Usurper Ghoul
May. 13th, 2024 03:02 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rynlingUsurper Ghoul
https://evandahm.itch.io/usurper-ghoul
Usurper Ghoul is a nonviolent Game Boy adventure game that aims to achieve the “ruined kingdom” vibe of Dark Souls. I tend to think that Dark Souls is marred by needless difficulty; and, in the same way, some of the gameplay elements of Usurper Ghoul are needlessly annoying. The nonlinear exploration-based gameplay of Usurper Ghoul is on brand, but it’s not for everyone. Like Dark Souls, Usurper Ghoul becomes more interesting the more you engage with it, but the beginning is rough.
You play as a horned, skull-headed demon who begins in the hills overlooking a small village, which in turn overlooks a valley of tombs. In true Dark Souls fashion, no one tells you where to go or what you need to do, and it’s possible to spend a lot of time walking around without getting anywhere. There are a few people scattered about in the wilderness, but they’re not particularly helpful.
Your job is to collect three items from three categories. Flowers allow you to interact with people differently, sticks allow you to interact with the environment, and rocks allow you to access more knowledge about the world. One stick allows you to unlock doors, for example, while another stick allows you to read written text. The catch is that you can only hold one of each type of item at a time.
Switching out items fits the larger theme of the game, which is that something must be sacrificed in order for something to be gained. Unfortunately, switching out items involves a lot of needless backtracking. The world isn’t that big, and the game isn’t overly complicated, but everything is big and complicated enough for the backtracking to be annoying. There are no puzzles involved; it’s just donkey work.
One might say that Dark Souls involves needless complications and barriers to progress, but one of the primary attractions of Dark Souls is that it’s gorgeous to look at. You might be continually frustrated over the course of your journey through Lordran, but you tolerate the setbacks because everything is so beautiful and atmospheric. The environment design of Usurper Ghoul is unique and interesting, to be sure, but we’re still talking about Game Boy graphics. There’s no background music, and the sound design is limited to jarring beeps at odd moments, such as when you read something. In other words, it’s not necessarily a pleasure to trek back and forth across the map to switch out one tool for another.
The overall story of the game is intriguing, but the writing is hit or miss. Most NPCs say decontextualized NPC banalities, and the lore you read in books and on monuments feels like a parody of Dark Souls. Although this is never explained, your goal is to enter a tower; and, to do so, you have to collect enough lore to figure out the right order to light torches in front of the tombs in the valley. You need different sticks to unlock gates, to read, and to light torches, so this is a tedious process even if you (like me) lose patience with the game’s obtuse writing and resort to a walkthrough to figure out the order.
The next paragraph contains mild gameplay spoilers, but it’s also the coolest part of the game.
For your own nefarious purposes, you can offer NPCs flowers. Comely flowers make people like you, malodorous flowers make people dislike you, and horrid flowers will kill anyone who touches them (except you). In one of the game’s endings, you can climb the tower and simply leave. If you want to play the second half of the game, however, your goal becomes to kill everyone. Each NPC you kill with flowers leaves a book in the tower whose text emphasizes the theme of sacrifice. For me, this was when the writing and story became worth the trouble of navigating the world.
This is one of the many things I appreciate about Ender Lilies, by the way. About 3/5 of the way through Ender Lilies, you can just leave, and this is positioned as a good and fair ending that’s rewarded with a lovely animation and a very touching scene. If you’re going to play the rest of the game, however, there is going to be suffering. I really love this ludonarrative device, and it’s cool to see it used in Usurper Ghoul as well.
Everything about Usurper Ghoul is brilliant on paper, but I feel that the success of the execution is limited by the Game Boy technology. In a perfect world, I’d like to be able to give the developer a nice chunk of cash to hire some collaborators and develop these ideas into a 16-bit format. Usurper Ghoul is a fascinating proof of concept; and, with a bit of polish, I could easily imagine it becoming a cult classic.
For me, the payoff of the endgame of Usurper Ghoul was worth the small frustrations of the gameplay and the occasional Dark Fantasy Generator™ writing, but your mileage may vary. It’s also impossible to say how long this game takes to play. I used (this walkthrough) to smooth over some of the rougher bits, but I still spent about two hours with the game. There’s a lot to explore and experiment with in this world, and it’s definitely possible to spend more time discovering its secrets.
https://evandahm.itch.io/usurper-ghoul
Usurper Ghoul is a nonviolent Game Boy adventure game that aims to achieve the “ruined kingdom” vibe of Dark Souls. I tend to think that Dark Souls is marred by needless difficulty; and, in the same way, some of the gameplay elements of Usurper Ghoul are needlessly annoying. The nonlinear exploration-based gameplay of Usurper Ghoul is on brand, but it’s not for everyone. Like Dark Souls, Usurper Ghoul becomes more interesting the more you engage with it, but the beginning is rough.
You play as a horned, skull-headed demon who begins in the hills overlooking a small village, which in turn overlooks a valley of tombs. In true Dark Souls fashion, no one tells you where to go or what you need to do, and it’s possible to spend a lot of time walking around without getting anywhere. There are a few people scattered about in the wilderness, but they’re not particularly helpful.
Your job is to collect three items from three categories. Flowers allow you to interact with people differently, sticks allow you to interact with the environment, and rocks allow you to access more knowledge about the world. One stick allows you to unlock doors, for example, while another stick allows you to read written text. The catch is that you can only hold one of each type of item at a time.
Switching out items fits the larger theme of the game, which is that something must be sacrificed in order for something to be gained. Unfortunately, switching out items involves a lot of needless backtracking. The world isn’t that big, and the game isn’t overly complicated, but everything is big and complicated enough for the backtracking to be annoying. There are no puzzles involved; it’s just donkey work.
One might say that Dark Souls involves needless complications and barriers to progress, but one of the primary attractions of Dark Souls is that it’s gorgeous to look at. You might be continually frustrated over the course of your journey through Lordran, but you tolerate the setbacks because everything is so beautiful and atmospheric. The environment design of Usurper Ghoul is unique and interesting, to be sure, but we’re still talking about Game Boy graphics. There’s no background music, and the sound design is limited to jarring beeps at odd moments, such as when you read something. In other words, it’s not necessarily a pleasure to trek back and forth across the map to switch out one tool for another.
The overall story of the game is intriguing, but the writing is hit or miss. Most NPCs say decontextualized NPC banalities, and the lore you read in books and on monuments feels like a parody of Dark Souls. Although this is never explained, your goal is to enter a tower; and, to do so, you have to collect enough lore to figure out the right order to light torches in front of the tombs in the valley. You need different sticks to unlock gates, to read, and to light torches, so this is a tedious process even if you (like me) lose patience with the game’s obtuse writing and resort to a walkthrough to figure out the order.
The next paragraph contains mild gameplay spoilers, but it’s also the coolest part of the game.
For your own nefarious purposes, you can offer NPCs flowers. Comely flowers make people like you, malodorous flowers make people dislike you, and horrid flowers will kill anyone who touches them (except you). In one of the game’s endings, you can climb the tower and simply leave. If you want to play the second half of the game, however, your goal becomes to kill everyone. Each NPC you kill with flowers leaves a book in the tower whose text emphasizes the theme of sacrifice. For me, this was when the writing and story became worth the trouble of navigating the world.
This is one of the many things I appreciate about Ender Lilies, by the way. About 3/5 of the way through Ender Lilies, you can just leave, and this is positioned as a good and fair ending that’s rewarded with a lovely animation and a very touching scene. If you’re going to play the rest of the game, however, there is going to be suffering. I really love this ludonarrative device, and it’s cool to see it used in Usurper Ghoul as well.
Everything about Usurper Ghoul is brilliant on paper, but I feel that the success of the execution is limited by the Game Boy technology. In a perfect world, I’d like to be able to give the developer a nice chunk of cash to hire some collaborators and develop these ideas into a 16-bit format. Usurper Ghoul is a fascinating proof of concept; and, with a bit of polish, I could easily imagine it becoming a cult classic.
For me, the payoff of the endgame of Usurper Ghoul was worth the small frustrations of the gameplay and the occasional Dark Fantasy Generator™ writing, but your mileage may vary. It’s also impossible to say how long this game takes to play. I used (this walkthrough) to smooth over some of the rougher bits, but I still spent about two hours with the game. There’s a lot to explore and experiment with in this world, and it’s definitely possible to spend more time discovering its secrets.
