The Use of Life

Story heavy game with cute art style and easily customizable combat. There are several branches in the story so it's also replayable. This game is doing a lot with little. Very worth playing.

A unique game combining a CYOA adventure book with a turn-based battle system where you use action commands to dodge enemy attacks. There's a lot of ability to go for different builds (two different physical classes and two different magical classes, which can be combined into four different advanced classes). As of writing one of the two major story branches is complete, so you're already able to get half of the endings of the game and even if it were to not get updated again it's worth the money.

Picked it up for the QTE gimmick a while ago, had some fun for a few hours, got frustrated that I couldn't grind things out to solve the problem of my get good not seeming to kick in.
Came back to it recently and took a more methodical approach to things, picked and chose my fights, got clever with item and ability combos, and switched to blocking attacks that were too quick for me to react too. Had a significantly better time, sunk 14 hours over 2 days and got both endings. Was a genuine indie delight. This game made me popping off from carefully considered and concisely executed victories and made me tear up in both endings.
The core system proves itself out past its gimmick and I hope the dev(s) don't over commit to much more past the new endings coming out any month now. With such a talent for weaving together disparate systems and narrative threads, short and tight experiences like this one without too much feature bloat will make for fantastic follow up projects.

Nice little RPG. Combat can feel tiresome if you don't like QTEs (quick time events) but with this embedded into the combat, it feels sort of like an action game blended with a strategy game and it feels fresh in the realm of turn-based RPGs. The story isn't groundbreaking but it's still effective and you still want to see where the characters end up toward the end. It also helps that the game isn't particularly long, you can get ONE ending of the game in around 4ish hours and subsequent endings can be gotten by speeding through the unrepeated dialog.

BREAKDOWN:

Visuals (C+)- Animations are minimal so it feels like a throwback to some old JRPGs. You're mostly going to see the protaganist's spritework animations along with visual FX like fire balls or flashy slashing strikes but the enemies are portraits (sometimes several indicating low health or something). The rest is like a Visual Novel presentation where static portraits with changing expressions exchange dialog and move through the story. Nothing fancy here but you can tell the dev put heart into the game with limited art assets. This could be a negative or positive depending on how you like your indie games. One criticism though is sometimes the art styles clash, for example Misha's portrait art doesn't quite match the style of the likes of Goshe's or the merchant's...same thing with the background art looking starkly different from the map art.

Music (B+)- Since there's no voiced dialog and only some sound FX to go with the written dialog or combat, I'll just focus on the music. My expectations were low considering this was an indie title, but some of the tunes are bangers. Had to add a few of these songs to my fav list on youtube, including the final boss music. The variety is alright with a couple of emotional pieces and the battle music is quite pleasant with the fast variation during enemy RAGE phases not being a mere sped-up remake but a completely different rendition of the same song, giving a sense of urgency. Overall, not bad...I enjoyed the music quite a bit.

Story Progression (B)- No story spoilers. The game has multiple endings and as you progress through the story, you will often come across various choices. These choices sometimes are influenced by the game's curated 'morality' system divided by 'Life' and 'Power'. The choices do feel like they matter. If you choose options that increase and/or decrease one, you may be locked out of certain choices later throughout the game. It's possible to balance life and power to give yourself more options to choose from but you'll have to make a choice by the end. And these choices aren't merely dialog either. They can be the difference of choosing to fight a bunch of enemies or having the option to avoid extra encounters. And of course, which side you choose will also affect the endings you get. So far, only 1 of I think 2 of the main story paths is complete, that 1 path having 2 of the endings. Might be aggravating to some, but to get a different ending, you have to start the game over...no loading up a past save unless you do some savefile shenanigans.

RPG System (B)- This is more-or-less the system of character progression and expression. The game has stats (Strength, Vitality, Intelligence, Speed and Technique) and when you get the points to allocate to these stats, they have effects on how your character can be expressed during the story/dialog part of the game using a DnD dice-roll mechanism. You'll encounter various options that will require rolls of your stats with a corresponding proficiency indicator. You might need to move a heavy boulder so it will roll off your strength or you may need to climb a wall which will roll off your vitality or check your knowledge on a certain monster by rolling off your intelligence. There will usually be multiple options though which may lock you out of different results. Lots of little interactions here and there that make you want to try and replay to find out other outcomes.

Combat (A)- This is an RPG with only 1 party member. The main character is the dps, the tank and the healer and you have to strategically pick your moves to obtain victory. Similar to turn-based games, you select the moves you want to use on the opponent and then engage. However, there is a curve-ball: you and the enemy pick your moves in sets of 3. After selecting your 3 moves, the combat plays out with you and the enemy alternating your selected attacks. After your selected move goes off, your foe's move will go off while you use QTE button inputs to dodge and defend against them in 'real-time' (i.e. enemy's attacks must each be blocked/dodged even if said attack is multiple hits...so a 4-hit attack you will have to press the corresponding button for each of the 4 hits as they come). If you're good at QTEs, then you may find a lot of the enemies easy or you can play more recklessly. For those not good at QTEs, you will have to strategize more. While Strength and Intelligence increases certain types of attack, you can use Vitality to lower incoming damage and increase HP to give you more room for error...then there's Speed which will slow down the QTE for all incoming attacks the higher this stat is...then there's Technique....when you're selecting your moves, you will also see the enemy's moves and you can choose yours depending on what the enemy is going to do...but sometimes the information shown for those attacks is limited or missing but the higher your technique stat, the more likely information about your foe's next attacks will be displayed. I'm not going to touch on everything, but I feel the game's turnbased combat has a lot of strategy in selecting how you will act and react along with a good amount of player expression in how you build your character and how much you pay attention/how good your reflexes are. I was almost always engaged as a player while participating in combat compared to some RPGs where battles got repetitive.

Classes (A)- Nothing too special about the classes BUT they do feel functionally different and may determine how you go through the game (or try them all out!). You have fighter, your general sword swinging tough guy, the methodical samurai who has to sheath his weapon before using his strong attacks, there's mage which is the typical elemental magic burst type and then sorcerer who has various unique spells aimed at defense + offense. You're going to choose 2 of the above so that you can then pick 1 of the 4 advanced classes which blends aspect of both with unique features. Since there is a very lenient respec system, you don't have to beat yourself up about making a decision, you can just reset all your points and reallocate them. Along with armor, weapons and accessories. there's a nice amount of variety.

For a turn-based RPG, I'd give it a B and for an indie turn-based RPG, a B+. Not many out there like this one. If I calculate the overall length into the rating (it's more on the short-end) and preferring my games to be between 10-25hrs, I'd give it an A. No padding, grinding or fluff.

I will preface that one of the two main routes is finished- however the fully completed main route has more than one ending- which HEAVILY depends on your decisions and choices you make throughout the course of the game. There is also a lot of little small things that do affect things later on in the story.
The gameplay of this game is really awesome and definitely the highlight that kept me hooked. It's a unique combination of split-path decisions with turn based combat that has action commands (on the defensive end) that let you either outright evade/graze damage or consistently guard enemy attacks. It has a very strong mechanical focus- with what you choose to spec in very much changing up how you go about combat encounters. Combat is interesting in that you and the enemy both pick your moves in sets of three- and this ends up being really cool with how the combat system is in place with a lot of player expression in terms of strategy in how you plan out your actions and confidence in mechanical ability to engage in its defensive system.
Also, this game has a pretty nice soundtrack! I love the fact that its dynamic in battle at some points as well. There were quite a few songs from the soundtrack I really enjoy. I hope an official release of the OST happens at some point.
The writing, while nothing completely ground-breaking, is at least good enough to make you care a lot about the characters and some pretty interesting world building and implications.
This is also a game that doesn't let you grind to overcome challenges. It's pretty difficult, all things considered. However, the gratification of overcoming the bosses FEELS SO GOOD.
It's a relatively short game that doesn't overstay it's welcome. I think my first playthrough from start to end was less than 10 hours, and the repeat playthrough for the other ending of route 1 was shorter due to being able to skip lots of dialogue. I think even in its current state, it's well worth a purchase, and I'm very excited for the second route to be completed as well.

I like this game; I love almost everything about this game. the story is good, and gameplay is good even though it a bit a hard but if you good enough it won't be any problem

Definately worth the price. interesting mechanics, a good story, and plenty of replayability. I enjoyed this game so much that I'm gonna show my share of appreciation through this review and a full coverage of the game, or atleast one route