Resurrection Gate

Adapted from a Review-A-Thon 25 Review

Style: choice-select
Played : 7/21/25
Playtime: 30m demo

This work is a fantasy game demo, an introduction to a larger work to come. Its overriding strength is its graphical presentation and UI. The thing oozes with art-driven character and mood. From its deliberately unidealized portraits, conveying non-movie-star characters of flawed human features, to its RPG UI interactions, to its moody location background work, the whole thing blends into a very attractive and functional package that is a pleasure to interact with.

The game it is in service of is promising as well - you are walked through playable character introductions, including some assigned RPG-like traits and selected buffs to tailor your gameplay. Interestingly, in the short demo you are given opportunity to inhabit two (of three?) playable characters, showcasing the breadth of the game system and narrative perhaps at some cost to depth.

The story itself blends High Fantasy tropes with horror tropes. While the former often leave me cold, I am a sucker for the latter, and this combination (uncommon if not completely novel) worked for me. I mean, undead have ALWAYS been in DnD, why have we not been freaked out by it until now???

The demo is accomplishing a lot, showcasing a lot of gameplay. Just how much is driven home by the work’s somewhat abrupt end. I was actually surprised to see it took a full half hour, considering the relatively modest amount of story I ultimately consumed. The mechanical introductions were not DRAGGY, thanks to the UI and art, but they definitely consumed more time than the story. As an intro this is not a terrible choice. Showcasing gameplay, particularly when the mechanics are this capably implemented does seem like highlighting its strengths. It’s just, I’ve rarely (not never!) encountered mechanics that were so compelling it was the main reason to engage a work. Story, especially in narrative works, matters, and can provide a much more emotional, compelling hook than fun swipes of mouse. Other than showing its horror-leaning, heh, bones, heheh, the character beats, background setup and lore felt underserved here? Not given room to heh, flesh out, heheh into compelling elements in their own right. As a demo, I feel like there’s room to expand on this half of the work.

There are a few other burrs in presentation, mostly in text cleanup. At one point the text asserts: “footsteps do not echo” while the soundtrack is clearly playing echoing footsteps! Elsewhere, my character stats reported I was not particularly superstitious, only for incidental text to later inform me I was too superstitious for a course of action. These are not fatal oversights by any means, but make for glitches in the experience that run counter to the mostly seamless presentation.

All in all a very admirable and engaging demo that showcased its undeniably strong UI, but neglected its narrative core. Will be interesting to see where this goes.