Scrabdackle

Kram (streamer): Play Doppl (streamer): Play Chat (community): Watch • “Fun but needs some pacing changes” • “where… are… my… new spells?” • “Impressive solo debut: art music and dev” • “tongue in cheek appreciated” • “Batnik, nice.” • “why isn’t the main skill on RT? shoot is on RB. why?” • “irreverent game for irreverent gamers” • “imagine West of Loathing, but twinstick magic” Reviews are an aggregate of the streamers and the community - Games are rated as a "Play, Watch, or Pass." We do live community reviews of new games with 1 player and 1 host. Duet Comedy meets live game reviews on twitch.tv/DemoDuo. You can also find us at http://demoduo.tv.

Excellent game about wizards. Silly story that is serious when needed. Despite being only 1/3rd complete, it has more than enough content to justify its price tag. It's very good, and the world is very satisfying to explore. Vastly underrated. Play Scrabdackle. Please?

The trailer makes this game look so fast-paced and exciting, and stylish in-game animations sell it, too, but the game itself is quite dull, with barebones gameplay and reams of meandering text to wade through for mission objectives and other info. It's the epitome of style over substance - and the dev said in a 2 Left Thumbs interview that he chose this art style because it was easy, so make of that what you will. There's a lot I could pick apart here, but I'll stick to a few major lowlights that stain the entire experience. One-Note Gameplay At the very start of the game, you can only walk and have no other movements or attacks. You soon find a wand that shoots straight projectiles, and that's your only offence. There is no melee backup or any other variety (more on that later). After nearly two hours of wandering around, the only upgrade I found was a vendor who sells a dash ability. Yes, you have to spend credits to get a normal human movement. And it's not even implemented in a fun way; it darts you some distance all in one move, and you can't redirect, control the distance, or jump back right away, so you can't use it for tight stick-and-move tactics. Speaking of normal human abilities that your character inexplicably lacks, here are a few more: • Unarmed Melee. Not only is it weird that you can't punch or kick or swing your wand, it detracts from the gameplay. Unarmed melee would give you a way to defend yourself before you get the wand, give you another attack for while your wand recharges, and give you a more powerful close-range attack to reward skilfully outmanoeuvring enemies. Plus, it would open up the possibility for self-imposed unarmed challenges! • Jump. There are elevated enemies that take potshots at you while you can't do anything to them, so it really seems like there should be a jump ability to give you a way to deal with them. It would also give you another way to dodge low attacks. • Squat: an option to duck high attacks (or teabag fallen foes if that's your thing). This would also open up the possibility of hidden secret areas that you have to get low to access. To be fair, these skills might unlock later, but I couldn't find the eating ability and starved. Jokes aside, another reviewer (sonarii) spent 19 hours and only found one other weapon, which left the combat still a one-note chore, so I'll learn from their mistake and not waste any more time on this. When upgrades are this sparse and some of them are just normal movements that are usually there by default, you know the developer is painfully short on ideas. Annoying Navigation The way you traverse the map is cumbersome and irritating for no good reason. It shows one screen area at a time and scrolls to the next screen when you get to the edge, rather than allowing continuous movement. This is like having a quasi-loading screen every time you move 10 metres, which is distracting when you're trying to explore. Plus, it resets enemies and obstacles, which destroys any sense of permanence and immersion and makes backtracking extra tedious. Old-school games were forced to do this due to hardware limitations, so this game seems to be blindly copying the classics without understanding the reasons behind their design choices. Typos The in-game About the Game section has "publicly" misspelt and the word "with" duplicated. I found other errors throughout the early game as well, such as the non-word "vertice" (vertex?) and a subject-verb disagreement on the Place of Power page in the wizard book, and further/farther confusion in a couple places. Not a huge deal, but you don't want to lead with careless errors right in your intro. Strangely, Johnny Got His Gun pointed out one of these typos the same day the game was released, yet even after the 0.5.13a update that lists "Minor typo fixes", that error remains. The Revealing Kickstarter Post The developer's Kickstarter post is very telling. First of all, the story is likely to remain unfinishe…