Game Thoughts: Deedlit in Wonder Labyrinth (Patreon)

Thoughts on Record of Lodoss War: Deedlit in Wonder Labyrinth:

That's a very silly name. RoLWDiWL! Or maybe it’s DiWLRoLW, depending on which site you look at.

Despite my love of exploration games, I initially held off until a deep sale because I don't really have any connection to the IP. There are vague memories of a younger me watching a Lodoss movie (show?) probably when the Sci-Fi channel did summer anime movies, but my main knowledge of the series is just that the franchise was super ubiquitous in anime catalogues/advertising so I've always been aware of it despite not knowing much more than: elf lady in green, generic fantasy RPG party members, possibly evil elf lady in silver. And you know what, I'm 100% giving it to myself on that description. The game makes little effort to explain the IP at all but you play as the elf lady in green, run into named generic fantasy RPG party members, and the second boss fight is against a possibly evil elf lady in silver.  So without any of that real knowledge, the story is just... nonsense. Maybe even if you do know the series it's still nonsense? It really seems like nonsense and you're probably safe skipping every dialogue moment in the game because it never really comes together in a meaningful way.

So enough rambling about bygone anime, the game is... fine. It's just... fine.

The backgrounds are super busy. The UI is too. And so are the characters. The artwork is nice but the screen is just a mess of stuff. There's one boss that has so many afterimages and effects that I simply couldn't see what was hurting me. That's the battle that taught me that healing items are super cheap and you can just spam that business! More annoying is that there are enemies deliberately placed to hide behind the UI. You're climbing up a stage and an enemy is hidden offscreen exactly behind the giant spirit orb in the UI. It's just cheap and unfair rather than actually difficult.

The elemental strength feature is kind of... there. As you do damage with one element, the opposite element gets stronger and you can refill your magic by getting hit by a same-element magic spell. If you get hurt, your current element gets weaker. It clutters the UI a fair amount and it's a bit hard to see the difference in your attack strength as you level the elements because enemies have elemental resistances, your character levels up, and you change weapons. When your element is maxed out, Deed slowly recovers health, so if you get knocked around, it rewards some tedious behavior by finding an enemy you can safely farm, killing it, leaving the room, and repeating the process until you start recovering health, and then you just stand around until you're at max health again. And enemies in this game hit hard/Deed is super fragile so this is a behavior you're rewarded for exploiting a lot at the start of the game. Even boss fights mostly consist of fighting until you get hurt, swapping to the element that's still max level so you start regaining health, and then spamming magic at a distance to re-level up the weakened element. Once you hit the mid-point of the game, pretty much every boss fight is just a long loop of doing that.

Deedlit has a bow and there are some early fun puzzle-like moments where you have to figure out how to bounce an arrow into specific areas to hit an object to open a door. Later in the game, it drops the puzzle part and you're just spamming arrow to spin bladed gates out of the way or wind up a platform and it becomes a tedious distraction. You also can't aim straight up for some reason? As for use in actual combat, the bow is terrible. Most are too slow, weak, and not fun to use, plus magic is cheap, fast, and strong so you never have a reason to not use it.

The melee weapons are also just adequate. I got an overhand weapon early in the game and I never switched off those. And I'm the kind of person that also never uses the slow strong weapons in Castlevania. In this game, there are a number of small, fast flying enemies and having a weapon with an actual hitbox is extremely useful. Other weapons have too short a reach and no vertical so it's annoying trying to line them up.

Most of the enemy grunts barely put up a fight and you really have to stand around for them to even attack. There are some stronger enemies that are mostly a threat because they're big and try to run into you and they have so much health that it just takes a while to beat them down. The bosses have fun gimmicks and patterns if you take them seriously and don't want to cheese magic. There's a lot of changing elements Ikaruga-style, hovering over or reacting to their movement, and good variety of attacks but a fun pattern once you figure it out. It does take a fair amount of trial and error to get the patterns down and it's not always clear that some attacks count as elemental magic your spirit can absorb.

There's no flow to the map. Part of what makes Symphony of the Night so amazing is that when you get a new power, you're exciting to return to a point in the castle to try it or you're seen somewhere you think you can sneak into now. In Wonder Labyrinth, I was pretty much just looking for empty squares on the map and following them rather than enjoying the exploration. Most of the "powers" you get as you progress also just amount to keys. There are 3 movement abilities (one of which is just a sliiightly better version of an earlier one) and everything else is just an item needed to unlock a new type of locked door. The game is divided into named stages, but they're still connected into one big world map so it's still just one castle. You usually only need to leave a stage to grab an upgrade you couldn't get earlier, so the game could have just been a linear 6 stage game and not much would change. A complete map doesn't have any gaps in the inside spaces. It's a really small thing but it makes hunting for 100% completion so much easier and cuts down on the Castlevania-style whipping every random wall you see moments.

There are some odd performance issues where the game will freeze for a tiny bit before popping back to normal. It's not SO bad it's a major problem, but it's a shock when it happens and can eat inputs. It's weirdly not even the enemies that have a bunch of effects that are the problems. One of the most noticeable ones was just this tiny little generic fairy enemy. Every time I play, the first time I encounter one, the game will freeze for a second but then be okay when I meet more of them, but after turning the game off and coming back the next day, the first one will freeze the game again. The game crashed when buying an item in the shop (and there doesn't seem to be an autosave). Finally, normally when you take damage, Deed flashes a bit, but one time, she just straight up turned invisible. When I took damage again, she finally popped back into existence.

Without an appreciation for the IP, RoLWDiWL is a perfectly adequate game. It's not awful but I certainly wouldn't recommend the average person play it. It's really just "one of these kinds of games" so even if you're a big fan of exploration games, it doesn't do a lot to draw you in. The most unique elements to the game that it tries to add to the genre (the spirits level system, the bow, and such) are the worst parts about it. It made me think of the game Chasm, another "fine" exploration game.

The thing I thought about the most while playing is that the game was made by a company called "Why So Serious" and their logo is a bat. Like, what? How? Why!? For all the frivolous lawsuits this industry has, this one slips through the cracks? What a bunch of RoLWDiWL.