Alaloth

No funny subtitle or song reference. Just don't buy it. Worst $15 I ever wasted.

 

I mentioned Alaloth here once before due to its opening cinematic's laughably generic yet overwrought pretense of fantasy RPG worldbuilding. When I finally got around to trying the actual gameplay, I automatically started mentally workshopping a "don't judge a book by its cover" moral assuming I'd find some redeeming qualities past the incompetent facade.

I can indeed say "don't judge a book by its cover" ... because the contents are much, much worse.

 

For "features" Alaloth just randomly slaps together shallow copies of cRPG/ARPG gimmicks from the past decades, like resource gathering and crafting, socketable gems to +1 your sword, or gambling minigames in taverns. Its main claim to fame seems to be using FPS controls for a Diablo-clone isometric punch-up routine. Except light attack, heavy attack, block and dodge are by no means new ideas and there's a reason click-to-move replaced eight-direction key movement in such titles decades ago. Ask yourself: does that interface setup give you anything that more fluid MOBA Q-W-E-R attacks wouldn't? And while many of its problems can be blamed on a horrible PC port of obvious console mechanics, those are padded with more than enough examples of universal idiocy.

 

Before hitting the gameplay and UI issues which make the game actively hateable, let's admit many others have skated by on poor design for their rich interactive storytelling, including some of the medium's classics like Torment or Bloodlines. This ain't that. That hopelessly generic slurry of elves, dwarves, goblins, etceteree, etceterah from the intro is pretty much all you get in-game. If it weren't released a couple years too early I'd say Alaloth's lore must've been auto-generated by some chatbot distilling high fantasy into its dullest, tritest form. You're given a hefty codex to fill with lore tidbits gathered from conversations, all of which pretty much confirm that every single group of combatants is the roughest, toughest buncha desperados on either side of Rio Grande, or that the god of smithing likes smithing, or that, yes, to your assured shock, this next NPC also hates Alaloth the big bad. NPC after NPC hand you the same "kill ten rats" quests from RPGs of thirty years ago with the same "they ambushed my caravan" excuses delivered in utter seriousness. As one example you walk into one town only to be thrown into a cutscene of two merchants talking about how this (dwarf) town's crafts are excellent. Yes dwarves make nice shit. Yes the shit dwarves make is nice. Yes the nice shit is made by dwarves. Yes. Ten paragraphs of filler later, having gone absolutely nowhere, the conversation ends.

 

Please don't wait for a punchline here. There is none. Every convo's just like this!

 

Those lore-dump NPCs? I've run into some that appear to be hallucinating.

Gratuitous ap'ost'ro'phes aside:

What beauties? What lonely?? What cave??? You're standing by yourself staring at nothing in a modestly populated tavern!

 

Alaloth feels designed half by some retired golf instructor that hasn't seen a video game since Gauntlet, the other half by some teenage apprentice code-monkey imagining himself laureled and triumphed for REVOLUTIONIZING CLICKING ITSELF by pointlessly shitting all over the myriad user interface conventions which normally make our lives easier. Which leads us to the real shit icing on the shit cake.

The basic game consists of a real-time overland map where NPCs and mobs randomly spawn and wander around, plus dungeons in four flavors of difficulty. Run into a mob patrol or dungeon to go into combat mode. Familiar enough, except you're given no stats or challenge ratings aside from rough dungeon quartiles of difficulty, no combat zone maps to unveil by exploration, everything is trial and error. It consistently substitutes obtuseness for the difficulty it pretends to offer.

 

Why does R stand for map by default instead of M? This isn't a button you'd need to mash along with your combat commands. Not a huge issue but illustrative of general irrationality.

 

Why does the Esc key not back out of the map or menus or other interface panels?

No tooltip details, which would've helped with the various ideograms for redundant effects. For example food can heal you or heal over time, which seems a pointless distinction since it's only usable out of combat anyway.

 

I pick up a quest to take something to Winterleaf. It turns out to have a time limit for some reason. Can't see Winterleaf. Can't zoom the real-timed overland map far enough out to see where Winterleaf is and am given no directions as to its general direction. Autofail.

 

I wasted my potions because the inventory list (aside from being a list you're forced to scroll through endlessly instead of a point-and-click grid) resets to the top of the list after you use an item instead of the item above or below it like most lists' default.

 

Then there's key remapping, which you're grudgingly permitted to do... but it only affects half your interactions. Some get remapped (to in my case arrow key movement with Num4 for "interact") while others default to WASD, like map movement. For bonus criminal incompetence, both can occur within the same interaction.

Augh! Index finger whiplash!

But wait, that's not even the kicker.

 

You're not permitted to save game, autosaves only because that's "hardcore" and all that. But after seeing my character relocated a couple of times after reloading, I couldn't figure out just when it saves, or especially whether (as every one of these "hardcore" games do) it saves when quitting to desktop.

So I tested it.

I stood in a tavern with 397/1500 health and ate some bread and cheese, drank some beer, ogled a waitress, good times. Watched my HP rise. Quit game. Started game. Hit continue. My HP was back to 397. Ugh, I thought, so it really doesn't autosave on quitting. What an outdated, pointless chore of a broken system for a... wait... I looked over to my inventory. The food was still gone. So it autosaves inventory but not hit points? WHAT!?! YOU UNMITIGATED IMBECILES how did you even manage that? My Sega Genesis back in '93 had a better save system than this! That is to say it had no save system, which was still better than this! I've seen freeware eroge better designed than this utter pile of garbage!

Was this thing designed as meta-commentary on cRPG shovelware? Was it designed under protest? Do the first letters of various lore dumps somehow spell out "help I'm being held prisoner in a fortune cookie factory"? Because otherwise I simply cannot explain such an irredeemable piece of shit!