Luncaid is a clear as day passion project, a game that wears its heart on it's sleeve; a game full of great ideas that means well, but ultimately isn't the strongest in it's execution of them. While the game excels in the presentation department, captivating you with its rich atmosphere, immersing you with the fantastic sound design and soundtrack, nailing the aesthetic and vibes of older games like King's Field/Shadow Tower; everything else was kinda mixed.
While the environments are beautiful and exploration is wonderful, the nature of finding secrets stopped me from fully appreciating the level design or the locales. With a lot of obtuse secrets hidden behind secret walls, which are very inconsistent in how they look with some normal looking walls being secret walls while ones with misaligned textures are normal walls, I was just going from room to room hugging walls and mashing 'E' as my first thought, rinse and repeat. Getting 100% without a guide is really tedious too, if you want all weapons/spells you'll spend an awful lot of time going back and forth between user made maps.
The game's balance just completely shits the bed as early as 2-3 hours in depending on your class and what you allocate your points into. Starting as Shinobi, I was already faster than everything in the first two areas and there were generally no threats. Put some points into speed, and in no time you're comfortably faster than the majority of the mobs in the game and combat poses no threat to you anymore. Likewise, I put some points into dex to increase my jump height for exploration, and decided to try ranged weapons since they also scale with dex; only to find out they're absolutely broken alongside magic, making you an untouchable killing machine and giving you no reason to even bother with melee weapons unless you really want to. The tension and horror elements that had me spooked out in the first 2 hours vanished with the realization I could zoom past anything and use my magic and ranged weapons to nuke them with ease. The gameplay just became really dull with the broken balance and stat allocation, realizing enemies were stuck in KF with their movement speed and animations while I was running laps around them enacting knockoff Skyrim dungeon gameplay.
It's still a fantastic homage and love letter to the genre of older dungeon crawlers and worth trying out definitely; just personally, I wish it wasn't so easy to break which resulted in a dull gameplay experience and that the secret hunting wasn't so tedious towards the end.
While the environments are beautiful and exploration is wonderful, the nature of finding secrets stopped me from fully appreciating the level design or the locales. With a lot of obtuse secrets hidden behind secret walls, which are very inconsistent in how they look with some normal looking walls being secret walls while ones with misaligned textures are normal walls, I was just going from room to room hugging walls and mashing 'E' as my first thought, rinse and repeat. Getting 100% without a guide is really tedious too, if you want all weapons/spells you'll spend an awful lot of time going back and forth between user made maps.
The game's balance just completely shits the bed as early as 2-3 hours in depending on your class and what you allocate your points into. Starting as Shinobi, I was already faster than everything in the first two areas and there were generally no threats. Put some points into speed, and in no time you're comfortably faster than the majority of the mobs in the game and combat poses no threat to you anymore. Likewise, I put some points into dex to increase my jump height for exploration, and decided to try ranged weapons since they also scale with dex; only to find out they're absolutely broken alongside magic, making you an untouchable killing machine and giving you no reason to even bother with melee weapons unless you really want to. The tension and horror elements that had me spooked out in the first 2 hours vanished with the realization I could zoom past anything and use my magic and ranged weapons to nuke them with ease. The gameplay just became really dull with the broken balance and stat allocation, realizing enemies were stuck in KF with their movement speed and animations while I was running laps around them enacting knockoff Skyrim dungeon gameplay.
It's still a fantastic homage and love letter to the genre of older dungeon crawlers and worth trying out definitely; just personally, I wish it wasn't so easy to break which resulted in a dull gameplay experience and that the secret hunting wasn't so tedious towards the end.