Dread Delusion X Final Fantasy
An hour into Entropy, the new turn-based RPG from Dread Delusion studio Lovely Hellplace, I stumbled on three randos frenziedly interrogating a severed head. In theory, the head belonged to a demon, one of the hellspawn who had recently laid the realm to waste, but the bystanders seemed… ambiguous on this front. I wasn't really in a position to judge: by this point in the demo, my party had already hacked a number of arms off, and in any case, many of Entropy's demons are rogue body parts to begin with. One of the early enemies is a walking pair of lungs, for example. You can shoot it in the windpipe to stop it casting spells.
Entropy is sort of a classic Final Fantasy game – there's an overworld with (thankfully infrequent) pop-up encounters, and the combat music puts me in mind of the spidermech boss from FF8, specifically – but it dunks that parallel into a bucket of rust, piss and fungus. The landscape is a mycelial web slowly devouring a few, bloody-minded tufts of PS1 masonry, where toadstools tower over castle walls. Everything here from the savegame shrines to the innkeepers seems toxic and untrustworthy and horribly short on sleep.
Not long after the business with the head, I visited a "soul garden". Once upon a time, a deity tended that garden, creating an earthly sanctuary for the dead. But then the god either went mad or was corrupted, and the locals started burying people they loathed there as punishment, and now you have to navigate a forest full of anguished ghosts. Mere blades and arrows won't harm these spectres; to defeat them, you must slaughter giant snails and scrape "soul moss" from their shells. The snails are worryingly humanoid. I'm quite glad Entropy doesn't have much voicework in battle, because I'd sure hate to hear these things scream.
It perhaps goes without saying that your party members are not the usual band of heroes. They are a bunch of permakillable mercenaries and refugees – cowards and failures, propping up bars or heaped by the road. They all look like gargoyles carved from sewage, with stained eyes and teeth and hugely knotted hands clutching at salvaged hilts. I do love Entropy's portrait art; there's a fallen guard in the prologue with half his torso missing, one eye staring at you calmly over a palatial expanse of rib and muscle - an incredible investment of art for a character destined to expire a few sentences later, but it certainly sets the tone.
The battling, meanwhile, is a familiar brew: melee fighters in the front row; archers, gunners and wizards to the rear. There's a turn order bar on the left, with more powerful special abilities delaying a character's turn. There are status effects such as stun and poison, and the opportunity to target limbs to stop people moving about or hitting as hard. A few enemies wear armour that has to be Pierced or smashed asunder using Blunt weapons. I'm not blown away by any of it, so far, but it's substantial enough to keep me occupied when I'm not boggling at the art direction.
I'm also enjoying the writing, which is steeped in theatre. Your character is a wandering troubadour with few prospects, bending the boards many leagues from home. The opening stat customisation is dramatised as an attempt to remember your lines, while recovering from a hangover. One of the initial demons - a persistent nemesis, I suspect - quotes Shakespeare at you in what I hope is a knowingly obnoxious way; they remind me of the Klingon general from Star Trek: The Undiscovered Country. Later dialogue weaves in bits of context, but seldom goes beyond a few sentences of backstory; it whets the appetite rather than stuffing lore down your throat.
It's all quite promising, basically! I need to go back and see if I can interact with that head. Assuming it can talk, the head probably has opinions on whether it used to belong to a demon. Try the demo for yourself via Steam, and look out for the early access release on August 18th.