El Cid & the Cult of the Wasteland

I was really impressed with this game. The music selection was very on theme and excellent for the whole feel of the game. The maps are well made and there are a lot of interactions available. I always felt engaged and was able to pick up items and the items were flavorful (ie tobacki). It was a nice flowing story, however I could not find the key to the door in the cave, the enemies were doing 0 damage and missing El Cid a lot. Overall GREAT GAME, lots of fun.

I didn't make it very far in the game- after a good 20 minutes of running around checking everything I can't find this key that I need to apparently need to get through an underground gate- but what I did experience was pretty unique and caught my interest immediately. Animal companions in an RPG are a fun concept and the way the skills are set up gives each party member their own battle identity and flavor. I also like that pretty much everything in the environment is interactable in an intuitive way. You can get healing items from cactuses, money from gold and silver bars laying around the underground mine and commonplace items like ropes and pickaxes just lying around as props are also collectable by the player. A lot of RPG Maker games are loaded with props that look pretty but don't do anything so giving them some purpose is a nice change of pace.

Aside from having no idea where to go next my main concern with the game is some polish issues. One example is that the battle music should probably be extended longer or at least have some variations so we aren't hearing the same relatively short loop multiple times per fight. Also, there are multiple instances of NPCs that don't move anywhere and can't be interacted with even though they're clearly bad guys, which makes me unsure if the game is bugged out somehow or if I'm supposed to do something specific to trigger a fight/conversation.

One of the most unusual features of the game is the ability to use skills seemingly without limit outside of combat. The horse in particular can not only fully heal the party's MP/HP for free after every single battle, it can prebuff defense and agility multiple stages outside of combat which carries over into the next fight you encounter. You can even use some weird skills like Holy Strike (normally just a strong single target damaging attack) outside of combat which doesn't seem to do anything other than drain MP. It seems really broken that you can buff several stats to max before the start of every fight at no cost but I'm assuming there may be some issue with how the some of the skills are programmed.

Anyways, a cowboy/lovecraftian adventure RPG seems like a really neat concept and I really enjoyed the small taste of gameplay I got as well as the presentation and visuals. I really do like the concept of this project and I hope the author continues tweaking the game with some patches in the future.

Really cool