Place of Despair

ooh this game has a great concept, and executes it in a great way too!!

(SPOILERS)

i love the idea of walking through this destroyed, doomed town. you don't know what happened or why is it abandoned. hell, you don't even know what the main character is like. but you understand that you're scraping for resources, almost everyone you find is out to get you, and you only have five days to get out of this place. the storytelling being so simple is super effective; it would've been easy to just do a massive infodump, but the minimal approach to the plot works wonders. it made me want to get every last scrap of information i could get from the environment or the few non-hostile people. it's great stuff! :D

the atmosphere is also super well done! i really like the pixel art, it's simple but clean and very readable. and the map design is really good too; you get a real sense of walking through an empty post-apocalyptic town with all the rubble and broken planks, or through an abandoned house with holes and blocked entrances everywhere. it's SO cool, and there are so many memorable parts of this town: the street that you get shot in if you cross it, the dark alley with two bad guys waiting, the psycho's cabin... and like i said, everything really works in making you feel like you're walking through an abandoned place. which is a point driven home even more by the audio! its use is spare, but things like the barely hearable footsteps or the creaking sounds when you take apart a group of planks are really good in building the atmosphere even more (the gunshot and fade to black in that one street caught me SO off guard lol). this game's presentation conveys the overall post-apocalypse vibes really well, but what i think really stands out is the few sparks of hope in this abandoned town; the two elders who help you by selling you stuff. it might sound silly, but having them in the game genuinely gives you strength to continue. finding small pieces of humanity in this screwed up world. and it's honestly more realistic than if everyone was just evil. so so good.

i also really like the gameplay! it's simple but the stamina bar is a really neat way to make you think about the actions you take in the town. "do i break these planks to enter this room? what if there's nothing there? do i wait until i get an axe? but who knows when will i find one?" and it's also present in the fights, which drain your stamina and flesh so fast that you need to prepare both before and after each encounter, which is also a nice bit of realism! the days mechanic was also really clever, making you choose when you should regenerate your energy, but also remove one day from the scarce time you have (and i didn't notice it until i was a few days in but your flesh and stamina get shortened every time you go to sleep right? a nice little addition to your strategizing!). the economy was also pretty well balanced, and the ending where it requires a lot of money and it made me sell many of my items was really awesome; it was, again, pretty realistic, like i was actually getting rid of important things i didn't know if i'd need in the future just so i could barely scratch the neccessary amount. "what do you mean you're only giving me 2 for my nailed bat???" haha. and the crafting at the workshop and fireplace were the icing on the cake of resource management! (though i don't think i ever found coffe beans or dandelions lol)

if i had to critique anything, i feel like some parts of the map were a bit spaced out, which made it kind of annoying to backtrack to the shops or the hospital. there were also some visual glitches; after i started the fireplace i left and when i came back, it looked like it had been put out, but when i interacted with it, it acted like it was still on. and after i killed the psycho in the cabin, when i interacted with them their sprite suddenly changed. also, when i tried to make sterilized bandages and i had 1 bandage and 2 water bottles, it told me i didn't have enough ingredients, but the craft only requires 1 of each. these aren't game breaking or anything though, so none of this is a big deal.

(edit: there were also some times where, when entering a new area, the game froze and kept loading forever. i'd suggest if you can to add downloadable versions of the game, since it's a LOT less likely for something like that to happen. only if you want to ofc!)

overall, this is a great game with a really awesome concept, and i hope it gets the recognition it deserves!! :>