Maliki : Poison Of The Past

An excellent game, a love poem to classics like Chrono Trigger or Final Fantasy 7, with inovative time-related mechanics

Le jeu est un coup de cœur absolu ! Pour moi, qui donne une grande importance à l'histoire et la musique d'un jeu, j'ai été servi ! La simplicité du gameplay sert à son accessibilité et permet de se concentrer sur la découverte et l'exploration des zones. Autre bon point, on peut parfaitement se lancer sans connaître l'univers de Maliki, le jeu nous le fait découvrir à petites doses sans que ça soit indigeste. En somme une petite pépite qui n'a pas à rougir face à ses concurrents et qui mériterait largement de se faire connaître à plus grande échelle !

I'm leaving a positive review to support the developers. I like supporting developers...but I would sadly not recommend this game. I was lured in by the visual design and time travel setup, but it really missed the mark in its execution. Pros: - cute environments. Sort of toy box vibes, reminds me of Maplestory - pretty fun puzzles with each party member offering a different mechanic for solving them. - the combat has a few unique ideas with shifting around turn order - fairly bug free Cons: - the story is not good. It's told entirely through recaps of events that you weren't present for, or aimless progression driven by the line "I don't know why we're here, but lets hope something happens." - The game clearly expects you to have read the webcomic its based on, which is fine so long as it's stated anywhere in the steam page (it is not). - combat is absurdly difficult. enemies hit too hard, items and healing skills recover too little, you're always low on TP, equipment upgrades are useless, and it kind of feels like everything was designed to punish you. This would be fine except this is clearly a story for children, so who exactly is this game for? - Assets are reused so frequently that you're essentially exploring the same town copied and pasted three times in a row. And for a game about time travel, it feels weird that nothing was done to differentiate each time period. - there are posters and billboards across every town displaying artwork from the webcomic...of the main characters. These aren't easter eggs, this is like a majority of the game's assets. No explanation is given for this. It's all a huge bummer because this game looks so promising from the outside, and the dev team clearly has the skills to put out something great. But on the other hand, I'm just one guy and maybe I'm the only one who felt this wasn't a great time. Either way, hopefully the above pros and cons will help you decide if this is worth a buy.