Panic Mansion

by [email protected]

2017
RPG
Twine

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Review

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
needs an overhaul, January 9, 2017

The plot of this game is obviously secondary. It's not even trying to be anything more than a pretext for the gameplay. Which would be fine, if the game were playable. The idea of combining a quiz format with RPG combat stages isn't inherently bad, but this game combines them in such a way as to make both of them less fun. The effect of the "boss fights" isn't so much to break up the monotony of the trivia game as to punish success by forcing you to repeat the questions after (almost inevitably) being defeated in a grindy link-mashing sequence.

That's the big picture. Zoom in on the details, and a different picture emerges--a much uglier picture. The battle mechanic boils down to a repeated choice between "Attack" and "Defend," a choice which has no actual discernible consequence that could lead you to develop a strategy. The fights are all unevenly matched against you, so you have you to replay each section over and over again until you get lucky.

None of that really matters though, because this is a trivia game. Just take the RPG and plot stuff as flavor or packaging, like balogna wrapped around a chocolate bar. Just gnaw your way through it to get to the good stuff, right?

Unfortunately, the trivia questions are the worst part of the game. They're the same every time you play, you're punished severely for wrong answers (you have to get every single question right), and some of the answers are flat out wrong.

All that being said, the overall structure of this game wouldn't be terrible for an educational flash-card kind of game. The questions would have to be replaced with something useful to learn, the order somewhat more randomized, and the questions in each stage would need to build logically on the previous stage. The mini-bosses could feel more like a reward than a punishment, if the player's strength in each fight depended on the number of questions correctly answered in that stage. The "attack/defend mechanic" is essentially meaningless, so it should just be thrown out. Why does there need to be any clicking at all? Just let the fights play out automatically on a timer.

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