Quest ReQuest: Quiz Quest

Today's quest is one my my biggest ones! In fact, outside of Dutch Quest and the Sorrowlad series, it is the biggest one!

It's Quiz Quest! A pretty early creation of mine, which basically kickstarted the whole 'quests based around weird concepts' thing after I liked Psychology Quest enough to carry it on. The concept of this one is a quiz! The protagonist is summoned to a rather weird setting and has to answer a series of 27 questions. It's weird, and not at all the sort of thing the engine was intended for, but I managed to make it work somehow!

Since the recording is so long, I'll be using timestamps to mention noteworthy stuff. I'm not expecting people to sit through 60 minutes of this, but it is 60 minutes filled with content! I'm surprised I didn't fail more of the questions, really!

Iknight Bright is a weird character! For one, the name's supposed to sound more like "Ignite Bright" than "I-Knight Bright"! I suppose in general he's supposed to be rather pompous and arrogant, but he also does know his stuff so it's not like it's just pure bluster like most of my boisterous characters behave. He's also surprisingly non-sexual, but will use cheeky flirting to annoy the villain and reacts to oddly sexual NPCs with curiosity or exasperation rather than excitement. It was fun to write him, even if he doesn't feel quite as flashy or extremely defined as someone like say Ingrid or Denarius is. Oh, we'll get to those two.

Wow, it;s Qorgan Qreeman!!

At around 3:44 I actually reference all the six Barbari races it seems! Of course only three of them are actually available in the game in its current form! I wound up relying a lot on Goblins and Ogres to substitute for the Fear, Destruction and Sorrow races. That's why most Ogres are Sorrow and most Goblins are either Fear or Destruction, even if they don't always really act like it! We might talk about that a bit more when we get to Globin''s character!

In the following conversation with EMPRESS GOREGONZOLA (I love that name!!) they actually talk about doing 30 multiple choice questions. I should have edited that to say 27, since there's just 27 questions!

At 4:55 the actual questions begin, I actually edited some of these after the game's release like 7 years back, because a lot of the questions were basically just trial and error! Usually this was by either changing the question outright, or by making the answer obvious from contextual clues. The 2+2 question was always meant to be an easy gimme though! The Egypt answer actually refers to a comment one of my Dutch teachers once made about 2+2=Egypt as an example of a nonsensical answer... It struck with me, clearly!

This room also contains the first SPECIAL CODE! It's 8663! We'll be seeing more of these codes, and they are the bases for one of the quiz questions. The numbers actually reference my usernumbers on Fig Hunter, the new Fig Hunter, Introverse and Alora Fane, if I recall correctly!

At 5:41 you can also see the penalty for failing, an instant game over! Originally the announcer's AI was not so aggressive, but I agreed with criticism that it was pointless to drag out being wrong and having to start over!

Every wrong answer has a battle trigger like this!
Depending on the nature of the mistake it triggers one of several dialogues!

At 6:48 we get to the first instance of random out of nowhere sexual content!! The sign in the room also explains, rather poorly, why there's healing crystals all over the place! This is also a reference to Sorrowlad, as one of the episodes in that series was about the town being flooded with healing crystals from the same company! That was actually meant to tie into like the OVERARCHING ANTAGONIST'S PLOT!! Well, like, it was gonna be retconned to be part of it, not like intended to be from the start!

This room's meant to look like Iknight's face!!

At 8:10 we come to the first BOSS QUESTION. This was the first one I edited, the original didn't have joke answers. This question is terrible!! It's vague and nonsensical, and the whole cucumber thing is weird. Was it just an innuendo? It should have been about cheese at least to be relevant to the setting! Sloppy!

This bit's also preceded by some blabber with Goregonzola. I like how she appears in every boss room and has her own consistent theme music! She's not quite threatening enough to warrant the Omnicidal track, but I'll chalk it up to ironic use of the theme! 

The rest rooms have a lot of dumb NPC banter! They offer potentially useful clues, lore bits and sometimes crucial items though. At 10:07 they quickly introduce themselves. I don't get what the point was of those two first who are doing some sort of FOREPLAY ROLEPLAY? Weird!

Whomham Disi is an amazing character though! Like there's a complete utter non-sequitur character if there ever was one, her dialogue still makes me laugh! The Dragon and Goblin are rather amusing too. The Dragon one is a rather thinly veiled and somewhat emberassing jab at a series of quests made by the engine's creator, the fourth of which (which was never actually released) was to be about a dragon misfit living in a village of unemphatic Goblins. Rather mean-spirited of me, I felt strongly about it at the time, but it just comes across as petty! 

The Goblin is also a reference!! It references a certain comic at the time, Catharsis. It featured a character decapitating a Goblin, then some other character runs along naked and the first character gets offended. DOUBLE STANDARDS AM I RIGHT?! I felt bad for that Goblin, so I put her in this quest and made her survive being decapitated! She also got eaten by the dragon, for reasons?? Weird, but kinda amusing! Also a bit petty! These quests really are time capsules of some sort.

The Goblin design is so cute!
I think AF:C started my GOBLIN OBSESSION!

At 14:05 there's an annoying counting puzzle! I put too many stupid math puzzles in the early parts! The coin one of the NPCs gives actually contains the hint to solve this, but brute forcing the puzzle is honestly quicker than solving it! There's also a secret 6 in this room, part of the password!

The dragon at 15:25 is super sexual again! The hint here is in her use of punctuation, she uses ellipses for three of the answers but exclamation marks for one of them. What a silly character though! I think this joke works better than the previous sexual jokes though, because at least it's consistent and the announcer gets to lament having to say out the answers! It's the only time he uses an emotion, actually! He's probably the only character I've made who regularly does not have associated emotions in his speech bubbles! 

At 16:27, there's the MEATHEAD!! This is like a super old in-joke between my and my brother. We used to play this crappy MMORPG-like game called Sherwood Forest or something and there was some NPC skeleton who boasted having "the biggest arms in the world". Silly! Skeletons don't have any muscle mass! I put this in as sort of an homage to that! The fourth answer also misspells Goregonzola's name as Goreganzola! Maybe that was intentional though, to clear up the ambiguity of what the answer is meant to be?

I like the visuals of this room! Big crystal made up of small ones!
The question is boring though, I'm skipping it!
Originally it just asked to count the crystals.
Now it's a Sorrowlad reference question.

From 18:25 onward there's a bunch of plot stuff going on! It's probably rather hard to follow though, due to the messy writing! The idea is that the restaurant is TERRIBLE and used to serve all sorts of BAD CHEESE products, which Iknight reported the place for which got it shut down. This was also when the Queen ate there and the BAD CHEESE transformed her into the Empress? It's strange and confusing really, since it implies a backstory between these characters that I'd clearly not intended when I started making this quest!

At 21:12 there's some more NPC banter! I like the two gossiping Goblins, it's a funny sequence. The hero they're talking about is supposed to be Bellestrella, who appears later on in the quest. I'll talk more about her when I get there!

Yes

There's this Goblin Shaman who references Shammama and Shamander, I think those are NPCs from DESTINY OF ATHROS, which was the first quest I made. It's kinda rubbish, but it featured Denarius Athros, who was a common recurring character in my Quest quests. There's a whole tribe of these Shammy Shamans, and Athros is the strongest among them, I think. The Chiefmayor thing is a reference to the Mayor character from Sorrowlad!! It seems I'd already made that back when I first released this.

Oh dear

There's also the Goblinkin character. Some of that dialogue certainly is very close to being ALLEGORICAL. I don't think it was meant to be allegorical though I would certainly write this different now than I did when I first released this! At least Iknight seems supportive enough. This was just another dig at that quest about the dragon living alongside the Goblins! Rather than not liking it, the Dragon actually wishes to be fully Goblin instead. Apparently Dragons and Goblins can conceive children in this setting! So I'll leave the image of a Goblin and Dragon having sex up to the reader. 

I also like the visuals here! This bit of the mountain is vaguely meant to look like a flower, and the bits with the chests are like the petals or leaves... Well, maybe it's not that clear, but it's why the room is so oddly structured! Some of these rooms I got rather creative with. 

Another password: 25

This character at 24:50 is a random reference to Björk Guðmundsdóttir?! How weird! I suppose this as back when a certain YTP came out which featured her, so I stuck her in here as a Goblin! This question was another one I altered, the original requires knowledge of her real surname, that's stupid! The new version had her use a tilde after every sentence, and the correct answer was the only one with a tilde. And speaking of Björk...

Another randomly sexual gay goblin!
HELL YES

This room is weird! It has two questions in it, questions 10 and 11! But question 10 is a stupid non-question! I suppose I added these to mix things up more than because I ran out. Gotta keep things interesting! The other one asks about Goblins that are helpful like signs, those are Signsage Goblins yes! A reference to Signacious Signod from Sorrowlad. A character I totally forgot about until some days ago! He was very minor, I suppose.

Tedious!

I couldn't fit in this dumb maze if I'd also had to put in an NPC, so hence why there's two questions in a row. The room name rather amuses me. It turns out this stupid maze just exists for Iknight to collect a tiny bud coin, but to get it he also needs to spend the far more valuable coins. It's meant to be a gag and I suppose it's a breather from all the questions, but I can easily see people forget which answer to take here!

This rooms looks pleasant!

The room at 28:18 actually contains a secret path to the previous room's sign. I only put these signs into the game after writing most of the final scene, it's tacky writing! I'd do that differently! The question in this room is possibly the most evil if you don't want to just trial and error! It requires counting all the pebbles in the first three mountain rooms! I of course had to count them myself, and it's 121 tiles with 4 pebbles each, so 484. I actually remember that one by heart since it's 22*22, so getting it wrong like I did is stupid! 

At 29:55 there's some more Goregonzola banter, and OBJECTS HIDDEN BEHIND TREES! Since these tree objects occupy 1*3 tiles but are very tall, it's possible to hide objects behind them! I really like this prop as a result. It makes forest maps very interesting to put together, and some of my favourite AFC maps are in the forest tileset as a result. 

Irrelevant Maze from "EVIL Quest"

Starting screen from "Level Zero"

The question in this room is rubbish though! I had to trial and error this! Is this a reference to something? Perhaps some in-joke we had at the time, but I should have altered this to give a contextual clue! 

The room at 30:05 has more NPCs again! This is supposed to be some sort of cultish place of worship for the Empress. I assume this was either built recently, or it used to be some sort of generic cheese temple of sorts! The NPCs are amusingly simple for once, try finding all the mistakes in the one ranting about the empress! The levitating one is joking about the ohm phrase by putting it into the context of electrical resistance instead of extrasensory abilities. Very amusing, yes, heehee haha!!

It also introduces Glee Bliss! Not related to Hugh Bliss from Sam & Max, though their demeanor is very similar! He uses what I refer to as the 'blissfaces', these pale yellow/beige-ish faces that all seem to convey a sense of uneasy peace and tranquility. I use it for several characters in other quests too, and they're all rather offputting people!

The questions inside the temple themselves aren't too interesting! The first one has some references in the answers, the second is a call-back to the two priests at the start of the game (it was fun making up the fake names!) and the third is a reference to Dutch Quest. It was originally something else, because I know I released Dutch Quest way after Quiz Quest! I'm not sure who the Heh character is meant to be though, he and Iknight are just inexplicably familiar!

Triggers!

The big gimmick here are SPECIAL RULES! These three rooms all have a rule, like don't step on the grass, follow the flowers and a mixture of the rules! The way I did this was to literally just put triggers all over the place so you'd get instagibbed by the Narrator if you disobey! Very hokey, but it works!

You can easily shortcut through this room!
Also, a hidden 2!

I wonder whether I could've made a better rule for this one.

Things get more interesting again at 40:00, the question in this room is just to follow the NPC, so it's easy so long as you paid attention. This also makes this the only question you can't ask the NPC to repeat! The next room contains some more exposition, and set-up for the messy finale. Empress Goregonzola drops some cheese for whatever reason, very convenient! She drops two pieces of cheese, one to open the lock so the player has to see this scene to progress and a second piece to be used during the climax. The question itself is rather confusing though, one'd think Cheese and Iknight would be more sensible picks than Queen! I chalk this confusion up to my failure to properly convey this in the prior writing.

At 43:18, Iknight meets some familiar and unfamiliar faces! The two characters on the left are Rey Alph and Denarius Athros, protagonists of Hotel Quest and DESTINY OF ATHROS respectively. These quests are both rather bad and not worth examining, but Denarius will appear in other quests since he's a favourite of mine whereas Rey Alph makes a large cameo in Honeymoon Quest and a silent and very brief cameo in a Sorrowlad quest. 

Bellestrella and her entourage were going to be important characters in Sorrowlad! In particular, Bellestrella is Hellestrella's much more successful and accomplished sister! She was going to have offscreen dialogue in Kitty Sitting, appear more prominently in the Art Gallery and feature significantly in the Town Hall episode and onwards. She also has Lovrette by her side, who was going to tie in with the Ghouliette subplot. There's also Sombra. I don't remember what her deal was at all! Maybe she was going to tie in with the whole Narrator/Player/Aunt Gertrude trifecta?

I should note that my plans for these three have been subject to change though, I might very well have cut out Sombra and Lovrette since the former is superfluous and the latter's role could be more meaningfully served by Ghouliette's friend group. Bellestrella was also going to be a much more serious characters instead of the zany hero she is here! Either her attitude was going to just be a font or I was going to retcon it altogether come Sorrowlad IX. 

DEATH

At 46:32, there's another Hotel Quest cameo! She used to be the BOTANIST OF DOOM back in that game, but now she's the clearly different FLORIST OF BLOOM!! Just like in Hotel Quest, she is hidden away behind two locks requiring Life Petals! The Petalier of Room line is a good one, I didn't intend to ever follow up on that, but I think I should definitely have put an NPC with that name in a quest at some point! Perhaps she could have helped out with the interior design of the Blissvale Art Gallery... The fourth answer references "Grapple", "Ju-Dorange" and "Pomegrenade", which were stupid ideas I had for Miasmon! Grapple was an apple specializing in grapple attacks, Ju-Dorange was an orange specializing in Ju-Do and Pomegrenade was a pomegranate grenadier. 

At 47:36 there's a sign that contains a hint about the final question. The room also contains the second Goblinkin dragon. Maybe if they fuse they can become 100% Goblin?! The question here is rather amusing at least, just because the name of the Goblin Mountain Village is spelled so ridiculously!

48:50 features the return of  the Narrator from Psychology "Quest"! Iknight doesn't fall for their usual nonsense babbling though, and the Announcer is rather annoyed as well as there's no need for both an announcer and a narrator. In the end any route is safe. The top half of the room is garbled on purpose! I don't remember what the purpose is though!!

Nani

The next room features me! Funny how my speech patterns have changed since then... I like that silly scene where I make Iknight undress and say something stupid in the middle of the heart-shaped pond! This is also where the passcode comes in! I believe the original version was much harder and the passcodes were more similar, in this version they're all totally different, so even knowing one part is enough to solve the question.

The room at 51:00 has some spooky ambiance! Totally silent! Sometimes the most proper choice of music is no music at all. The question here makes no sense though, or rather, the answer that's correct makes no sense! I really messed up here, hence why I fail a few times! This is also the point where I was somewhat running out of steam, but of course I CLEVERLY made it so it was the Empress who was running out of steam instead... Why did she make this quiz anyway?!

>:]

This is where the 'boss rush' happens, though it's more like a boss questions rush! The question in this room is a rather tricky one, it's "what is this question's number"! One might think it'd be 25, assuming there's 6 sets of 5 questions, but there's actually two less questions than that because the first section only has 3 questions!

There were actually meant to be no crystals during this entire segment, but I realized it would be tedious to sit through cutscenes all the time, so I added one anyway. But then I forgot to alter the dialogue saying there's no crystals. Whoops!

At 54:10 the scene is suddenly outdoors again, and you need to enter one of four restaurants, even though it leads into the castle! The question here is a bit of a silly one, Gheffrey DX what Iknight thinks is the right answer, rather than asking for the right answer, which would imply any answer Iknight earnestly picks thinking it's correct would be the right answer! So much for a boss rush! This silly trick is actually ripped pretty much directly from Telepath RPG 2, where the protagonist can reason their way out of a conman's shell game using the same logic.

I should also comment that the portrait and sprite don't match up properly!
The portrait is correct while the sprite is wrong!
Iknight and Icky aren't supposed to be bald but have very short hair!
This same issue happens in reverse with Minori in Sorrowlad, who's meant to be bald!

The next two rooms basically function as a trick question! Gleeful Bliss states his question is the final one and has the final answer, and a simple one at that, does Iknight want an easy or difficult path? Both answers are correct! The next room then asks the question of WHY Iknight chose the path he chose. The trick here is that obviously it could be any answer, but Gleeful Bliss and a signpost earlier stated that the final answer was the final answer. Giving anymore answers therefore BREAKS THE RULES!! So, the solution is to abstain from giving any answer and walk the other way! Doing this triggers a suddenly sappy conversation where Iknight and Icky make amends. That story arc could have been fleshed out better! This trigger is also why entering the room triggers Iknight to walk up to his brother, the solution couldn't work otherwise! The wrong answer here also has a special dialogue, it's the only answer with a unique game over dialogue!

Anyway, I got help from a friend setting this scenario up! I do like it conceptually, the final solution is not to pick the correct answer but to not give an answer in the first place! It's interesting! The execution might not be flawless though, since the connection between the final question and breaking the rules for doing a question after that might be too vague!

AND NOW THE EPIC FINALE

The finale is really quite dumb!! The Announcer does some grandstanding and the Empress challenges Iknight to piece together her incredibly stupid backstory and plot!

I like this room's looks at least. Menacing!!
It also has the quest's only ogre! How odd!

Soooo... The conclusion. It starts at 58:46 and it goes on, and on, and on! When I first made this quest, I had to cut this dialogue up into several pieces because I kept hitting the dialogue limit! Hence the awkward pacing and the Announcer spawning in there!

Iknight basically ties together the Empress's plot and her transformation from the Queen into her current form, and it's weird and confusing! The whole cheese thing is very silly, and the basic gist just seems to come down to the Queen loving cheese so much she kept eating it despite getting a food poisoning, and it turned her evil because EVIL CHEESE!!! But Iknight fixes it with GOOD CHEESE which the Empress dropped but it was actually dropped by her GOOD SIDE the Queen who somehow still had that much control???

That makes... Sense? Sort of? Maybe? But it's really dumb and poorly conveyed! Still, it's a functional ending! There wasn't too much left for me to do, other than maybe totally alter this room into a sequence of multiple choice questions where the player needs to GIVE the answers before Iknight exposits! I'd have had to kinda finagle it though, as this was literally the only remaining map left to use, and I'd used up all plot states too!

I've used up everything!!

I had to use several other workarounds for things too! For example, the dialogues for the rest area NPCs and the questions are actually reused between areas! I made sure to end each chapter with a plot state advancing trigger, which is also why it's impossible to backtrack, as every NPC in every area changes their dialogue every chapter! This means the NPCs asking questions 1, 4, 9, 14, 19 and 24 all use the same script! 

It's hokey, but functional! It goes to show how even in the older days of the engine, where it was much more limited, it was possible to work around it with clever use of plot states! Still, I much prefer the current engine that has much more spaces for dialogues, props, NPCs and text boxes per dialogue!

All in all, I think Quiz Quest is decent. The mapmaking and writing is all over the place, and some areas and questions clearly got more love than others! I do think it has a certain appeal at least, if only just for the sheer novelty of using an RPG making toolkit to make a multiple choice quiz!

Oof, this blog is over 4,000 words long! And QQ isn't even my biggest quest! This took me entirely too long to write, doing this for all quests is not sustainable! Since I do want to continue this series, I'll experiment with the next quest and will try out live commentary. That might mean I'll put these out less consistently, since I don't want to do those when there's people around, and I will need to see whether I can even feasibly record audio, but hopefully I can get it to work!

Thanks to anyone who made it this far!! As a question, please tell me what question you like best or something. This is my way of knowing whether you read this part!!!

Quest ReQuest: Shower Quest

Time for another installment of Quest ReQuest! I made the first of these yesterday, and today we are jumping forward in time significantly!

Yes, it's time for the quest in which my author avatar deftly throws away his clothes and takes a shower!! It's based on real events, it's really silly and stupid, it was made specifically to show to my friends, it's Shower Quest!

The story behind this one's creation might be the most interesting thing about it! I went to take a shower, but when I entered the shower there was a BIG FAT MOTH in there!! Hijinx ensued and I successfully took my shower, and afterwards I recounted the fact in a chat server I was using back then, and I got the idea "well why don't I make this into a quest?".

Yes, it's very exciting!!

And so I did! I made this quest on the very same evening, I'm sure, and I even had the conversation at the start of the quest mirror the conversation we were having after I'd taken the shower. Of course my author avatar made sure to point of the time paradox! This also explains why some bits of dialogue must seem like total non-sequiturs, these were some injokes we had at the time! Quite amusing, some of them, though I don't like that whole 'legion of fangirls' nonsense. All I want are fanboys. And the fanboys are all goblins. Ohyes.

This isn't actually from any real quest.
I just made this so I could take this screenshot.
I got a lot of mileage out of it, so 100% worth it!

This quest reused a lot of assets from an earlier quest I made, funnily enough the rooms here were loose adaptations of the house I live in. Of course, in the 7 years since, I've moved into another room in the same house and the bathroom got a complete overhaul, so the layout is quite outdated! Funny how one of my quests sort of becomes a time capsule of how things used to be, I can actually vividly remember the old bathroom just from the layout I gave it in this quest...

Something I'd often try to do in my quests is make a lot of dialogue for optional observations of objects! Writing these bits of dialogue were often the most fun part of making these quests, though looking back at them I think a lot of these would be much better if I cut them short! Many of my jokes in these quests turned out rather long-winded, and not on purpose either! Were I to make a quest today, I'd really need to keep in mind that oftentimes less is more, at least when it comes to silly side content. I'd also say something about how the dialogue can suddenly get very suggestive, but, well, this is nothing compared to some other stuff I made!

How randomly lewd!

I'd also try to give all of the items in my quests unique descriptions and whatnot, be they equipment or just key items! I also gave my clothing gigantic stat bonuses, which of course is totally pointless when I remove them before taking a shower! Yup, that's some PERMANENTLY MISSABLE CONTENT right there!

The use of music amuses me! The Fear track playing during the intro despite the quest's silly nature, Path playing for the EQIP QUEST TO GET TO THE BATHROOM and THE EPIC QUEST TO OBTAIN TOILET PAPER, having the silly Goblins track start playing when I take off my clothes and of course the very overblown use of Courage for the battle with the 'moth'! While the dialogue leaves things to be desired in several areas, I do think the rest of the quest is relatively polished and technically competent, at least for what might as well be called a shitpost in quest form!

I do also like the use of the facial expressions, especially the Goblinface above. The game's Goblinfaces just conveyed a lot of raw emotion filtered through rather dopey and silly expressions, they were my favourite to use and I gave most Goblin and Ogre characters these expressions!

Fun thing, when this quest was made I had to use a scorpion instead because the game didn't have anything resembling a moth yet! The game has since added other creatures, such as the blade bee, but I kinda like the use of the scorpion now.

Speaking of, boss battle!! And in fact the only battle in the quest! Something I do still like about these quests is how battles are used sparingly and only for other named characters. There's no cutting down or random wildlife or precious goblin lives! Having said that, the balance of some of these battles was rather out there! In this battle, every single action has a plethora of special effects! On my first try I accidentally buffed the opponent and got instagibbed quite hard! I actually edited the stats a bit to make it easier, since it's not really meant to be a real challenge considering it didn't even happen for real!

So, that was another quickie! It's fun to look back at something like this, which was made for an incredibly niche audience of like a dozen people tops! It shows off a part of gaming that is really quire obscure, just making these short little stories for friends to play and not really meant for mass consumption. Just the sheer joy of creating something for others to enjoy. Regardless of whether it's actually good!!

I believe next time I'll go back to the realm of more out there quests and cover Quiz Quest! Because the most sensible thing to do with this RPG engine was to make a quiz, of course!

Quest ReQuest: Psychology "Quest"

I recently unearthed the Shockwave Flash file that can play Alora Fane: Creation quests!!

Many years ago, around 2013 or so, I was a beta tester of an unreleased RPG creation engine referred to as DreamQuest and later rebranded to Alofa Fane: Creation. Being a member of a small and selectively-chosen community, other testers on the site and I would make quests and share them with each other and I wound up making a surprising number of them. Most of them are really bad and there's a lot of really embarrassing stuff in there!

Clearly this is not one of them.

Yesterday I played some of my old quests on a whim and realized I could actually easily record them and upload them to YT, so I figured why not write about it while I'm at it?

In these Quest ReQuest blogs I'll be playing some of my old quests and generally reflecting on my current feeling on them as well as what inspired me to make them back in 2013. Some of these quests got pretty experimental and a few go on rather long too, and before I knew it I'd built a loosely connected setting featuring a suspicious amount of gay Goblins and Ogres!

I believe this was the first of my "Quest" series of quests, a series of quests revolving around a certain theme, idea or concept. The idea for this one was pretentious psychological games that leave everything up to interpretation! The later ones would get much more ambitious, but we'll see about those when we get there!

The dialogue is mostly gibberish, plot points fly by left and right with no rhyme or reason and the game is constantly shifting moods! It's short, to-the-point, very much on-the-nose, tongue-in-cheek and it probably thinks it's funnier than it actually is!

What I like about this one is how mercifully short it is! There's only about 4 character props, not that many screens or conversations, but I think it still conveys a sense of complete garbled nonsense posing as being meaningful rather well. I even made some LUDONARRATIVE CONSONANCE by making it so you need to follow the antagonist's advice to knock yourself out when fighting it, by literally using a physical attack on yourself. The antagonist even enchants your physical attack to be super effective against yourself, wowzers!

SECRET SORROWLAD IX SPOILERS

Curiously enough, I seem to have taken a liking to these characters enough for them to  recur throughout my other games! The narrator winds up being an antagonistic force trying to tear apart a Good Human Paladin and Evil Goblin Shaman couple (gay couple of course!!) and all three of them also were to continuously appear as nonsensical easter eggs in my Sorrowlad series of quests, with "Player" being renamed to Aghnostic! I'll talk more about those when I get there, hopefully!

Honestly, of my oldest quests, this is probably the best one!

Telepath Tactics: A Deterministic Effort

Just yesterday I finished my playthrough of Telepath Tactics, Craig Stern of Sinister Design's latest entry in the Telepath series. I really enjoyed it! It brings a lot of interesting, unique and well-thought out innovations to the strategy RPG table, and it makes me wish other games would take a cue from it.

While I like tactical RPGs conceptually, I haven't played too many of them. The one I'm most familiar with is Final Fantasy Tactics, definitely one of the game's inspirations in some regards, but I think I might actually prefer Telepath's system overall. And I believe the primary reason for that is...

Determinism: RNGesus begone!

Why aren't more strategy games deterministic?! Really, Telepath Tactic was a big eye-opener for me in this regard. 

Deterministic is defined as lacking randomness here. The default in Telepath Tactics is that the outcome of an action leads to 100% predictable results. There are no random chances of missing or scoring a critical hit and there is no damage range. If your Swordsman with 10 strength uses Strike against a Swordsman with 20% Slash resistance, it will 100% of the time do exactly 8 damage. Likewise, if a Spearman with 8 Strength uses his Spear attack to backstab a Spriggat with -40% Pierce Resistance from 2 tiles away with a height advantage, it will 100% of the time do 18 damage.

No really the math isn't that difficult.

This means that when planning out a turn, you can be certain you're going to be doing a specific amount of damage to an opponent without having to rely on RNG to succeed. The outcome of a turn is by default fully in your control, when you commit to an action you know exactly what you are committing yourself to, and what possible fate you might be condemning your troops to should you make a miscalculation.

There are no arbitrary hit rate caps of 99% which feel awful to fumble, there are no characters who suffer permadeath due to an unlikely critical hit. All the information you need to make an informed decision and to reach perfect play are right there at your fingertips.

So how does the game manage to stay interesting?

Breadth of tactics

Battles in Telepath Tactics are rarely just straightforward. There are many variables to consider, and the game is set up to allow a broad scope of different valid strategies to succeed.

Units come in a large variety of flavours, each with their own peculiarities. A Swordsman gets more counterattacks per turn and can reduce an enemy's counterattacks, a Spearman can attack at a distance and is more bulky, Bandits have more damage output and access to an AoE attack, Mantis Riders can more further and keep moving after attacking while Assassins have even more movement and get large bonuses for scoring backstabs. They might all be melee classes, but they all have unique playstyles which can give them an edge or hamper them. Certain campaign-exclusive melee characters even get the ability to lay traps which automatically trigger and stun any character who walks over them!

Gotta love baiting enemies to walk into my Snare Traps by exposing myself to a back attack

Likewise, Bowmen are fragile hit-and-run ranged attackers, while Crossbowmen are bulky ranged attackers who can also easily destroy environmental elements. Meanwhile, Kineticists don't rely on physical weapons and use psionics to fuel their attacks, getting access to status effects and powerful but expensive big AoE attacks.

This is of course typical for strategy games, but Telepath Tactics brings a few additional layers to the table, most remarkably with how much importance is placed on positioning and battlefield control.

Characters have abilities that can push and pull other characters around. It's possible to shove an enemy into an environmental hazard to make them waste their turn, take damage, or even remove them from combat altogether. And enemies aren't shy about using the exact same tactics against you!

Absolutely need an ally to be somewhere but they're a tile short? Shove them! I can't count how many times a simple shove turned out to be a vital and crucial part of my strategy! There is even a whole class who specializes in this type of play, pushing and pulling enemies at a distance, and they're invaluable on certain types of maps. While it feels good to pummel an enemy with sword strikes, nothing feels quite as good as pulling someone into a ravine for an instant kill. And nothing feels quite as horrible as realizing you left yourself open to be shoved into a ravine yourself, or as relieving as realizing you can still pull that character away from that precarious cliff edge!

Get dunked on.

Likewise, it's possible to control the flow of battle by creating, or destroying, certain bottlenecks. Every unit on the map is impassible for other units, whether enemy or ally, and maps are littered with destructible objects that can be used and abused to your own desire. Is there a bridge full of enemies? Plant a bomb with your Engineer, have her run away, then have your Crossbowman shoot an explosive arrow to ignore the bomb and blow up the bridge and anyone on it! You can even preemptively cut off enemies with tricks like these and force them to take a long detour to reach you!

Cool Engineers don't look at explosions.

It's even possible to create objects to make chokepoints, or cut off areas altogether. This can be achieved by making formations so that opponents are forced to attack your tankiest units, who can retaliate with a counterattack, or using natural bottlenecks in the level's design, or taking matters into your own hands and forcing the opponent to fight a way through barricades while you can pummel them with ranged attacks from a safe distance.

nope

One very important consideration with positioning is move order and turn order. Turns take place on a team-by-team basis, so during the player's turn they can make all their characters move around and perform an action. The order in which the teammates move and act is wholly up to the player, and it's possible to move a Mantis Rider with 7 movement points and the move-after-attacking ability one square to make way for an ally of theirs to move, then move 2 squares so they can be in range for an AoE healing action and then move 2 squares to attack an enemy, then move 2 more squares to make way for another ally. The order of operations is very important, and seeing every action fall into place to creative a cohesive and efficiently played turn just feels incredibly right.

Heal whole party spells in JRPGs: Thoughtless, boring
AoE heals in tactical RPGs: Galaxy brain, exciting

There are some other factors to consider as well. The most important of these is backstabs! Attacking an enemy from behind deals 50% bonus damage, a significant amount! This bonus applies for melee, ranged and psionic attacks. Assassins make this their bread and butter, and get abilities that lets them do extra sidestab damage as well, or get 100% damage bonuses when backstabbing. There is a risk to thoughtlessly chasing backstabs though! Enemies will be just as eager to backstab you in return, and recklessly charging into enemy lines to score a cheap backstab is a good way to ensure a character death. As such, positioning characters such that nobody has their backs exposed becomes a crucial battlefield strategy, which is most easily accomplished with a back to an environmental object, or another ally's back!

Characters can have resistances or weaknesses to certain elements defined by their level up progression, species and elemental affinities. Winged creates are weak to Piercing attacks, Kineticists are resistant to their own elemental affinity but weak to Slashing, Stone Golems resist physical attacks but are weak to Light and Cold.

This particular Stone Golem reminds me of someone... A distant relative of Mr. Triangle?!

Attacks with a variable range have damage fall-off if they target beyond the minimum range. A regular Bow attack can hit any linear square between 2 to 4 tiles away, so attacking 2 tiles way does 100% damage, 3 tiles away does 90% and 4 tiles away does 80%. Likewise, a Light Bomb attack with a 3x3 Area of Effect spread tiles with an epicenter either 3 or 4 tiles away does either 100% or 90% damage depending on which tile you target. This way ranged characters are allowed flexibility in their targeting and it's possible to have a melee fighter backed up by several ranged fighters, but there is an incentive to move ranged fighters closer to the action.

Lemme AoE

Another factor to consider is elevation. Attacking an enemy at a higher elevation than you gives a -30% damage penalty, while attacking from the high ground gives a +30 range penalty as well as +1 extra maximum range on ranged attacks. Melee attacks cannot strike opponents who are more two or more units of elevation above or below the attacker, and getting pushed from a high elevation to a low elevation inflicts damage and can even stun a character if the elevation difference is big enough. Hence why tossing enemies into cliffs is a good way to deal with them. Of course, this is only a factor on maps that have differentiated elevation.

Target practice

So, that's a lot to consider! Thankfully there's no moon cycles or zodiac alignments or potential offspring charts to consider or things might get out of hand! The game uses a lot of varied systems, some of which are legitimately unique such as the heavy focus on mechanically meaningful positional manipulation abilities and terrain destruction/creations, and I could talk about other factors as well, such as the use of movement-based abilities like Sprint and Levitate, energy costs and regeneration, equipment and inventory management, but for now let's talk about randomness.

I need your offspring to have the proper enneatype to form a social link with my future offspring!!

Yes, that's right. While the game strives to be mostly deterministic, it does use random factors in a few areas, but sensibly and sparingly. For the most part.

The most obvious instance of randomness is the enemy turn order, the way the AI is currently programmed, it will randomly select the turn order of its active characters and make them act one by one, forgoing the benefits that can be gained from having a cohesive movement strategy. The potential hokeyness caused by this AI behaviour is diminished in the game's single-player maps, where enemy layouts are such that they won't be tripping over each other and blocking each other's routes due to their starting positions and their triggers to start actively engaging with the player, unless of course you manipulate them to do so. As such this element of randomness mostly serves to make it so you cannot simply restart a battle, play the exact same first turn and have the enemy react the exact same way, the enemy characters will act in a different order, which does affect the outcome, but can also still be planned for.

While characters have 100% accuracy by default, there are some exceptions to this rule. Some attacks have less than 100% accuracy, these are attacks that aren't restricted by linear targeting and are as such more flexible in their use. The most prominent example of this is the long-range Arc Shot ability from Bowmen. This attack only has a 60% accuracy and won't do much damage from a high distance, so it should be factored into your turns not as a cornerstone of your tactic but more as a little bonus. It's still better to rely on your other abilities, but it can be a little extra bonus damage on targets you can't otherwise reach. This accuracy can be mitigated by targeting enemies at a lower elevation, enemies who are swimming in water/lava or by inflicting certain status ailments, which actually raises the accuracy back to 100%, giving the player some ability to mitigate the RNG.

Likewise, certain specific classes have an innate dodge rate. This mechanic is used very sparingly by enemies, there's only one type of enemy that has any innate dodging ability and they only appear for two battles, so it mostly factors in as a lucky break for the player. On the player's side it's mostly the special Hero class and the Assassins who get dodge growths. It's not something you should rely on, but it is helpful to have on your designated front-line fighters as well as your characters who prefer to be among the enemy lines. Dodge rates can also be sidestepped by Mental attacks such as Mind Blast or feedback, which have a 100% hit rate regardless of Dodge rate or the user's accuracy. Just be careful to not have your own Assassins get backstabbed with a Mind Blast!

There is one other factor that is randomized, and it's one factor which I do actually take issue with, and that is random status ailments. There are a few abilities which have a 50% to inflict a status ailment, most prominently the elemental attacks used by Kineticists and Spriggats. These status ailments can be incredibly crippling when inflicted on a party member and they appear rather prominently on some maps. This makes completing these maps much more luck-reliant than any other aspect of the game, much to its detriment in my opinion. While it is possible to resist status ailments with elemental resistances (or be weak to them in the case of an elemental weakness), it's difficult to fully resist these ailments altogether.

This is rather annoying with the Dark Spriggats and Skiakineticists who can reduce your characters's speed and the Photokineticists who can Blind characters to reduce their accuracy down to 0% (deterministic!!) The worst offender are the Frost Spriggats, who have elative high movement, can fly and have AoE Frost Breath attacks with a base 50% chance to freeze someone solid, which renders the target unable to move, act or use items. The only way to heal this condition is the Melt ability from the Pyrokineticist, and oftentimes you'd rather be attacking with her rather than healing your party members. These sudden freezes can at times come down to 50% coin flips as to whether a certain character is doomed or not, and I'd much rather this system was reworked somehow to make status ailments deterministic in line with the rest of the game's design.

Still, that is just one problem I have. It doesn't even begin to weigh up against all the things I greatly respect the game for! I sincerely hope other games take note of the things Telepath Tactics did!

Plot, character, scope and politics

Alright, that's enough gameplay talk. Let's talk about story! Because Telepath Tactics does some interesting things with its story.

Yes, the story of a little girl needing to find someplace to pee.
... Do Shadowlings pee? We'll get into that. Maybe.

One aspect of the plot in Final Fantasy Tactics I really admired was how down to earth and gritty the political drama was. Past tense, because as the story progresses, the hero ranks up from dealing with political intrigue to dealing with a far less interesting evil cult bent on resurrecting some great demon. What an absolute waste! While the hero is off dealing with the thousandth evil cult and fighting against God, the foil Delita gets to partake in all sorts of intriguing politicking and gets to actually make morally grey decisions.

A less interesting story than you, Delita.

Telepath Tactics doesn't fall into this pitfall. It starts off with very clear states stakes and contains itself to resolving those stakes. The protagonist and her sister were kidnapped by bandits at a very young age and sold off to a mining company where they grew up as slaves in their mines alongside their sick father. When through various circumstances the two sisters manage to escape and get dropped off in a remote, isolationist village, the elder sister is determined to go back to those mines and make the slavers pay, rescue the slaves and reunite with her father who couldn't escape with them.

How to maintain an upper class: Divide and conquer the lower and middle class.

And that is exactly what the game is about. There aren't any sudden cults, the mining company aren't some font for a greater evil, because as it turns out, private industries are perfectly capable of being sufficiently evil to provide menacing antagonists and motivations for a protagonist to fight against. If anything, they are more suited as main villains when you consider we're all living under the suffocating heel of capitalism and human greed, and it's not the prim princesses who want more or the moping disowned royals who deserve the spotlight but the regular common folks who don't have any political power or birthright to leverage, but choose to team up and fight back regardless.

You never actually get a meeting with the guy, either. You're on your own!

So, you've got your stakes and your antagonists. Time to fill out the party roster. On their quest, the sisters meet a large stable of characters willing to join the party for a variety of reasons. Some are also looking to liberate people from the mines, others are hankering to fight some bandits for great glory while others ally with you for their own personal safety or convenience. You've got your insufferable master of puns who's adapt with a bow, your miasma-breathing, horned, winged and clawed starving artist, your scheming mentalist who puppeteers enemies across the battlefield and your hardened bandit-hating mantis rider with a gigantic stick up her arse. Though the amount of interactions between the party member is limited to certain scenes, I did enjoy the scenes that were there a lot.

That's why we play video games, to escape the madness.
But thanks for reminding me, Meridian.

Really, Gavrielle?

God damnit Zimmer, you absolute fucking moron.

Sadly, not every party member gets to be as developed, some characters join late in the game and mostly serve to fill up the ranks to make up for any characters lost to the cruelty of permadeath should you not be playing on casual mode, but it is natural for late joiners to not get as much growth.

One thing that the game never comments on but did inform its character designs is the fact that most of the playable cast is female. It's never pointed out in the game itself, nor does it make girl power or anything of the sort a part of its plot, but it is unusual compared to the majority of games that have a male majority or an even split. Personally I welcome it, I think it's perfectly fine for games to choose a primarily male playable cast or an even split, but we should also see more games with majority female casts outside of the genres where that is already the standard.

So all-in-all, I liked the game's plot! It's simple, it's straight-forward, it's to the point. It can be emotional at times, it can be funny when it needs to be, it features themes of sisterly kinship, the evils of capitalism and greed, the power of the common man united against a dehumanizing regime and it subverts some tropes without falling into the pitfall of defining itself wholly by subversiveness. It crafts its own identity, and part of that is owed to the setting. Let's squee about the setting.

Nostalgia: Cannonballs, Gargoyles and Psionics, oh my!

I would be lying if I said this game came on my radar by accident or coincidence. Telepath tactics is far from the first tactical RPG made by Sinister Design, and was preceded by the Telepath RPG series.

I quite enjoyed playing these games way back, that must have been over a decade ago, considering Telepath RPG 2 came out in 2008. For some reason the series left a strong impression on me, rather like MARDEK, Epic Battle Fantasy and Sonny did. Funny to think the people behind those are all still working on these series, in some form or another.

Anyway, Telepath Tactics is set in the same setting as the previous games, so for someone like me it was rather nostalgic to see species like Shadowlings or Spriggats again, or fight using Psy Fighters again. It's not really required to have played other games in the series to understand any of it, since all the relevant factors are explained in the game, but I still want to gush a bit about the setting because I find it interesting!

The most bizarre aspect has to be the Shadowlings, which are like floating cannonballs with unattached floating arms and smoky plumes. They're underground dwellers feed on negative emotions and typically prey on humans because they're just such great sources of misery as it turns out. But they're not really all bad, and they've appeared as party members in every game since TRPG2. They never do address how this feeding process works in detail as far as I know though, perhaps they did that in the third game, which I still need to play... Well, anyway, one wonders whether they feed on your opponents or they are the party counselors because they feed on anyone venting at them. Who knows?!

Some of them also have radical text-box blocking horns!

They are highly skilled at mental abilities rather than any sort of physical combat skills, and they exclusively communicate using telepathy. They are also somehow very capable at mining vibra, which is why the mining company you fight is mostly made up of Shadowlings. Their colours are also supposed to indicate age, but in this game they indicate team alliance instead, meaning you can get RIDICULOUSLY IMPOSSIBLE variants like white or black Shadowlings! They are probably my favourite species in the series, because like, what are they? They're so unique! So strange! So edgy! I like that!

Seriously what are those mouths for? ... Reproduction?
Also, try guessing which is the male or female Shadowling!

There's also the Spriggats, another species of underground dwellers. With skin as smooth and hard as polished marble as well as wings, horns and claws, they look a lot like gargoyles. Ohyes, we do all love ourselves some gargoyles, don't we? But they don't turn to stone overday, nor do they roam New York City. They do however get elemental breath, as indicated by the colour of their skin! Red Spriggats with Fire Breath, Frost Spriggats with Frost Breath, Black Spriggats with a corrosive Dark Breath and the newly introduced Gold Spriggats with electromagnetic radiation Light Breath! Yeah, it's weird.

Funnily enough, they're all named after philosophers and other well-known intellectuals, so there's Spriggats with names like Seneca, Cartwright, Rousseau, Hipparchia or Bacon.  Just like the Shadowlings, they've been party members ever since TRPG2. They were also engaged in a civil war with the Shadowlings in that game, following an uprising sparked by them figuring out the Shadowling Queen was selectively killing off and imprisoning female Spriggats to control their birth rates, committing fantasy genocide. Good thing she's dead!

Damn bro, you got the whole squad laughing

There's the Stone and Bronze Golems, steam-powered giants fueled with Vibra. Big, strong, quiet and with seemingly a questioned amount of sentience, yet in specific cases sufficiently sentient to be able to form simple sentences and form emotional bonds to their owners. A pair consisting of an Engineer and a Cryokineticist appear in the main campaign, the former of which fancies herself the mother of a Bronze Golem. It's precious, and makes me wish the game had more interactions between them!

They are naturally pretty slow on the battlefield, but they are very study as well and resistant to various types of physical attacks, though at the expense of some elemental weaknesses on the Rock Golem's part. Bronze Golems depend on their spinsaws to deal AoE slashing damage, while Rock Golems are able to throw units across several tiles. I do wish the main campaign had a Rock Golem party member, I'd very much love to toss enemies off cliffs or into the murky depths!

My new OTP

A species added in the third game, The Servants of God, was Spirits! Nobody seems to know exactly where they come from or why they exist, but they perpetually repeat their own name to themselves to prevent themselves from forgetting their identity and devolving into a primal state where they will possess inanimate objects or haunt creepy crypts and basements aimlessly. Spirits don't appear much in the game, only appearing in a haunted crypt as well as accompanied by one of the higher ups in the Mining Company who fancies herself a researcher and loves to 'study' humans...

They have unusually high energy reserves, and they can feed on enemy health to recover their own energy as well as feed on enemy energy to recover their own health. They can also donate their energy reserves to other characters, making them useful when paired with Psy Fighters who have powerful but costly big AoE attacks.

I like the aesthetic, Spirits kinda look like negative photos

This also translates over to the setting's wildlife. Rather than knights riding horses, there's knights riding mantises. Scorpions are a common household pet, though they sadly don't appear in Telepath Tactics. It's a nice way to use some familiar animals in a new way. Mantis riders are conceptually cool.

D'you think this setting has teenagers obsessed with caring for their mantises?

One aspect that's been mentioned a few times before is mental and psychic abilities, psionics, kineticists and elements. This all ties in to the setting's substitute for a magic system. Some characters in the setting have psychic abilities that let them manipulate air particles, perform telekinesis, communicate telepathically, read minds, create psychokinetic barriers to protect people and directly alter or assault the target's mind.

Of course the source of these powers is still not entirely defined, some characters in the setting consider it a gift from a higher power, but this is only speculation. The game does have clear limits on what these psychic abilities can do however, bar certain Spirits and some exceptionally powerful individuals who have powers that surpass common understanding, though those do not appear in this game.

I particularly like the flavour used for the four elements and healing abilities! Heat abilities don't simply conjure fire, they accelerate particles to cause intense heat and combustion in a localized area. Likewise Frost abilities decelerate particles to cause intense cold and freezing in a localized area. It's very scientific! Shadow and Light are even wackier, Shadow skills are an offshoot of mental abilities which physically manifest negative emotions as a corrosive miasma which breaks away water vapours while Light skills combines electromagnetic radiation and percussive force to concentrate photons and damage the opponent at a cellular level, then released with a bright flash. All scientifically sound, no doubt!

Kinetic attacks also have fancy visual effects!

Meanwhile, healing abilities don't manifest as magic to mend flesh and heal wounds, but instead reinforce a character's psychokinetic defenses. It's more like armor stapled on than actual healing, though it does also function on non-psychics and environmental objects. It's even possible to create psychical objects that function like an Engineer's barricades, or to create especially hard to maintain shields that can increase a character's total health beyond their regular maximum health. These barriers are apparently invisible to the human eye, but able to thwart both psychical, mental and kinetic assaults. This is also why Psy users are naturally weak to slashing, as they rely solely on psychokinetic barriers for defense and psychokinetic barriers are more easily broken by slashing attacks than any other sort of attack.

The apt-titled "Big Shield"

But for real though, we all know the question is whether you'd hit that or not. Heck yeah I'd make out with a Golem. Or a Spriggat. Or a Shadowling. Definitely a Shadowling. Or maybe a Spriggat and a Shadowling making out... Maybe a Ghost could possess a Golem. Saucy!

Heck yes
Credit to Lethal Laurie

Anyway! As I'd mentioned before, most of this is just background fluff and they aren't things you need to know or understand to enjoy the game! This was just a long-winded ramble on my part about why I like this game's particular setting and find it nostalgic!

Remake: Fixes and wishlist

This is the part where I pull the wool over your eyes and discuss the aspects of the game I didn't like, but the developer pulled the wool over my eyes by already working on fixing many of these problems in a remake. And now there's wool all over the place.

During my playthroughs I ran into two engine-related problems, one which overrode some characters's inventories with another character's inventory as well as slowdown during long battles. The latter wasn't that much of a problem, it only happened thrice and only started kicking in when I was nearly done anyway, but the first bug actually made me have to manually edit my save file to mostly fix things, though one hookshot was sadly lost to the void.

These problems are fixed in the new engine! That's good!

Another issue I ran into was with the game's resolution. My screen has a 1680x1050 resolution, which caused cutscenes to look zoomed out with large black borders around the screen, as well as making the relative sizes of text, sprites and character portraits appear very small in combat maps. Which is a shame, since the spritework itself is very well-done!

Lots of enemies, too.

Thankfully, this problem is also fixed in the new engine!

The new engine also promises to have a lot of new features, improved UI and accessibility and much more. It even seems there are plans to do more projects with it aside from recreating the Telepath Tactics main campaign. I look forward to it!

Apparently the game will also have more facial expressions.
So there won't be moments like these, much as they amuse me.

So, while I am here, I might as well mention some things I do want to see or some neutral observations.

Stone Golem party member: One of the most fun things to do in TT is pushing characters into environmental hazards, whether it's shoving with a melee character or using telekinesis to fling them around. But nothing would feel better than using a Stone Golem to simply pick one up and throw it over somewhere else!

EXP system: TT grants experience for using most types of actions, only some movement abilities don't give exp for being used. The formula for calculating this EXP yield is pretty smart, and grants more exp for using actions with an energy cost, AoE attacks that hit multiple targets and attacks against high-leveled foes. This means support characters won't linger behind if they use their support skills frequently, and you don't miss out on exp when using Shoves instead of attacks. Reaching level 20 even promotes one of your units, giving them cool new sprites as well as various bonuses depending on their job, ranging from extra stats to extended range on certain actions or lowered energy costs for core class skills.

Not all classes are created equal though. Classes that can perform multiple actions per turn have a big advantage, since cheap support abilities are an easy way to quickly gain levels. It's not possible to grind by spamming the same action over and over in a turn, but it's still the difference between 10 EXP per turn and 20 per turn. On the contrary, melee units and (cross)bowmen level up much slower because their EXP yields drop off late in the game when you frequently fight swarms of low level enemies who only give paltry EXP, whereas support abilities earn full exp and Kineticists can score lots of EXP with their high-cost skills and AoE EXP bonuses. A combination of a flat EXP bonus for scoring a kill regardless of level difference as well as higher minimum exp yield for fighting low level enemies, perhaps?

Weapon durability: One game mechanic I couldn't really get into was weapon durability and weapons breaking during combat. It feels punishing towards weapon-using Humans and Lissit and pushes you to play Psy users and your Shadowling/Golem/Spriggat instead. It's the sort of feature you don't really think much about until it suddenly bites you in the ass. I did read the new engine might have a mechanic that lets characters repair their weapons during camp scenes between battles to restore uses, I hope that's going to feature in the main campaign!

More party interactions: As stated before, I enjoy the party interactions a lot! More sequences where Emma or maybe even Sabrina could interact with the party at their campsite would be nice, or more scenes scattered around between party members.

More side missions: One of my favourite missions was the lategame solo mission with Harriet! It's just a simple 1-on-1 mission, but you get used to playing with a party of 8 or more for most of the game, so smaller scale battles using fewer characters and less enemies are a nice change of pace.

-dabs-

I think that should cover most of it.

Closing thoughts

Honestly, I really enjoyed my time with Telepath. It's been a while since I've played a tactical RPG, but this is one I could see myself coming back to, since there's enough characters to tackle maps in a variety of ways. The no-nonsense approach to combat and the grounded nature of the plot really clicked with me. It solved a lot of the issues I've had with the Final Fantasy Tactics games, as well as doubts I'd have over playing other tactical RPGs. The game also has a good OST, containing very fitting tracks for the tactical combat and whatnot.

Telepath Tactics is a game that often is overlooked due to its visuals, though I personally like them just fine, but it's a game that really shines in its gameplay above all else. I wish the developer the best of luck with his work on the remake, and eagerly look forward to what's next in store!

I strongly recommend this to any fan of the tactical RPG genre, though I can also understand waiting for the remake to come out first to get a more polished overall experience. The Kickstarter for the original game posted an update containing a backer demo just this day, so progress seems to be coming along steadily. I'll keep my eye on the forum's devlog in the meanwhile, and maybe post again once it's out.

In the meanwhile, I might consider trying out Telepath RPG: The Servants of God. It's a game that was on my radar during its development but was above my price range back when it came out. Now that I'm an adult with an income, I can afford to spend a little now and again. We'll see if or when I'll get around to it!