Monster Girl Tactics: Oubliette

Thoughts on the beta at time of this review. Give it a try, even if you aren't into text based games. The writing is pretty good, characters seem interesting, and I am already liking the small amount of plot present. About the tactics gameplay, It's challenging, but you can skip battles with seemingly no punishment (I did it for the second try). It has a few quirks in how orders are solved, but once you notice that characters cannot move and attack if something happened in between (you attacked with another character) it isn't bad. Other than that the game feels a bit slow, specifically if you are playing a second time and need to view the animations and interludes between characters and travel, which are not skipable at the time.

So far, quite the excellent beginning. Obviously the decision to make everyone amorphous blobs is quite interesting but it honestly grew on me over time and the writing is detailed enough to make up for it with a bit of the player's imagination. The combat is interesting enough, there are a couple oddities (any Action ends the turn for all moved allies) but the limited movesets make combat feel pretty tight and engaging between the different battles and their conditions. I can also certainly see how different decisions can alter your path and overall build in pretty neat ways. I would be interested to see how someone who didn't get the unit that carried me tackles the later missions. Similarly, it seems different choices can lead to smaller changes in your units and rippling effects on how others view you overall. All this makes it a bit rough to try and perfect but that's hardly a problem for an early in development game with no guide/wiki. Finally, the "scenes" are... fine. Obviously still much to develop and expand on but currently the number of fully fledged scenes is limited (still a decent number for this stage though) and there is a "gallery" unlocked at the end for any scenes you have found. My issue with it is there are a couple explicit moments that are moreso just skimmed over, where I would've expected, or liked, something more complete. Critically, there seems to currently be no scenes with the lamia or harpy, which are notably absent in the later parts of the current game as well. (Possibly just because of my path?) Not something really worried about in the long term but, well, I won't deny my disappointment, completely unplayable. Really looking forward to seeing where this goes!

A genuinely inspired work of art. Despite simplicity of the visuals and the gameplay, there is a lot of depth in the writing and the choices you can make during gameplay. The presentation is excellent, and the characters are all enjoyable (if slightly unhinged), the world-building is intriguing, and level design is genuinely well-thought out to carefully ease you into gameplay. It's understood here that brevity is the soul of wit, and narration is condensed into easily digestible breadcrumbs that pull you deeper into the story. The dev clearly capitalized on their limitations and managed to make something that shines because of them rather than in spite of them. There are just a few issues with it though: The many dark colors do start to blend in with each other and cause readability issues. I personally haven't had a problem with it yet, but it is something to keep in mind. The text is automatically pushed up every time more dialogue is added or other dialogue is overwritten. Eventually, this causes the text to scroll to the top and even beyond the screen boundaries every single time you advance dialogue. Combat flow feels a bit awkward. I get that the secondary abilities restrict movement because they may require the floor as a target, like Hana's bubbles, but it's a bit weird that I have to toggle the default action in order to move. It's not a dealbreaker, but it's worth considering just making attacks and abilities part of a separate action menu that pops up when you click a unit twice and allow movement freely. UI is functional, but having everything off to the sides of the screen is a little unintuitive for seeing the forecasts, managing inventory, and examining your characters. It's also impossible to examine your characters stats and passives during combat, which makes it difficult to understand your character's limitations within the moment. For example, I didn't even know that they had different move speeds until I looked into the character sheets because it's not noted anywhere else. I also don't get why managing items is a separate UI on the same screen as the party UI, and it's much smaller than the party UI. Again, not a dealbreaker, but a little thing that I found myself getting mixed up with often.