Blood Knot

I wish I could recommend that. The story seems nice enough and the dialogue is decent, but unfortunately I can't give it a thumbs up simply for the fact that the UI is broken. Both the battle and the menu ones. Sometimes when I'm in battle, the UI will bug out making the items names disappear and the HP and damage counters will not rise or fall. That way I can't know what items I have (unless looking through its descriptions) and I can't know how much damage I'm doing to an enemy or how much they're doing to me. Not only that, but when this occurs, after the battle, the items do not show on the menu and the HP bar will always show 100, no matter how much damage I took in the last battle. Worst of all is that the bug won't go away unless I do a soft-reset. I just can't proceed in the game that way, and this bug occurs way too frequently. Alas, until this bug and some others (like enemies can't follow you through cliffs, and they often get stuck in their running animations, etc) is fixed, it's better for you to just stay away from this.

Blood Knot is a very dark RPG set in the Brazilian equivalent of the American Wild West, starring a drover who is being hunted by his former companions for a treasure map he supposedly owns, and his estranged daughter who gets dragged into the whole situation. The story is probably the strong point, though it can be summarized as "almost everyone in this narrative is a huge jerk, or at least has made a huge jerk of themselves in the past and has to confront it now." There's some occasional issues with how it was translated from Portuguese, but they're basically just typos and occasional mangled names - the protagonist changing from Fernand to Ferñao for the occasional line - rather than anything that makes the story hard to understand. Artistically, Blood Knot is definitely one of the more stand-out RPGMaker games I've ever played, with the entire thing being a side-scroller and almost no "normal" RPGMaker assets being used. Unfortunately, that doesn't carry over to the music, which - while I think it's original - is less than a handful of tracks played on repeat over the 5-7 hour length of the game. As a game, however, is mostly where Blood Knot falls a little short. Combat is a…