It's clear from the jump that this game is heavily inspired by Space Funeral-- the pumpkin head houses are the most blatant reference. The entire reason I downloaded this game was because after seeing those, I knew this was going to be some cheap knock off (I say that as a positive). However, I feel like there were a handful of things that it got wrong, both as a spiritual successor to SF and as its own game. And I want to be able to judge this game based both on how it exists on its own and how it compares to its spiritual predecessor.

Right off the bat, I noticed a great amount of tonal dissonance between the battles and the overworld, particularly in the music and sound effects. Most of the overworld music is incredibly somber and quiet, yet regardless of what area you're in (except for one late game location) the battle music is the same incredibly spunky tune. The catch is that neither the battle tracks nor any of the overworld tracks are bad or poorly composed, they just sit at opposition to each other. The battle initiate sound is also incredibly loud and obnoxious, which further rips me out of the moods that the overworld tracks set me in. Like I said, incredibly tonally dissonant. Space Funeral managed to get away with bordering somber tracks and it's funky battle theme both with a lack of an encounter jingle, but also because it completely did away with random encounters, so you know when it's coming, and where to go if you don't want to hear it. And again, the overworld tracks are incredibly good and are great at setting tone, but it was so good that I'd get mad when I'd encounter an enemy because of how off it was.

Relatedly, I feel like the maps are needlessly large. Large maps aren't inherently bad, but the problem here is that the maps don't have much to show. The game goes for the same 'shitty hand drawn in one take' vibes that SF has, and I feel like it does it pretty well, especially in conjunction with the last area of the game. However, the maps tend to be very large and empty, with little variety in decoration, tiles, or NPCs, so getting around them isn't very fun, especially when you combine it with the obnoxious tone destroying random encounter battles.

Next, I want to talk about the characters. What made Space Funeral shine to me was that even though the main characters were ridiculous, they had moments of genuine conversation and development. There were cutscenes where the characters talked to each other. In fact, that's something you'd find in any game, especially party-base RPGs. However, there's just... no cutscenes here. Like, yes, there's introductory cutscenes, and an opening and ending cutscene, but for long stretches of the game, you go without hearing anything from any of your party members. No cutscenes when you reach a new town, no cutscenes when you defeat a boss, nothing. Which is sad! Because when you meet each member, you get a little taste of their personality, but after they join, you pretty much never see it again, because these characters don't talk to each other at all during their journey. It's especially disappointing because they get introduced at a near perfect pace. There was never a moment where I thought 'I hope we get our new guy soon' or 'we're getting another new party member? but we just got one!'

The combat has me in a weird spot. On one hand, it's standard RPG Maker fare, and it has pretty smooth scaling. I never felt like I had to grind, and by the time I got sick of battling random encounters, I was leveled up enough that I didn't really need to, which felt awesome. The combat also felt balanced in the sense that you couldn't just spam enter and win, you had to keep an eye on your health. Although, the same couldn't be said for your MP, as it starts so high and spells cost so little that I almost never needed to recover it. However, there's no type chart of any kind, and you unlock most of your good moves pretty early, so you end up using the same one or two moves every turn for every single battle. Furthermore, there's a few status-based skills and spells introduced way too late in the game that I never used once because I just didn't need to.

I also feel like there's a lot of bugs and oversights in the design. There were a few times where I opened a chest and it said I got an item and then that item didn't appear in my inventory. There were also a lot of item 'upgrades' that were expensive in the shop but then didn't actually raise (or lower?) your stats, so they were completely pointless.

I will say though, there were a lot of creative decisions I really liked in terms of character designs, and that final area of the game still caught me off guard and held me in a trance. Definitely not one of my absolute favorite quirky indie RPGs, but still a very good one worth at least one playthrough if you have nothing else going on.