City of Despair: Shadows Over Tokyo

[quote][url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_slop][b]Warning: AI Slop[/b][/url] This game is partially or completely made with talentless, soulless AI generated content.[/quote] RPG Maker strikes again! ""City of Despair: Shadows Over Tokyo"" is one of hundreds of low effort RPG Maker flips spamming the store. RPG Maker is such a lame and limited construction kit that, in their own words, "These easy to use tools are simple enough for a child". Most RPG Maker asset flips are just a bunch of canned assets mixed with cringey high school anime club fan fiction. Here, the developer amazingly managed to make something even worse than most flips. Instead of the usual Final Fantasy top down adventure levels, it's just visual novel text between various badly done JRPG fights. The pixelcrap assets are replaced with disgusting AI slop... almost all of this comes across as vibe coded for RPG Maker. It's truly awful. But the cringey high school fan-fiction writing is all there. The argument must be made that construction kit toys like RPG Maker are intended for making small games, toys and demos to pass around with friends, and should never be used as a substitute for professional g…

I am trying to be a better person. Well, a better version of myself, anyway. The kind of person who values their time… y’know, the guy knows when to say “no”. And a meaningful component of this self-improvement project is learning when to “nope” a hopeless mess of an “indie”/Steam sub-basement game and move on to [b]anything else[/b] when there are hundreds of games worth playing (in my account alone). And time away from responsibilities, she is precious folks. So, uh, given that preamble... guess what? This right here is a big ol’ honkin’ [u]nope[/u]: no way, no how, not even worth 5 minutes of your time. The ambition is there, I suppose: “City of Despair” tries to mash JRPG, visual novel, and puzzle elements into its creaky-but-sorta-functional RPG Maker UI, all within a vaguely Persona/Jujutsu Kaizen fan-servicey nonsense end of the world at the drop of a dime plot. The main problem here, aside from RPG Maker’s innate deficiencies as a game engine, are that quite literally everything feels AI-generated, and all the moving JRPG parts—overworld, equipment management, turn-based battle, progression—feel hot-glued and duct-taped together. Every member of your party gains a level…

City of Despair: Shadows Over Tokyo is an indie role-playing game developed by Succubella Games and released on Steam under the unusual publisher credit Looking for publishers, a detail that already hints at the project’s independent and experimental nature. The game places players in a version of Tokyo pushed to the brink of annihilation after a catastrophic meteor strike triggers a massive earthquake, tearing the city apart and opening the door for strange, hostile entities to emerge from the chaos. Rather than focusing on grand political stakes or large-scale military responses, the narrative grounds itself in personal desperation, following a college student named Tristan as he navigates the shattered metropolis in search of someone deeply important to him. The story unfolds as a survival-driven journey through ruined districts, collapsed infrastructure, and areas overrun by supernatural threats. Tristan’s motivation is simple but emotionally direct: to reunite with Takaoka, his beloved, whose fate is unknown after the disaster. Along the way, he is joined by members of an organization known as Force X, whose presence introduces a broader context of resistance and investigatio…