RPGM - Darkstar [v0.2a] [Harold]

You get isekaied. Game promises to give you lots of choices. But it feels surprisingly linear instead.
After 35 minutes all I have seen is a super linear info dump with one meaningful choice.

I encountered a combat system which was frankly worse than the already bad default RPGM. (basically RPGM but with tactical positioning)
There is no fast forward for text, and the save points are not placed before the choices.
So you need to repeat a lot of text if you want to check other choice branches.

So far what few choices I saw lead to the same results with potentially one exception that I did not take.
There was a single branch I didn't explore which was netorare. Drugging your elf waifu and handing her over to the noble bastard who wanted to rape her.
Whether you reject him outright or pretend to agree and then rush back to her and warn her so you can escape, the result is identical.
You are captured. and before your elf can save you the castle gets wrecked by a demon and you escape.

Mostly the game was just exposition about the world thus far.
Then at the 35 minute mark I finally reached the initial "hero test" tower.
which turned into a prolonged FPS game with Quake tier graphics. Where you are forced to explore a boring maze with horrendous 3d graphics. Also the controls for it are really bad as you can only move in the cardinal directions. It is fully 3d and rendered in real time though, so why are you locked into cardinal movement?

After getting bored of it, I accepted the "cheat" of skipping to the 3rd floor.. but it wasn't even the final floor. After solving the 3rd floor puzzle I got lost wandering around in the 4th floor before finally having enough.

The game is an amalgam of too many different systems. all of them bad.
You got the bad RPGM walking simular exploring a pixelated map.
You got the bad tactical combat.
You got the bad 3D FPS maze puzzle that looks like it came out of 1990.
You got the bad RPGM dialog boxes. without any quality of life features like rollback, fast forwards, or not having the same button be used to both advance text and pick the first choice in the list.

The VN portion has art that is extremely dated 3d. I have seen this exact same 3d before in other games so it isn't even original.
So far the plot is just a generic fantasy isekai. It promises to go original later, letting you take a corruption path and the like... but I have yet to even reach it.

tough perhaps a bit overeager on my part for giving it the 5 star rating. At the very least the corrupt route shows promise, it's well written, and the dev understands how corruption actually works, which is a rare thing here in f95.

the world building is solid and the characters are interesting even if the mc is a blank slate. This adds to the efficacy of the corruption since it's always better when you twist something with substance, even tough it's very much early days the devs knows how to make this stuff work.

All that said this is still a RPGM game and if you are like me and remember well the old days of pre-F95 RPGM games, of barely functioning games, bugs crashes and worse, not to mention a fair bit "one picture sex scenes" then there are some aspects of the game that will trigger your PTSD.

On the corruption run I ran into one bug that i can frankly can't exclude the possibility of it being a problem on my end. That said frequent autosaves and plenty of saving prompts from the game mean that any potential impact is minimal (although a greater number of save slots and the ability to name them would be welcomed). The sex scenes are not animated but they do have plenty of individual images, so to my mind they balance out.

In the end if one can stomach the RPGM tag and what it often implies then one will be pleasantly surprised by the competence on display here.

[As of 0.1a] Pretty good game with a surprising amount of choices and diverging pathways (esp for an RPGM). Combat is optional (*) but pretty fun (its simplified Fire Emblem style combat). Though I will say it takes a bit of time to get into, definitely not for those looking for quick sex scenes (first proper one for me at least wasn't til around 30 minutes in, which is about where this version ends).

(*) There is an option to skip combat but when I tried that it kinda just bugged out on me and I had to reload my save, likely will be fixed in future updates if I had to guess.