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Thoughts on ARCADEA / AWOL

Quite a while ago now I played the ARCADEA demo on stream with my good friend Purea Patel… I'm only writing this review(?) so much later because Ive just uploaded the VoD.

To get things started, ARCADEA Is an upcoming RPGmaker game in which you take control of Maisie, a mute girl on a quest to find her brother Jas. To do this, we must go through the world of Arcadia. It should be noted that Arcadia here does not refer to the Greek province, but instead refers to one of the interesting phenomena that can be found here: you see, In everyone's dreams lies an Arcade machine which represents their innermost psyche or something. It seems that we can go into these arcade machines for… reasons. Something to do with a cat? Here's the problem with writing a review of sorts from memory months after I've played something, A lot of the exactitudes of the game story have become hazy in my mind. For instance, I remember there was a talking cat who acted slightly sinisterly and seemed to be important somehow… The only other thing I remember about him is that we made him Australian for some reason. A lot of my recollection is like this, so from now on ill just mention the stuff that's stuck with me the most about the game.

Firstly, I must mention the art here, especially the character portraits. It's very good, I feel like all the main characters have very distinct designs, they're all vaguely colour coded in these nice lighter colours which both makes every character easy to tell apart which also giving them a nice sense of cohesion. It's all very cute, and this carries over to the level art, which also has pleasing pallets whilst keeping a good sense of variety between zones. Secondly, I must mention the minigames: they are of paramount importance in a game literally structured around arcade machines, and they most certainly do not disappoint. Even this demo has quite a few varied little gameplay segments, and it honestly does better in them than even some other extremely well produced or popular RPGmaker games like Pocket mirror, which relies a bit too heavily on variations of the chase sequence. Of course ARCADEA isn't exempt from having one or two chasers, close to the end there's a chase sequence against a paintbrush monster thing… but at least there is a mechanic there where you can leave bait for the monster to stall it a little. The other games are a bit more interesting though, for instance there is a puzzle in which you have to stand on a certain spot and then line up a piece of paper to reveal a symbol that tells you what direction to go next. It's a bit like that one forest sequence from Metal Gear, except in Metal Gear, the devs just left you to flounder until you got out. There's also one or two quick time button presses that I was very bad at… but it's also an interesting change of pace from other games I've played.

Last thing I'd want to mention here is that in one scene you are put in a greenhouse and told to draw one of a few plants highlighted in the room, except there was also a random set of vines highlighted that had nothing to do with this, and I was very disappointed when I couldn't try to select the random set of vines over all the pretty flowers to draw.

Anyway, all in all I had a very good time playing ARCADEA, and I'm excited for the full release. I would highly suggest that you play the game for yourself, you can download it here.

After we finished that demo on stream, me and Purea still had a fair amount of energy left, so we decided to look at the other game that the ARCADEA dev has worked on, A Wave Of Lights (AWOL). It's a cute little visual novel about a shut in girl meeting an alien girl and then, like, being gay for two hours. I've not much to say on the actual game itself since it's relatively short, It's just well written and the art is also cute. I will say that, uhh, I made some choices on the stream's end that might have impacted the drama of it a tad… When we played it we decided to voice one character each and whilst Purea gave a pretty neutrally toned voice to the main character, I heard that the other character was an alien and like… I can only decide the voice I went with as somewhere between Skeletor and a Dalek, because alien. It was really something going into the more dramatic or serious scenes with the characters opening up to each other and whatnot, where Purea was playing it 100% straight, and I was doing the silliest goddamed voice I have ever attempted.

to close this out, I should say that the Dev for Arcadia is named Aishin, and you can find them here on tumblr @arcadea-rpg.

Whilst Aishin was the artist for AWOL, it seems that the writer and lead dev listed was Tabby Wright, who you can find here.

AWOL itself can be downloaded from here, and finally you can find the VoD for my stream here.

#ARCADIA #A wave of lights #rpg maker #vtuber