Getting difficulty right is one of the hardest things to do. According to the original developers of the dungeon crawler-veteran Wizardry, the team spent a lot of time on getting it quite right with a long phase of testing the combat experience, which is why the game still stands today as a testament of balance (not the modern fake balance that makes each choice equally valid, and thus equally worthless, but actual gameplay balance that keeps battles tense even with well-developed characters until you reach the end-game).
Mary Skelter: Nightmares (2016 on PSVita, 2018 on PC) is one of the Japanese dungeon crawler variants that is solely in the tradition of Wizardry (or it Japanese successors), even if it has its share of unique elements. Combat is turn-based like most Wizardry, but moving around in the dungeons means traversing and avoiding real-time traps. It feels a bit like busy-work, once you know how to avoid the traps, there’s not much to them, but besides the traps the game also offers lots of gated content that similar to a metroidvania-type of game can only be unlocked by getting one of the characters with a unique ability to get past that obstacle.
Bombs to open cracked walls, various ways to traverse pits, speed-move to walk past cracked tiles and so on. Then there are sliding ground tiles that make these parts of the dungeon its own kind of puzzle, and some puzzle where you have to push blocks as a relay station for flaming arrows. I was less fond of those, as again, once you understand the principle it becomes busy-work and not the good kind.
Still, the game tried to innovate in a lot of ways. Character-wise, you only have female chars as active fighters (one passive male char as a support character), two rows (less damage but also less harm on the second row), lots and lots of skills btw. spells to use an upgrade, job-switching, a mechanic to roll back your level to create even stronger chars (you level down but keep certain upgrades, which makes your characters stronger in the long run), a mechanic that makes your character go berserk from time to time, but can be used to get other neat effects, item upgrades.
There are boss-characters that hunt you down in real time in each level, where you can’t kill them and the map is disabled. There are two boss fights where you have to kill them by traversing multiple levels and attack them on each of them.
The problem with a lot of those innovations is that they were exiting in the beginning, but after some time, just became annoying. And while the game throws a lot of concepts and mechanics at you, very few of them feel like they substantially alter gameplay. The early game was definitely the best in terms of tense battles and a real threat to you. After that, the only way you suffered defeat was when you didn’t pay attention, but otherwise, the game became a cake-walk and no enemy really posed a threat.
At the end you have so much money you can carry around an almost infinite amount of health and spell point potions, you can save everywhere and teleport back to base at any point with no cost to it.
All this makes the game trivial easy later on. Difficulty is hard to balance, but it didn’t really feel like they were even trying. And yet, I still enjoyed my time with the game until the end (and the massive post-endgame dungeon). There just something about the basic gameplay that is incredibly addictive. Explore one more dungeon, collect one more member to your troupe, follow the inane discussions between them presented in visual novel style (the most annoying part of the game, there’s lots and lots of pointless talk between the cast that doesn’t add up to anything worthwhile).
And the game looks really good as well, with each dungeon having its own wall-sets, actually multiple different graphics per set and often very different designs for them, and very neat enemy visuals. The cast is pedo-bait anime characters of the worst kind, but the rest of the game doesn’t look like anime much and still offers a cohesive, visual vision.
So, overall, good looking, interesting dungeon crawler that is slightly too easy, but has lots of content (that is quite addictive) that makes it fun to go through at least once.
The Entropy Pump 