Faye Falling

Faye Falling is a story-driven, sprite based RPG with action combat elements reminiscent of games like the Mario RPG games and Undertale. You play as a recently deceased amnesiac individual who turns out to be Only Mostly Dead and stuck in some sort of weird abstract purgatory filled with puzzles, dangers and other ghosts who haven't quite passed on fully yet. Things are not all well in the land of spirits and the player can either be a jerk about it as they wander around and interact with people or spend some time trying to help out the locals. I played a basically lawful good spell-focused character and went through the whole demo, which ends after the first boss fight and took me about an hour to beat.

I don't really need to go into the details of the story here because it's probably best experienced going in blind, but it did keep me interested the whole way through the demo. Visually and musically the game feels very polished, and has a consistently bright, geometric art style which is super impressive for a one-person development project. I didn't encounter a single bug or graphical hiccup during my whole playthrough which is honestly a rarity for many of the indie RPG titles I've tried on itch.io. Technically, Faye Falling just feels rock solid and everything from the ambient music to the font choices to how the battle UI reacts to player input feels intelligently thought out and intelligently crafted. I appreciate little details like the animated trees and bushes blowing in the wind and the creepy wall eyeballs that follow you everywhere which really help to bring the world alive.

I also really like the feeling of moving through the levels in particular. Character movement is usually a very subtle thing that doesn't always get much attention in these kinds of RPGs, but here it just feels good to move around corridors and through hallways. One trick the game uses which I like whenever it pops up in games is how if the player character is halfway running into a wall, they'll automatically wrap around the wall and keep going instead of just getting stuck. Also, the dash you get early on makes zooming past spike traps and breaking glass pillars feel very satisfying. I hope the full game has more of these movement options and some different types of level environments to take advantage of them.

In terms of things that didn't really work for me- I don't think the mana economy in the game really meshes with the amount of combat the game expects you to be doing. It quickly becomes apparent that you're better off not bothering to use any of the mana-expensive utility spells and that the best strategy is to just dodge as many enemy attacks as possible while burning enemies down as fast as possible with your cheap but effective attack spells. Additionally, most save points not restoring mana/health is frustrating as a spellcaster because you're constantly running low on mana but this doesn't actually make the game harder since you can just die on purpose to get respawned with your stats restored. Even with this dying/respawning trick, the game seems to consciously push players towards only using the cheapest spells possible outside of particularly difficult battles. It simply is not worth wasting your painfully limited mana supply with any of the support spells because reducing incoming damage or disabling abilities is never necessary and you're always better off just learning to dodge the enemy attack patterns, tanking with the cheap and powerful healing items you can easily stock up on and landing all those highly damaging dodge counters. 

Honestly, these complaints aren't the biggest deal for me personally because I don't really play story-based RPGs for intricate combat balance. I care mainly about the environment, the music, the dialogue choices, and how the world makes me care about the characters in them and the events of the story. Everything in the demo kept me interested this far and I'm eager to see how the story plays out in the full version of the game.