So on a complete impulse today I ended up buying this. Man, is it super cool. Its sort of a Princess Maker + Roguelike Text Adventure?

The goal is simple. You're a 14 yr old girl who's mother has been killed and you are the rightful heir to the throne however to actually become queen you need to actually live until your coronation. Despite all the cutesy anime aesthetic your character can die by being run through with a sword, drowned, poisoned, ect...

Each week your given the ability to take "classes" which level up specific skills of which there are dozens all of these skills come into play in the form of Dungeons and Dragon's style skill checks when events happen during progression of the story. An assassin shoots an arrow at you and kills you? You should have leveled up your reflex skills. On top of this you have to factor in your mood of which can be changed by a number of events. Your mood indicates what skill's will have bonus gains and penalties to learning.

So, having your dominant emotion being "afraid" might not be bad thing because then you can upgrade your medical abilities faster where as you will take a penalty to your military abilities until your primary mood shifts. Stacking all of this on top of each other despite being nothing but simple menu clicks leads to some interesting decision making.

I ended up being extremely dodgy and not trusting pretty much anyone or leaving the castle. My plan ended up eventually backfiring when the surrounding regents decided I was a weak ruler and banned together. After refusing their compromise of marrying a provided suitor and remaining a figurehead while relinquishing control my castle was stormed and i was then locked in a dungeon. Yikes. This instantly lead me to think of various scenarios I could have changed with different choices. What if I had accepted one of the previous suitors as my husband? What if I had had the appropriate skill checks for foreign affairs to politically battle my aggressors? I'm pretty intrigued at this point to go back and play this through a few more times to see if I can't reach the coronation.

This game also straight up has a death checklist in the main menu if that infers anything of how brutal some of the impending fates of poor Elodie can be.

Its on sale for $8.99 right now. I managed to get .60 knocked off after selling some trading cards. Oh, and here is a trailer. I dunno, I thought id bring this to attention because I found this to be a really interesting indie game and will most assuredly try it a few more times.

I don't think it's worth nine bucks, but it's definitely an interesting time waster. I just wish there was more to the game.

Princess Maker inspired? Does that mean I can create a prostitute queen?

@ravenlight: Yeah, I don't blame people if they wait until its like $5 but I kept starting at it in the store so I just ended up saying fuck it.

@demoskinos: I really like the concept of Crusader Kings Lite this game seems to try for. I'd love for the team to make a sequel with a bigger scope.

With the power of your imagination, anything is possible! And you probably won't be arrested for it! Probably.

confer not infer.

Looks interesting, how much actual game is there? Are you just beating it in an hour and replaying it for different endings?

Yeah, the turnaround for a single playthrough seems to be in the range of an hour or so less if you fail more spectacularly early on. Like games like spelunky (as weird as it is to compare it to that) its meant to keep taking cracks at it with different approaches.

No lie one of my internal monologues during purchasing this was that someone needs to give VGK a copy of this stat.

Do it.

This game is awesome. I made a brilliant military tactician and espionage expert, who instigated a civil war with unfriendly nobles and then put them down... who then ate poisoned chocolates because I hadn't bothered to teach her court manners, trade knowledge or decoration. That's awesome.

I've played the game probably 6 times and still haven't been able to reach my coronation. Game is hard, duder!

@brodehouse: Yep, its got some interesting hooks into it. Its almost like Dark Souls in the way that no matter how prepared you THINK you are for a situation the game sort of just laughs at you and gives you the finger.

Just bought this game and it very neat indeed. Just finished my first playthrough.. Died during a Journey to a ball...

Thought I did pretty well and focused mostly on magic but man there are som many things you have to consider through the whole game. Replay ability seems very very high.

Urk, I was wondering what this game is when it popped up on the Steam sale. I wish I had read this thread earlier.

Well, I'll wait to see if it shows up again then maybe just buy it full-priced anyways.

My only problem with the game is the actual gameplay itself.

On your first playthrough, planning out classes and trying to balance Elodie's mood seem like super interesting mechanics and if you're into the aesthetic of the game and the stuff you saw in, like, the Steam trailer and screenshots, you'll be thinking it's like the greatest game ever. The writing is great, the way taking classes shows you a brief overview of the progressively more advanced topics you're learning in a given subject is neat, and man, like everything about the presentation of the game itself is fantastic.

You notice as you play along that you're failing like every single skill check. You might even be like "aw man, I missed this Poisons check? Better bone up on Poisons" — only to find that you'll like never need Poisons again for the rest of the game. (Disclaimer: I have yet to complete a successful runthrough of the game, but have spent over three hours of time in the game according to Steam.) Then you'll die from something out of nowhere that you could've never seen coming and prepared for on your first time through.

"Okay," you think, "I'll give it another shot. This is clearly just a mechanics'd up visual novel, anyways, so I guess I should've expected hell of Bad Ends." On your subsequent playthroughs, you'll attempt to adjust your class schedules accordingly such as to allow you to pass checks for events that you now know are coming up from your previous playthroughs. Then, when you train for a key class, you'll get little-to-no skill points from it because you weren't watching your mood. Or worse yet, you were watching your mood and thought to make your princess as happy as possible because she starts the game all sad and depressed over the death of her mother, but as it turns out some class you wanted to take does barely anything or nothing at all for you because of the mood you're in. You search around the UI and try and find some sort of reasoning for which classes are affected by which moods — and it turns out that there is no such thing (although they [mostly] follow some sort of logic). Instead, you must either figure out which classes are affected by which moods on your own and write them down in a grid on a piece of paper... or just check the top-rated Steam guide for the game.

Basically, in the end, the game becomes more of an exercise in replaying the game over and over and learning from your failures, taking notes on what worked and what didn't, in order to come up with a plan to make a successful run through the game. If this sounds appealing to you, that's fine; I was hoping for a much more role-playing-oriented experience out of the game, myself. Again, I understand that it's a relatively short game once you have the path for "the right run" down, and the length of the experience comes from the act of replaying it over and over again, and also it's just a more mechanically-dense visual novel, when it comes down to it. These things are all fine, but it's just not quite what I hoped for given the promise of the game from the outset and the great writing the game has and such.

In summary, I feel like the game has a great setup, great art, great writing, average sound and music, and great mechanical premise... but just kind of crappy actual mechanics in the end. It's still worth playing if the theme and setting and stuff interests you, and even more so if you're willing to put up with the visual novel tropes that make several, several playthroughs a must if you want to see a non-death ending... but at the end of the day, I personally wound up finding the core gameplay systems to be frustrating and poorly thought-out.

So is this just Magical Diary but with royalty instead of Harry Potter?

I actually "beat" the game in my second playthrough with maxing out everyythng magic related. I had no clue about history or politics. I could dance and had a huge presence but in the End I was victorious by wining a magical one on one combat. XD

But now I wonder what happens if you will not go with magic at all. What if you become a legendary sword fighter or a tomboy who likes to climb on trees and play in the mud XD

@darji: I was determined to beat it without magic and after my 5th unsuccessful playthrough, I decided to plan the whole thing out using the wiki. Basically my Elodie was a super military/naval genius and the magic king never made it past the ocean. She was also a total gossip and more than a little paranoid and surrounded by bodyguards. That's how you win without magic but I'm not sure how anyone could do it without a guide to meet the stat requirements to survive some events unless they were some sort of savant.

I'm thinking about getting it and that terrifies me.

Been playing this game for the past couple days, it is pretty great.

@takua108: I agree. Calling it a mechanics'd up visual novel is apt.The game seems to be incredibly linear in its storytelling. Princess Maker this is not.

Bought this as well on a recommendation. Played about 30 minutes of it, still have no idea what i'm doing haha. I've never played this type of game before.

My wife is super interested in this, but I never saw it go on sale with a discount higher than 10% off. :(

I liked this game the first 3-4 times, but it's starting to get annoying now, it would be a lot better if the story branched more than it does, but it seems most of the choices you make have very little consequence and it's just a matter of replaying over and over making the right skill choices in order to avoid a death check that is approaching. If there was some randomness to the game, it would be a lot more interesting.

One good thing about this game, you get a lot of trading cards from it and they are selling for a lot right now, I think after selling my cards I ended up only paying $3 for the game, not bad.