So this is clearly a passion project by someone whose life was changed by Undertale, and as someone for whom that game is also very important I don't want my criticism to be overly harsh.

The spirtework is genuinely good and the concept of "mains" and "inverts" who can combine is a genuinely fun idea that could have been the basis of a great story if it had received the focus it deserves.

In terms of gameplay, the thing about Warioware-style minigames is that good or bad they're all over in a few seconds. A lot of these dragged on too long and the margin for error on several really needed tweaking.

But what really dragged this down was the writing. It's not a crime to be less funny than Toby Fox. the thing is, even the best comedy needs room to breathe and, in the case of a story, needs to be in service of building a character. At least sometimes! You can't fill the majority of the playtime with nonstop twee jokes and then spin that into a big emotional payout in the final act. It doesn't work!

Had very conflicted feelings when finishing this game.

It's very obviously very inspired by Undertale, almost to a fault, and almost takes its messaging word for word, and also takes its hand at themes of isolation and the fear of being forgotten and I can give its props for how it deals with those heavy topics.

My main issue is the overly silly "quirky" lol XD writing and jokes. Like take not so funny Undertale and Omori dialogue and gags and shoot it up to 11 and that's the first 2/3's of this game. This further hurts the game with by having this overly silly nature, the serious topics don't have the same punch to them, or even during serious moments the game will crack a couple unfunny jokes, killing the vibe of the scene

I can give praise to the last third of the game, it has cool music and the atmosphere is great and with the ending I got, left a melancholic feel with me.

Overall this was a miss for me. The game looks good, cant take that away, it oozes with its style and the solo dev deserves praise for their work. But literally everything else is either done poorly or done much better in other games.

El mayor problema que he tenido con Furquest es que parece que más de la mitad del juego es relleno. Tienes que repetir muchos minijuegos (algunos muy muy justitos, que hasta me han llegado a frustrar), explorar mapas grandes en los que apenas hay nada y hablar con NPCs que no importan mucho.

También se toma en serio muy pocas veces, y la mayoría del tiempo está haciendo bromas tontas que alguna puede ser graciosa, pero apenas hay un momento de seriedad en el que los personajes y la trama avancen.

Hablando de la trama, empieza bien pero luego hasta el final del juego no avanza mucho más. Me había parecido muy mal mientras jugaba, pero el final me ha acabado gustando y por eso la salvo un poquito.

Creo que Furquest no es para mí. Además de todo esto, prácticamente no he conectado con ningún personaje, y se me ha hecho difícil meterme en su mundo. Me ha parecido demasiado poco serio y muy repetitivo.

Igualmente dentro de lo que cabe me lo he pasado bien, y viéndolo una vez terminado lo recuerdo como un juego divertido y goofy, que tiene indudablemente muchísimo curro y que no me arrepiento de haber jugado.

I think this game will change someone's life; unfortunately, that person isn't me. I really didn't connect with this game, I eventually just gave up on it.
The writing didn't click with me, it has some really funny bits. It's not very dynamic, the characters don't really affect each other very much. They feel kinda just disconnected and as a result fall flat.
The Warioware gameplay is a cute idea, but it just ends up tedious. Warioware is fun because the microgames keep increasing in speed, just doing them as battle encounters is just not engaging. I started avoiding battles all together.
I wish I fell in-love with it, the creator should be proud of what they made. It's just not for me and I can accept that.

[DEMO REVIEW]

Alright, I'll be the first one to review this game under the pretense that I have never seen this dev before or any of their games, but I have played Undertale.

Look, I completely understand that trying to be the next Undertale is a form of motivation. Making the next big story driven, "wholesome turned creepy", fourth wall breaking, charming RPG is definitely every game dev's (who played Undertale) dream. But what this game has is not that at all.

To start off with the basics, THIS GAME IS A DEMO. The one on steam that you can play right now, over the weekend of the time of writing (18th of June), is an unfinished build that takes you through about the first 30 minutes of the game. It shows a basic pitch for what "combat" will be like as well as a taste for the writing, story, characters, and music.

To start with the positives, the game has good music at times. Some of the minigames have a chiptune style of music that isn't exactly irritating but as I'm writing this I cannot remember what any of them sound like, the overworld music wasn't the greatest either. There are some songs and ditties that weren't as bad although all of the songs suffer their biggest issue of being unmemorable. The gameplay itself is also very basic and bare, "combat" happens when you run into an enemy. These battles are short microgames that barely last 10 seconds and often include a very simple task. This was charming for about the first and second time I ran into each microgame but this quickly became tedium, I ended up ignoring them after I spotted an enemy that I had played the microgame for already. There was no incentive to initiate combat either, because your only reward was more "Life" that I didn't end up losing anyway because the microgames are just a little too easy.

The other positive is I really liked the character "ratboy68", he was particularly written in a very charming way where his dialogue made sense with how he was trying to be cool but not really succeeding. He was also the only character that I found myself enjoying the jokes of. (After rewatching someone play this game, he wasn't written that well either.)

But this is where the issue lies, you may have noticed that I phrased his dialogue as "making sense" in terms with everything else. That's because the dialogue is trying way too hard to be funny and trendy. There were many times where I would read a line of dialogue and groan, roll my eyes, or just sit there in silence because I know I'm supposed to laugh but it just wasn't funny. A lot of the humour relies on knowing and understanding internet humour, not terrible as there are games that rely on this as well (à la Undertale) but the way the game does it is not very timeless.

At the time of playing most of the jokes in the demo were already old and dead memes, things like the petting hand gif (which is in the trailer), and the over censorship of minor "curse" words like "H#ck" and "D#mn" would have been relatively funny when they were coded and written, but now I just don't think it sticks anymore. And this will be an underlying issue for the game's future, if these jokes are dead now and are unfunny, how dead will they be when the game releases March of next year?

So a majority of the jokes land flat due to over reliance on fleeting internet jokes, but surely the sentences that don't rely on those could be funny, right? Well, sometimes, but not all the time. While interacting with the world a text box will appear to describe the object you are standing in front of. This is a staple of RPGs like this one so it's only to be expected, the issue lies in the fact that this text box acts as an additional character.

The text box will often times retort, jest, and even poke fun at whatever is happening as if it was a secondary character in the player's head. Sure, I'm assuming that this is on purpose and there's a big ol' twist that the interact text box is a character and you just meet them later, but it's still not an excuse for how unfunny the dialogue ends up being. Example being: the text box stating that the player is not heroic enough to pull a sword out of a stone, and then immediately takes it back and apologises in fear of hurting the player's feelings. It honestly doesn't add anything and probably could have been more effective with one line of text.

Then we move on to the characters that are actually in the world. The first character you meet is unfortunately the most annoying, a rabbit that immediately comes off as trying too hard to be cute and funny when that clearly isn't the dev's intent. Every word she says comes off as both mocking (somehow) and also desperate, and after finishing the demo the latter was more accurate but there is still an issue with how she's written. I wouldn't have minded so much if there wasn't so much unnecessary text boxes coming from your own playable character. Almost every few text boxes the rabbit is interrupted by the player character so they can impart their beautiful wisdom of the lustrous phrase: "...", and every single time it did not get any funnier. It created dead air when there wasn't any, it felt like the protagonist was waiting for a laugh track to end. Using an example from a game this is taking inspiration from, Undertale's protagonist doesn't say a single line of dialogue throughout the whole game, they do not even have a talk sprite. Yet, the player can assume for themselves that the protagonist is not talking or responding due to the fact that they do not have any textboxes, I do not need to be told that my character isn't talking.

The start of this game acts as a "tutorial" that isn't a tutorial at all because it teaches you nothing new (despite having a line of dialogue stating "Well at least you learnt something") and is generally just a frame for the game to throw some more bad jokes at you. The other reason this tutorial doesn't teach you anything is because you know the controls already, because the game's intro actually did a good job at teaching you everything you needed to know: move, interact, and pause. So at the end of the day you have an intro after the intro that just wastes a little bit more time.

Lastly, without saying too much, I completely guessed pretty much every plot twist the game could've had for me. As soon as I learnt the premise I had assumed the identity of the "big bad", and was proven right by the end of the demo (and the trailers).

In conclusion, this game definitely has the Undertale inspiration on it's sleeve; the character designs are a little on the nose, the writing is trying just a little too hard to be funny (and there was in fact an Undertale reference in the dialogue), and it's failing to execute the same charm Undertale had because of the way it's presenting itself as an Undertale successor. And while I listed all of these negatives and I've said the word "Undertale" about 20 times now, I don't think this game is going to be completely dead. It will have its audience and there will be people who will find this funny, entertaining, and charming, but if it wants to be enjoyed by a broader audience it would have to have been toned down just a little. But at this point it is looking a little too late for that, and I don't think the dev is forcing themselves to write like this. That and the fact that this is only a demo, maybe my broad assumptions are not correct at all and the dev is shooting lasers at me.

If this is just the dev making a game that they enjoy that's perfectly fine, it just wasn't for me and I wanted to throw my two cents in as an Undertale enjoyer.