This time, is the holy creative name Our Church and Halloween: Story One.
A soldier of God on a Holy Mission.
Wait a second. No Bible scriptures?, no "Halloween is Evil"? It's kinda odd that a Christian-themed game lack the inclusion of Bible references or talk about the debate about Halloween. Just the title, and the plot element of the game as a boy sent by the pastor's son on a mission of resurrection.
In the present day, Breakthrough Gaming and ProjectSummerIce unleashed their forces to release trash games.
Unlike their previous Arcade series of games, the Our Church and Halloween series are RPGs. An interesting turn from all their previous works, but doing an RPG is more complex than a shmup or a platforming game, as it involves key elements, exploration, item collecting, deep lore and sometimes turn based encounters and leveling up. From The Legend of Zelda, Faxanadu and Terranigma to Xenosaga, Hyperdimension Neptunia and CrossCode. With Breakthrough Gaming teaming up with ProjectSummerIce, you've might expect a boost in the product quality and have a more playable videogame adventure. Unfortunately, that's not the case with Our Church and Halloween: Story One. As an RPG, you have to explore the forest and find the entrance to a cave, and then explore it.
Well, they were "Ghostbusted".
As you enter the cave, you'll notice there's NOTHING there to find. No enemies, no treasures, no items, no nothing!, until you reach the end where you'll find your friends captured by ghosts and then it's time to leave the cave and get some help, but suddenly, you and your girlfriend are captured. Tough luck, right?
To Be Continued? Oh, my Lord...
You get captured and the game ends. That's it!?, This 2-3 minute maze exploration that ends on a cliffhanger inviting you to play Story 2? I mean, even the Tech Demo of CrossCode was more fun, complete and challenging than this, and that was only a demo. Here we are talking about a "complete" game and I put it in quotes since it feels like a lame demo. I mean, even for a multi-part story there's always place to add more to the story and make a larger chapter and a more entertaining game.
SEE YOU NEXT MISSION (or should be "Next Videogame Nightmare"?)
Unfortunately, you're not done with the game. In the title screen you'll have to press Triangle and then you'll start the Challenge Mode. While at first it looks like the same game, the game will show you how cruel it could be.
Player trolling at its worst.
In the cave part, you'll suddenly fall through a hole. It might look like you screwed up and fell on it, but the problem with this is that the hole is invisible until you fall on it as if the game is trolling you. It's like your mind goes "LEA! HOW?! WHY?!" as soon as the game pelts the entire god damned cave with invisible holes at the point of making the cave segment unplayable like those bad random-tiled Contra hacks like Super Contra 2 where there's water areas where Bill Rizer and Lance Bean can swim and others where they'll get nothing but a ticket for a one-way-trip to meet God. Even for a Bible game, there's a thin line between difficult and impossible, and when the game pulls a stupid trick like this implying memorization is just ridiculous. ¿Why not tossing you a large number of enemies to fight with?. I mean, even the Bible and religious-themed content like Christian music talks about combat and fighting, for instance a verse of Jeremiah 51:20 says "You are My war-club, My weapon of war; And with you I shatter nations, And with you I destroy kingdoms." Stryper's song "Soldiers Under Command" says "We hold His two-edged sword within our hands."
The videogame stupidity doesn't stop there. It also affects the trophy hunt as it wants you to play the game as many times as possible. To begin with, you have to clear both modes in a fast time within the time limit, but oops, there's no Time Limit within the game so you won't notice you didn't finished it in time, While finishing the normal game fast is possible by skipping all the blah-blah-blah by tapping the X button and running holding X and move the character, there's the invisible hole memorization in Challenge Mode. Also, if you can complete the cave part without falling and within the "Time Limit" you'll get your trophies. It's like they had an idea of challenge but they didn't executed it right.
Graphically, it breaks with the zero-effort look of the Breakthrough Gaming Arcade series and aims for a more Earthbound-like spritework and scenery, but keeping the monochrome theme as if it was a Gameboy game. The character sprites look more like an approach to Nintendo-Game Freak's works like Pokemon and that's the only positive aspect of the graphics.
As for the music, there's more "instruments" and the soundtrack tries to make some suspense on the title screen and we have a upbeat-ish overworld theme that feels like an obscure NES game as if it came from American Video Entertainment or Sachen, which is five steps above their previous trash games.
Despite having good ideas and the fact that it vastly improves over the abominations of the Arcade series, Our Church and Halloween: Story One is more like a broken demo than a full commercial indie game since there is not too much for an RPG to consider it part of the genre unless you want to think of it as a textbook example of how not to make an RPG.
Is this game a must play?
*No "Crying Lea" appears.*
Something's wrong...
People, I've got some bad news. The "Lea Scale" broke today. So I'll let Shizuka Sakai answer this.
Does this game is a "Must buy" or a "Must Play"?
That's Ms. Sakai's answer for you.