nice new power to use, and you head out to the next place – simple structure. Paletta’s adventure initially starts pretty friendly, but soon devolves into something more hostile. Get a shard by gifting a town with a golden goose egg? How whimsical! Some shard holders offering you their shards in exchange for getting a cure that involves the blood of a shapeshifter? How ominous. For the most part, the story’s cutesy, but it knows when to be dark without being overly dark.

From a gameplay standpoint, PALETTA‘s an easy adventure game, which is perfectly okay. The puzzles aren’t very challenging and it’s easy to figure out what powers you need, but I’m not really complaining. PALETTA had a relaxed pace that feels matching of the game’s mood and aesthetics and I feel that any harder puzzle would throw that pace out of wack.

The art’s got a nice cute style, using limited palettes to represent the areas. While Paletta herself is monochrome, so are the different towns, the latter of which explained in-story as being the result of the crown being destroyed. Upon clearing the area’s problems, the area lights up with the colors that corresponded to the crystal you just got.

While the music isn’t original, the music selection for the game is pretty good. Generally for the areas before you get their shard, the music kinda has this depressive vibe, to reflect the whole state of the world. Then that music becomes something more joyful as you get a shard, accompanying the world filling with color, creating a hopeful mood as you head on. The music selection definitely does a good job with establishing how the game should feel.

The music also sort of carries this fairy tale like-vibe, if that makes sense. Think of some fantasy cartoon that’s made for kids. I think this vibe is most felt with the game’s opening and closing cutscenes. And you know what? Looking back, PALETTA kinda felt like a fairy tale to me. I can picture the stuff in the game, especially the visuals for the cutscenes, in some book.

So, PALETTA. It’s a cute game with a simple story wrapped in a nice, feel-good presentation. I honestly don’t have any complaints with it, except maybe wishing there was more. I enjoyed this and I think that it’s a strong contender for winning something from IGMC.

IGMC 2017 has ended, which means that this site will go back to its normal schedule. Grasshoppermask and I released our game, To Crime Nirvana, and while I doubt that we’ll win anything, we had a fun time making this. If you’re interested, check that out!

But enough about me! To start off November, we’ll look at one last game from IGMC 2015 before I maybe start looking at IGMC 2017 stuff? That might be conflict of interest, I dunno, but anyway:

ZIZ is a sci-fi adventure game made by nerdvsgame. It’s made in RPG Maker VX Ace and it was the winner of the adventure genre.

A woman named Motoko awakens on the research ship Ziz, an unknown disaster calling her to the ship’s bridge. To assist her, she turns on a maintenance android, who dubs himself Seven as he quickly develops sentience. It’s very much one of those, “can robots be people?” stories, told rather quickly within the constraints of the game jam.

The game’s theme is actually expressed in a neat way toward the end. At one point, you’re controlling Seven and you’re presented with dialogue options. However, you don’t actually get to choose what he says. Symbolizing his growing sentience and independence, he automatically chooses what he wants with no input from you. It’s also him that decides which of the two endings you’ll get, which depends on how you treated him during your playthrough. It’s a simple but neat way to express the idea of robot sentience.

Gameplay has you controlling Motoko and Seven, with the ability to split them up and switch between them. The most basic use for them is to split them up so that they can simultaneously turn on separate panels to proceed. Seven gets a later mechanic, capable of moving through electrical fields that Motoko can’t pass through.

The game’s puzzles? They’re just okay. Some puzzles felt arbitrary but they weren’t annoying, either. My favorite is probably the one in the screenshot above, where you’re switching around electric fields so that Motoko can get around safely, which makes the most use out of the character switching mechanic. For the most part though, the puzzles didn’t wow me nor did they have a sense of personality to them. I feel that without the sci-fi aesthetics, this stuff could easily be pushed into a different setting and context. It’s not bad, but it doesn’t stand out, either.

On the game’s aesthetics, it’s pretty nice, clean, sci-fi stuff. ZIZ has a nice look to it and I appreciate the ambient “spacey” music that follows for most of the game. The strongest, most unique part of the game’s aesthetics shows up when the ship’s AI speaks. Instead of just being a text box, a computerized voice speaks out its lines. While this isn’t the case for its extended conversation toward the end of the game, hearing the AI voice out actions while you’re doing things kinda gave an immersive feel to the game.

Overall, ZIZ was pretty okay, if pretty standard for adventure games made in RPG Maker. I kinda feel that it’s one of those things that could have better set itself apart and have more to if if it wasn’t a game jam. While lacking, the game still managed to tell the story it wanted to tell and its aesthetics were pretty on point, so that’s something to appreciate.