Baobabs Mausoleum Grindhouse Edition - Country of Woods and Creepy Tales

Baobab's Mausoleum was a very interesting find in the steam store; it looked like a mysterious elaborate indie game with only 5 reviews (at the time of writing) despite having been released in early 2021 on PC, a world which would be incredible to go into without knowing anything. However, I feel that Baobab's mausoleum is severely lacking, especially in the gameplay department. At most times, the game plays like a worse version of an RPG maker game. The main character walks slowly with no dash option. Picking up items triggers dialogue and an unskippable 5 second animation. The RPG gameplay mainly includes walking around form one point to another, solving easy puzzles that are pointless from a story perspective and also boring. The game has a Final Fantasy style turn-based RPG scene built into it, but it's implemented so lazily it's hard to call it a feature; you fight a janitor by pressing attack 3 times and win. The same goes for the part of the game that turns into first person. And the style, while it is unique to say the least, did not impress me much more than pixel art with rather wacky characters (the main character is FBI agent with an eggplant for a head and lettuce f…

Funny at times, but terrible from a game design standpoint. If I were you, I wouldn't expect the pop culture references and charming art style to save the experience.

Reading the old reviews, nothing I could write could save this little gem. But I finished it on the Switch and loved every second of it. Had so much fun in fact that I bought it on steam on sale. Plan to play through it eventually and unless the steam version had bugs the Switch version doesn't have then game is highly entertaining. At it's core this is an average SNES rpg with "mode 7" visuals trown in from time to time, but don't let that fool you: you WANT to play this for it's atmosphere and style alone, NOT for it's gameplay as, at it's core, is a basic RPG... Csn you guess I love RPG's?

Love how off the walls this game is, reminds me of a fever dream on acid.

Baobab's Mausoleum has the distinction of being one of the few games I just couldn't finish. I'm going to start with the bad. At a technical level this game is a mess. The controller inputs are just.. broken? Sometimes a single press is multiple presses, just extremely hypersensitive to the point of not working. I fell back to keyboard controls which also weren't always the best. In chapter 2, there is a required task that is impossible if you have a monitor with a refresh rate beyond 60hz, without lowering it to force the game down to 60fps so the bookcase speed works. The last section of gameplay is a rail shooter, and hit detection just felt broken, 60 fps, 165 fps, doesn't matter sometimes hitting square in the "eye" is a one shot, sometimes they just don't die, restart the whole section! You also can't use the mouse for the rail shooter segment, it's arrow keys... I appreciate that this was made by a small set of people, for all of the issues I had with the game it being "generic" or bland was never one of them, it's clearly a passion project, but the flaws outweighed the charm for me.

This game is pretty horrible and literally makes me feel sick just trying to play it.