I haven't seen a thread on this game (I did a quick search through both GRPG and here), which is a damn shame. I was actually going to post in GRPG but I figured
Infinitron would just move it here like he does with every blobber except LoG. TLDR; I enjoyed the game immensely despite several very frustrating issues, you probably will too if you like blobbers.
I just beat it after 30 hours or so played. I could have finished earlier but a couple major bugs caused me to lose several hours of progress each (more on that later). I decided something akin to a full-fledged review is warranted, since it's always mentioned in passing ("yeah Paper Sorcerer is a good recent blobber, you should try it") but has never (to my knowledge) been talked about extensively. I'll try to keep each section to a reasonably short paragraph.
Paper Sorcerer is a first-person, turn-based dungeon crawler with a maximum party size of 4 (including the titular Sorcerer). It takes a page from the Wizardry IV book. You play as the apprentice to an evil sorcerer who gets locked into a magical book that doubles as an extradimensional prison after the sorcerer is defeated by a group of heroes. The backstory serves fine as setup. The in-game story is nothing to write home about. It is serviceable and succeeded at making me mildly curious about various issues discovered over the course of the game. The author is clearly not a writer of competence or quality, which is a personal annoyance of mine (I've grown into a massive prick over the years wrt writing quality). Grammar and spelling errors abound. Not much else to say here.
Party composition choices are varied and interesting. For my first playthrough I took the Vampire, Werewolf, Ghost, Skeleton, Goblin and Puppet. Each of the summonable monsters is meant to fulfil a specific party role, with several of them acting as hybrids. Werewolves are monks, Vampires are something like Dark/Shadow Knights (2H damage dealers who sac their own hp to produce effects), Goblins are thieves, etc. The Puppet is a special case. If anyone has played Final Fantasy Legends for the Game Boy (any of them, but particularly II), the Puppet is something like a Robot. Its stats and skills are determined entirely on what equipment you give it. I will say up front that some choices turned out to be complete traps; I took the Goblin thinking it'd be useful to have someone who can open locked stuff, only to find out as I progressed that (a) all locked treasures and doors have a key somewhere and (b) he's not very fucking good at picking locks or combat anyways. For all that, each class seems distinct. A Werewolf plays very differently to the Sorcerer or the Skeleton for instance. Overall the choices encourage min-maxing and munchkinism. I thoroughly approve :D. I can definitely see myself doing one or two more playthroughs solely to see how other classes play and try different themed parties (I really want to try Sorc (Arch Mage)/Ghost/Shadow/Imp or Sorc (Mage Knight)/Werewolf/Vampire/Troll, for instance).
Character progression is predictable, but well enough executed that it is thoroughly enjoyable. I was always excited to get a level up, on all my characters. Most of them were still receiving new skills even into their late 40s. You gain a small amount of stats with each level up, and either new or improved skills to use in battle as well. In addition the town has a skill trainer which will improve nearly every aspect of your characters for a price. The price scales really high (it costs over 100k gems to max out training in any one stat), so you never lack for a reason to sell all your stuff and save up your gems.
Combat is, again, predictable but a great deal of fun. There's a lot of it, both preset and random, but interestingly the two types are generally clearly separated (for instance, on a floor with set encounters you will generally not have random fights at all, and vice versa). Fighting itself is very straightforward; pick an action for all party members, watch the round play out. One thing I thought was very interesting (and that I'm not sure the creator originally intended, as it can lead to very weird results) is ongoing effects taking place during action selection, rather than the round itself (so for instance, if a buff is going to fade on your skeleton, it will come off while selecting his action, rather than during the combat round). This applies to enemies as well! It is possible to predict with 100% accuracy when an enemy will have a turn if it has a DOT effect on it, since it will take damage at some point while you are choosing actions. As I said, very cool but probably not intended. It is also possible for an enemy to die during action selection, rather than on its turn, if a DOT effect would kill it. Nifty and sometimes useful when dealing with the game's class cannon-type monsters. Combat (and indeed, the entire game) is hampered by a plethora of questionable design/configuration decisions and bugs (more on these later), but was still interesting enough that I don't recall ever being bored.
Exploration was a weird case for me. It starts out super easy. Each floor is small and self-contained; there are no loopbacks, no jumps from level to level, and for the most part everything is very much on-rails. As soon as you enter a floor you can access it any time through the town menu. And you can get back to town at any time, without restriction, using the Gem of Recall. In this it differs sharply from its obvious main inspiration of Wizardry; there is zero resource attrition tension in this game. You can count on there being at least one secret per level. Nearly 100% are telegraphed, either through obvious graphical clues (buttons, rings etc on walls) or through the "Search" function that pops up occasionally. Surprisingly instead of being bored and annoyed with this style, I found it rather pleasant and enjoyable. I viewed each floor as an interesting puzzle to solve, rather than a grinding chore of wall-banging to be endured and dreaded. One feature I learned to appreciate is that doors stay open while you're on the level; this makes it much easier to see where exactly you still need to explore when you're faced with branching paths. The much later floors do open up the challenge a bit, with multi-floor puzzles and some larger levels.
The UI... look I can't put this charitably. The UI is a pathetic and enraging clusterfuck. Keyboard shortcuts are difficult to find and difficult to memorize en masse. I remembered I for... character equipment?! and M for main menu. That's it. Some screens take both mouse and keyboard for input, and some only take the mouse. Some will take both for input, but depending on your actions will STOP taking the keyboard (this is particularly annoying)!
Let's take a pause here. I just want to harp on this; I try hard to take care never to use the usual formatting to emphasize points I make in my posts. I go to great lengths to avoid all caps, italics etc. But the UI is angering enough that I couldn't think of any better way to express my frustration with it. Just remember that if I weren't
disciplining myself on this issue the FOLLOWING PARAGRAPH would like like a
Battle-Tech writer had gotten
its grimy hands on the post! Back to the rant.
Selection speed is atrociously slow. This is especially irritating in combat; with a menu-driven game like this it is practically a requirement that navigation and selection move at near-light speed to minimize annoyance. This game exacerbates that annoyance with multiple menus that grow over time (every character's skill menu is going to be littered with over a dozen skills by endgame), and when it takes a second or more to move from one selection to the next, you'll begin considering a trip to murder the game's creator. Speaking of multi-page/scrolling menus! This game does long menus really badly. Scrolling one item at a time is tedious and painful. Using the mouse is (incredibly) also tedious and painful, as the mouse has a predefined slow selection speed. To make matters worse, when navigating frequently between two different menus (say, while shopping) the game does not properly memorize where you are in each. You'll buy something, and be returned to the shopping menu with a completely different spot selected. Sometimes, this new selection will be OFF THE SCREEN. This is difficult to explain but trust me; you're going to absolutely loathe going to the town's shop later on in the game when each menu has 30+ selections.
Finally, bugs. There are many. Most are easily ignored; some are annoying; and a very few (I can think of one in particular) will require nothing short of a complete restart. Navigation to menus will sometimes not load the full menu, or load the wrong one (fixed with a save/load). Moving around inside your room in town causes random 2-4 second input lag every couple seconds. Related; be careful when leaving your room. Best practice is to save 100% of the time right before walking out the door. If you do it too quickly after one of those periods of input lag the town menu will fail to load when you leave. The only solution I found was a full game restart and reload. On two occasions my thoughtless lack of saving led to losing a couple hours of progress and, in both cases, some sweet item finds. One of the game's premiere puzzles is bugged such that it is impossible to complete; I thought I had done something wrong or missed a step until I checked the Steam forums. These are the highlights but there are plenty more. This is the only area I am willing to unabashedly slam the game's creator. Many of the bugs I encountered were thoroughly documented on the Steam forums years ago, but the author simply abandoned the game. Absolutely inexcusable.
Overall I had a great time playing this game, and I look forward to picking it back up at some point to try new parties and see different skills/skill synergies. Just beware the game's atrocious UI/design decisions and several bugs ranging from annoying to restart-inducing that the author never bothered to fix (seriously, he should burn in hell for this).
I don't know why my search didn't turn this thread up.
