For one, I initially didn’t think I controlled him, so I just kept button-mashing through. When it comes to the battles themselves, they’re pretty standard when it’s one-on-one, but when you team up with another person, like Ognjen, it got confusing fast. You’ll die over and over again until you just give up - there’s only so many times you can try with this one. All of this goes out the window for boss battles, by the way - they’re practically impossible to beat, even on the easiest setting. In some ways, I was a little disappointed by how easy it was since some of the NPCs stressed how important it was to strategize, but in the end, battle only felt like a speed bump in-between me and storyline, so it was okay that it went by quickly. You heal automatically after each battle, you move on. The Pale City stresses the importance of strategy - using skills, taking different stances, adopting different tactics depending on the type of enemy - but honestly you can just hack and slash your way through. There is more to The Pale City than just dialogue, of course - like any good RPG, there’s a chance to battle in-between storyline, and I was excited to see another turn-based style of battle grace my screen. In fact, I had to start over since I didn’t realize I was looking for a switch on the wall, exhausting everything in the room before just pulling the plug on my first playthrough and trying again. This is not a game for people with short attention spans - clicking too quickly means you might miss a key tidbit of information, and with no quest marker to indicate what to do next, it’s really easy to mess up, especially in the beginning, if you speed through the verbiage. On the other hand, it was just too much to process, with dialogues going on for what felt like an eternity and never truly connecting. On the one hand, that’s fantastic - the city was absolutely lived in, and there was a solid culture (albeit a disgusting one) that thrived, like putrid mold and maggots, in the disgusting slime of its buildings, roads, and people therein. I honestly felt like I was drowning in the filth of the city and its inhabitants. There’s almost no reprieve from how dark it is, and since each grotesque piece of information gets thrown at you left and right, it’s really hard to digest it before the storyline progresses. Naturally, the shock value didn’t end there - simply wandering around, I stumbled into a church of sorts, which I learned housed a cult of baby eaters (you read that right) who apparently get their macabre meals from “corpse hunters” like me. But after listening to a man go into great detail about why he loved buying and then subsequently killing horses, leaving their corpses in the street to bleed out, I was shocked by what I was reading. The Pale City is legitimately fucked up - at first I thought it was just being childishly gross, like hearing a conversation about “horses and anal sex” in passing. Heading above ground and into titular town, Vasek is met with sights that go from grim to downright ghastly. After two weeks of searching, you and your moody companion Katasia finally find the treasure, but there’s no time to celebrate just yet - between making mincemeat of monsters and watching out for backstabbing betrayal, the dungeon is fraught with obstacles that stand in your way between you and your pay. At the beginning of the story, this means exploring cavernous dungeons in search of the third piece of a mysterious golem for an even more mysterious patron. The Pale City follows Vasek, a man whose past can most positively be described as “shady.” A sword for hire, he takes on any job that’ll pay him coin, no matter the danger involved. I’m sympathetic to the fact that this was made by a single developer, and an obviously talented author at that however, story alone isn’t always enough to carry an RPG, and that proves to be true in The Pale City‘s case. The Pale City is both sides of that coin - a very powerful story wrapped in an unpolished experience, it simultaneously fascinates yet fails to completely capture my attention. I’m not one to judge a book by its cover simultaneously, there are some games you gloss over for no reason other than “it doesn’t call to me.”
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