Labyrinth of Refrain: Coven of Dusk Review - Grindy But Golden Dungeon Crawling

Fans of classic dungeon-crawling, rejoice – Labyrinth of Refrain: Coven of Dusk offers many enjoyable hours of smashing walls to find secrets, exploring winding and mazelike maps, and fighting massive bosses. As Dusk Witch Dronya, you use a magical book to create a highly customizable puppet army that explores the depths of a huge labyrinth. While story bits are plentiful between crawls, the focus is on a successful cycle of of exploration, combat, and customization.

 

From a selection of puppets, you can build the perfect army. While you begin with simple tools like mages, tanks, and rogues, you can mix and match abilities to create insanely powerful characters. The same is true of equipment, as you can infuse your best weapons and armor with other pieces of loot. You’re constantly upgrading and using multiple resources to forge the ultimate team; you can field up to 15 different characters active in combat, and many more supporting them. The gameplay loop is immensely satisfying, and you always feel like you’re growing. I enjoyed grinding out levels and gear to take on some of the optional, more difficult encounters. Leveling can get dull at times, moving from autobattle to autobattle as you work up a stack of experience, and some levels contain baffling frustrations like pits that are easy to walk in, killing your whole team, or rows of unavoidable poison.

 

The story goes to some insane places. On the surface, you’re attempting to find some special items below the dungeon while you defy your old master, but the ludicrous and bizarre developments defy any kind of traditional storytelling; it’s entertaining, if not the stuff of Shakespeare.

As with many dungeon crawlers, the story is simply window-dressing for a layered exploration experience as you move though maps and dungeons. Epic boss battles form milestones during your travels through a multitude of environments, from dark caves to lavish towers. The unlock trickle even continues into the post-game if you want another 20 hours of content and a multitude of ultra-tough boss encounters. You take on a variety of enemies in each area, including elite enemies marked on the map that you can avoid if you’re not feeling up to the challenge. Instead of solving big puzzles, you get some freeform tools to unlock secrets, like being able to smash through walls, set up portals, and hide from roving foes. The allure is sublime as you move from environment to environment, an addictive progression romp that always keeps you fiending for a rare drop or a new pact.

Pacts are items you find or create that allow you to form your characters into covens, which come in myriad forms. One pact may supercharge a single character from multiple support units, others may allow you to level up a support very fast at the cost of your main unit’s experience gain. Some support three characters, others two, others one, and they often come with other restrictions as to what kinds of characters can be slotted. These pacts add a cool wrinkle, allowing you create teams designed to cast ultra-powerful spells, burst with insane critical damage, or guard and take massive assaults. Mixing and matching pacts with your characters is great, and lets you make interesting decisions with your team composition.

Labyrinth of Refrain is an excellent dungeon crawler that brings some cool new features to the table. While the title can be grindy at times and includes some frustrating maps and encounters, the core systems underneath are a joy to tinker with for hours.

Read More

Timespinner Review - A Fun Trek Through A Flat Circle

As one of many games mimicking the style and structure sanctified by Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, Timespinner has its work cut out for it. It introduces fun twists that distinguish it from the pack, but Timespinner is at its best when it’s comfort food, since it nails most of the fundamentals players expect to follow its classic look. It takes a little while to get going, but nonetheless delivers a fun time-traveling adventure.

Playing as Lunais, a girl raised from an early age to be a time messenger, you must save your clan and village by traveling back to a time before the evil Lechiem empire that threatens them is all-powerful. Here’s the catch: Success means removing this particular timeline (and Lunais herself) from history. 

The plot is as labyrinthine as you’d expect from a story about time travel, and gets more complicated as it unfurls. Much of the exposition relies on notes found across the world. They aren’t long or plentiful, but as they complicate the roles of Lunais, the countries at war, the people stuck in the middle of the conflict, I had to keep going back to them just to make sense of what exactly was happening. The overall thrust of the story comes through even if you don’t get the whole picture, however, and seeing the conclusion to Lunais’ story was one of my main motivations to explore Lechiem.

Lunais’ time-bending powers let you stop time whenever you want, freezing the world and enemies in place. This helps you get out of dangerous situations and use enemies as platforms; I was able to access a few areas I probably shouldn’t have early on by luring enemies towards high jumps and freezing them in place. That said, there are only a handful of satisfying puzzles or platforming challenges that use this power, and I’d regularly forget I even had it for long stretches of time. With it being a central mechanic, that’s disappointing.

Fortunately, other aspects pick up the slack. Instead of equipping weapons like swords or axes, Lunais uses magic orbs to dish out damage, and you have a number of cool combat options at your disposal. Along with a basic melee attack, you can summon pistols, shoot lightning, and chuck icicles as your main offense. It’s a clever system, as different enemies have elemental weaknesses you can exploit by swapping your loadout, and you can equip two kinds of orbs to vary your damage output and element. I usually found it best to stick to two of the same kind and swap loadouts with the press of a button, since having different orbs can lead to some unwieldy attack patterns.

 

Lechiem’s grid-based map seems large at first as you start carving out its various nooks and crannies, but it follows a fairly strict progression from left to right. Most of the interesting divergent paths are back-loaded in the second half, so you spend much of the first half simply moving forward. You have enough secrets and optional paths to explore later on, most of which offer a challenging boss fight or cool reward as you make your way to 100-percent map completion. I wish these were more evenly dispersed instead of bunched up near the end, though, since the mainline bosses are rare and mostly pushovers, which exacerbate the slow start.

You also unlock side quests for some of the friends you make during your journey, but these end up being fairly basic fetch quests and don’t offer much of a reward beyond learning about the character who gives them to you. These stories add some interesting layers to some of the cast, but don’t feel essential.

I can’t deny the allure of the formula Timespinner is aping, and if its pixelated font and damage numbers give you nostalgic shivers, don’t hesitate to give it a shot. It doesn’t escape its genre trappings, but its combat, late-game exploration, and interesting plot make for a strong foundation that hooked me long enough for it to all come together.
 

Read More

Forza Horizon 4 Review – Pure Racing Bliss

Read More