SGBCC Day eight – Chantelise

This is day eight of my Lent 2013 Steam Game Back Catalogue Challenge.

Today’s game was Chantelise – A Tale of Two Sisters, an ARPG. I was really looking forward to this because I don’t really play many games like this, so it would be an interesting change.

However, this happened:

Sad times.

EDIT – I got this working a couple of days ago and had a go.

This game is several things. Charming, hard, and impossible to control. They keyboard controls are a pig, and to be honest it’s not much better on a controller – though that does at least make it marginally easier to control the camera. It does make you realise how spoiled we often are with intelligent camera angles in games. No such luck here – it’s a camera that points at you from a fixed distance at a fixed angle, no matter how much you turn, unless you manually move the camera yourself. This means you are often attempting to fight things off screen with no idea of what or where they are until you can spin the camera.

I seem to recall Recettear being similar, though I don’t remember it being quite this bad. Perhaps I didn’t get as far with the combat in Recettear, since there were other things to be doing – perhaps that diluted the annoyance somewhat. There’s not really much else going on here – no twist like in Recettear – but the magic gems is a neat idea. Enemies drop different coloured gems when defeated, which you can collect and combine to perform magic spells in combat.

The difficulty level pretty much requires several playthroughs and reattempts at each area – a desire that’s increased by the hidden chests of treasure in each area. They are unlocked through all sorts of mechanisms – destroying all the torches, hitting particular boulders, ignoring all enemies and killing the last one first – all sorts of odd little mysteries.

So, there is incremental replayability here (which is probably quite essential as I suspect I’m nowhere near good enough to get to the end!) – I’m just not sure if the difficulty will be too much of a barrier to me playing this much, since it’s more than likely to be weeks between my attempts.

I shall give it a go though.