MV - MASSIVE DEMO UPDATE: bio-Synthetica (Sci-fi Adventure)

+ This title screen is super sick looking with a cool soundtrack. Tells me everything I need to know about how spooky this game is gonna be.

+ The fact text appears when you hover over choices is pretty cool. Gives me some ideas, honestly.

+ All of this UI work is phenomenal, by the way. The ring menu for the main menu, the fact all the little usual RPG Maker menus slide in, the fact you give the player the choice to skip the tutorials, your little robot friend’s preview system, etc.

+ I’m really vibing with this apocalyptic future punk setting. Really speaks to my inner edgelord, especially with how there’s a ton of leftover apocalyptic logs – even voice files with actual voice acting. There’s a lot of effort put into this!

+ I love all of the little animations and flourishes the game has – your little character has a ton of adorable motion, and the little touches like stepping on a puddle and leaving behind wet footsteps is honestly kind of amazing. The game feels alive despite how dead the world is meant to be.

+ The little jumpscares are great. A corpse moving its head with a shock stinger SFX, etc. I do like that there wasn't anything truly obnoxious though, since the setting itself is already doing a lot of heavy lifting by being silently creepy. The rats in particular unnerved me the most because of the sounds they made.

+ A queueing system for the crafting is honestly kind of next level. I’d love to know how you accomplished this.

+ That little puzzle with the symbols was neat, as was the one where you have to do a set of numbers in order.

+ (!!!) There were no RTP sound effects throughout the entire thing!! You've legitimately done more than even a great deal of commercial RPG Maker games in that regard. Big applause all around.

+ I like how involved the cutscenes were, especially with our little robot buddy panicking and trying to open the door while the Lurker goes after him.

+ The battle system is pretty neat. I'm very fond of games that try to do the whole position awareness thing, as well as the checks in place to make sure you can't just spam your normal attack and expect to win.

+ That segment with the disembodied voices and the Lurker was genuinely quite chilling, especially with how you had to do number puzzles while he was chasing you – that’s a good setup-and-payoff for that mechanic! I also liked how he let up just long enough for you to run away.

+ The overkill skill and how there's multiple different animations upon using it on specific enemies is AWESOME. The fact it scares surrounding enemies is also a very cool idea - I wish more RPGs did this kind of thing. (EX. A lack of "He just ate Big Jim with a fork, you really think I'm just gonna stand here?!")

= Oh hey, it’s Olivia’s Horror Effects!

= I do think it’s interesting whenever a game has like, social media buttons.

= If I were to recommend a plugin for the title screen, it would be SRD’s Title Command Customizer and Title Choice Pictures, since it would remove the default RPG Maker menu from this set-up.

+/- Interesting choice to not show enemy HP outright. I’m usually not a fan of this, but it is nice to see at least some visual feedback with the heart icon thing.

+/- I also find it... fascinating that you made the detection of collectible objects an addon you have to equip instead of just something your character can do normally. Not a fan either, but at least it still exists even if you have to equip it.

= I think it’s pretty hilarious that the battle entrance SFX is a jumpscare scream.

- No keyboard rebinding. Please install Yanfly Keyboard Config or have your coder create a custom version that fits your game. (And in your case specifically it’s kind of strange that you have this very custom options screen yet no rebind function.)

- (!!!) The pace of the game is extremely slow. Every text box, step you make (you can't sprint) and combat action feels like it takes forever, and from what I could tell it was deliberate to preserve the mood or to make actions feel weighty. After a while, it genuinely gnawed at me - when I found a recipe to craft like, the Nanoheals or the Explosives, my reaction was more like "oh god I have to go back all the way or die just to make use of this."

- (!!) Likewise, I find it very cheap how you can't really dodge the enemies due to how tight every corner was. And you can't sneak behind them either, given that they auto-detect you whenever you get close to them. Combine this with the fact you can't escape (which is odd because this is not the first game in this marathon to do this to me), and the "can we please get this over with" feeling really did start to build up.

- (!!) The Armored Brute was where the mechanics kind of lost me. Combat was pretty easy/routine until this dude came along.

I tried everything - light attack, heavy attack, brutal double, push beam, etc. But it didn't seem to do anything, while he clobbered me doing the most damage out of any enemy in the game. The status tip didn't help either, since it just said "certain attacks will lift his shield state". I assume this means I had to learn the right skill or something, but if that's the case then I can see someone getting stuck on it for ages.

- I think it's arbitrary to make the overkill skill also have an HP gate, since you already have to kill like, five enemies beforehand just to use it in the first place.

- (!!) This is actually one of those games where I feel building it around action inputs would not only work tremendously, but also solve some of the jank. You and the enemies getting two hits randomly is cool, but whenever the odd "counterattack" prompt shows up I often beef it because it comes out of nowhere.

You use Light Attack a lot as is, as Heavy Attack leaves you open without much more benefit. So it'd make sense so the two-hit combo is actually part of the gameplay loop since if you miss, you just do the 1-hit version or whiff entirely. Given that you're ganged up by multiple enemies at a time and some of them can back up to avoid you, forcing you to use the pull beam or the particle blaster, I don't see it doing much harm anyway.

I feel it would make the game feel more exciting since it involves the player using their skill instead of relying on RNG.

- Nitpick, but I felt the spookiness lift a bit when I started to see that the Lurker was the big bad guy. It was more effective when it was just a nebulous evil without a specific source.

Bio-Synthetica is one of the most impressive RPG Maker games I've ever seen - especially from someone who frequents our forum. It nails the atmosphere, has a very fascinating combat system, and is lovingly, grotesquely detailed with a ton of effort put into the little things. (And the big things too, like the sound design!!!)

It genuinely unnerved me at times too, which is a wonderful thing for a horror game of any stripe.

But where I feel the game falls flat is its pacing. The game is agonizingly slow, and due to this it stops feeling atmospheric after a while and mainly just becomes frustrating since you can't run, actions feel sluggish, text boxes linger for longer than they should and so on. The Armored Brute fight confused me more than anything else, and I didn't feel excited to jump back in to deal with it even though I was sitting on a big cache of scrap and recipes to better fight it with.

But man. If these flaws ever get ironed out, I can see this demanding a lot of attention once it hits store shelves. It has extremely high potential.