Eve of Calamity

Found this game through the YouTuber Humblemud, like many others in the comments, and got it on sale. After playing for a few hours, I regret not buying this at full price. This game is DEEP with how much you can change between playthroughs, and there are a lot of different choices to be made that will drastically change the story, so no two save files are the same. A ton of love and effort was poured into this game, and it doesn't go unnoticed.

Eve of Calamity is easily among the best RPG Maker games I've played, standing on its own merits as a worthwhile investment of the 12-ish hours it should take to complete a first playthrough. Though the graphical style is an acquired taste, and in places borrows from RPG Maker MV's default asset pool, this does not noticeably detract from the experience; if anything, the simple (and occasionally ugly) portraits lend a charm to the characters that few games are able to replicate. The writing serves its purpose, which is to communicate information to the player that propels the story forward. Recruitable characters have basic but distinct and established personalities, opening the player to choose from their favorites to bring along into battle. Outside of the opening crawl, world-building is dished out in small doses, rewarding players who choose to explore with a deeper understanding of how the world came to be, what the Calamity is, and why it threatens to return. The player character follows a straightforward but satisfying character arc, beginning the game as a desperate novice and ending it as a hero worthy of the title. The soundtrack has a grungy, unfocused tone that, w…

Eve of Calamity, developed and published by Klothscape, is a retro-inspired role-playing game that embraces the design philosophies of classic Japanese and Western RPGs while offering a modern sense of player freedom. Set in the vast empire of Asterna and its surrounding islands, the game centers on the looming return of a catastrophic threat once held at bay by a previous generation of heroes. You step into a world shaped by past sacrifice, political instability, and growing unrest, tasked not only with preparing for an impending apocalypse but also with carving out your own path in a land that does not revolve solely around a linear main quest. One of the defining characteristics of Eve of Calamity is its open-ended structure. From early in the game, players are free to explore the empire largely at their own pace. Rather than funneling you through a tightly scripted progression, the game allows you to take on quests in varying orders, pursue side activities, or even wander into dangerous territory long before you are fully prepared. This nonlinearity creates a sense of genuine exploration, where decisions about where to travel and which conflicts to engage with meaningfully sha…

Visuals are as seen in the store page's screenshots. Audio is okay. As for the writing... it's not good. But that might be fine; mediocre writing can be excusable as long as the open world design is good. But how do I say this? Exploration does not feel rewarding. Of course this is partially because of the aforementioned mediocre writing making it harder for me to care. Town walker NPCs recycle generic throwaway lines; what purpose do they even serve, other than to randomly step around and into 1-tile wide hallways where they'll annoyingly idle to block your path? The other thing that makes exploration feel unrewarding to me is the random loot in chests, which is a symptom of a bigger problem: loot not being placed deliberately by the designer tells me that the world is not crafted intentionally. I mentioned random loot. Let me also describe my experiences with random encounters and in-combat RNG. At the end of the intro sequence, you are not exactly railroaded but heavily steered towards clearing out what is supposed to be (this is an open world game so you can ♥♥♥♥ off and do whatever instead) the first dungeon: a goblin cave. Inside this dungeon, you can get the 1 Wolf random e…

Finally got around to playing this. Scratches that old school rpg itch with a fun open world design. Edit: I finished the base game and DLC and enjoyed the experience.

Fun game. Music can be maddening rarely. Gameplay is simple on the surface, but you can do some rather amusing combos, and I enjoyed the variety of characters that can join your party. I def got my money's worth