Indie Evowok Breeder - CRPG inspired by pokemon (free & released)

[CryptRat]

The v4.0.4 (info here) which fixes the bug and changes a few little things (it seems teeth are healed by the medic now) just got release.
The dev's pretty cool and reactive.

 

[CryptRat]

Quests are much better than the few FedEx quests from the start suggest, often requiring actual exploration and with possible failures not without consequences.
For example a girl aksed me for 300 coins to be able to leave her village, I couldn't give her the money because I didn't have it at this moment and when I got back to the village her storyline had advanced, I couldn't give her the money anymore, she was still there and had another quest for me.

I think that your character can face death situations and that your luck points act as extra lifes (and your karma can be converted into luck). Exploration is greatly rewarded, but taking too much risk may also be punished.

Quite awesome game.

 

[CryptRat]

An interesting thing just happened. In the pit in Sardonyx, you can fight 4 breeders whose evowoks are level 30, 30, 25, 28+18 individually and in a rumble. You can use a level 50 max evowok for the rumble and against the guy with 28+18. I brought my level 47 venimous mushroom, with whom these 2 fights were going to be easy, fought and beat the guy with evowoks level 28 and 18. Problem is I killed his level 18 one during the fight, and now the rumble fight is against levels 30, 25, 25, 28 and I can only use a level 35 max and then can't use my mushroom for the fight anymore. That's fun.

 

[CryptRat]

This game is easily one of the best games in recent years.

I'm gonna make a big review when I finish the game, although I probably still have a long way to go.
The review will inevitably be incomplete because I won't try to figure out if sores - fortunately I had a lotion to cure them probably bought from some travelling merchant - can actually kill me or permanently damage me nor I will deal with some shady guy or infiltrate a bandit camp by a hole in a hedge. I mean, the girl whose I didn't give her 300 coins requested me a plant which is normally used to abort and asked me not to tell her mother, which was understandable so I didn't, but it seems she finally used the plant as a poison to kill her mother and left her town. Your actions have consequences, I don't want to die.

The game has a lot of qualities (and some flaws), but its best part is undoubtly how you have to catch and use some good and/or appropriate evowoks to win the fights, you're planifying fights, unlike Pokemon where any pokemon with some more levels, quickly gained along the road or while looking for other pokemons, or with the good rock/paper/scissor property will do the job. First you can't gain more level that easily, secondly the difference between breeds but also between different evowoks of the same breeds can be huge. I don't mind rock/paper/scissor but this game is more subtle in how one of your evowok will beat another, which is good too, and finally you can't put a team which overlevels the enemy teams in a fight.

 

[hello friend]

The problem is that evowok breeder backloads the good stuff. With all your character stats starting at 0 - tracking can be removed entirely, all it does is guarantee that you have to grind for content, which is non-gameplay. Mindless alternation between the 'a' and 'd' key is not gameplay. Catching + Taming could honestly be combined into one stat, have it level at 75% speed instead or something. Let you purchase backup nets - I try not to spend money if I have less than 45 gold. Or even 55. If your net breaks and your evowok is damaged and you have less money than that, game over. Giving you a 10 gold discount at the healer if you can't afford the 15 would improve the game, although if you ever need it you're doing something wrong. There's a fun game behind the grind, but in it's current state most people will never bother to get far enough to see it.

 

[hello friend]

CryptRat is there any handy way of viewing the differences between evowoks of the same breed?

 

[CryptRat]

I don't think so.
What I had in mind is mostly that you can have one with one attack skill at 70% (I never got much more) and another with an attack skill at 35% if not no attack at all except some hiding skill. The stats can vary too but I didn't really dig.

I agree with what you're saying, they went a little too far with limiting money and almost nobody will play the game because of that.
That said I don't have any money problem anymore, except when I want to buy the next map. In fact I found at least one good spot where you can get a lot (well not a lot but 120 per sold evowok, and it's not rare there) of money relatively quickly (very quickly as you get good at catching).

Spoiler

It's in the first town, take the time to fight everyone here

Spoiler

you want a more precise advice?

Spoiler

Beat the guy in the house with his two dogs. He gives you a key to a basement. Beat the guy to enter the basement then enter the basement and in the first part of the subfloor, between the stairs and the door, there are bats, not rare nor very hard to catch and sold 120 (the fire evowoks you find here are sold more than 200, but they are hard to catch at the beginning and quite rare). Just catching and selling 2 or 3 should give you some air and at least some money to identify breeds.

 

[hello friend]

Thanks for the tip, that'll smooth things out a little for sure.

I thought you meant differences in stats at first. Yeah, the skill levels + starting skills vary a lot. Caught one of those red unicorn dragon thingies, it has one attack with a 35% hit chance, bit of a bitch to train. Unless it's really as low as 25%, I don't remember as I put it into storage pretty fast. Deal with it later.

 

[hello friend]

Huh, Robin Hood and his homos show up and hand me 300 gold, not that long after a group of bandits show up and take me for all I've got.

Great game.

 

[CryptRat]

My character is addicted to a drug, his bravado is stuck to 0 and then he's terrible at doing everything and in particular catching evowoks.

 

[CryptRat]

100 hours in my current game and I've won my first big tournament.

Too bad I'm a junkie, I asked the few other players in the forum of the game about what they think I should do about that, in particular if they think I'll die if I take more dope, or if it could lead to some obvious bad consequences but that at the price of some luck points things could get back to normal then, or if only then someone (in the game) will be willing to help me, because at that point doctors, herbalists as well as old witches don't care, or something.

 

[CryptRat]

Funny how with each new cartographer I feel like : "oh wait, it's even bigger, then." No way I'll finish the game before Grimoire gets released.
By the way, I got a cold sweat when my horse died from thirst in the desert and I had to get back to town, thirsty and on foot ; fortunately I had some luck points to lose, otherwise I would just be dead. I still have many things to do so I'm delaying the time when I'll roam the desert again. I can already visit the next cartographer, it's not in the desert, but it seems that one of the next steps will involve travelling through snowstorms which does not look particularly welcoming either.
It's really interesting to have permadeath in such a long game, I learned to always choose the coward solution and stay away from conflicts. Besides I can't be 100% sure yet since I don't know how you win, but a great point of the game is that you're just here to make your way through evowok breeding, gaining renown only via official matches, in a world which is much bigger than you, you're not a knight or warrior, you're nothing and even if you learn ways to deal with bandits in under circumstances 2 robbers are always a threat ; you can help people but it's not your priority and in particular it does not give you renown points which would totally ruin the purpose.
One funny things is that your evowok does not die when he loses a non-vital organ, I have got a mushroom evowok whose tongue got crippled (in a match where I was too greedy, you can always retreat when it's your turn), it had a licking attack that it can't use anymore but that's it.
I don't know what's the max level of evowoks, for a time I thought it could be 150 but then I met one breeder with a lvl 157 one and I haven't unlocked the entire world yet.
In term of writing, there is really every kind of things, for example there's a town composed of rapist slavers, and you're not in a position where you could do anything about that. One funny thing, about evowok matches is how a lot of people like when one evowok dies during a match.

 

[Werdna's Revenge]

CryptRat you are doing the lord's work here. If I had the time to sink into it this looks like the sort of hardcore grind I could really enjoy. I like stuff like Pokemon/SMT/Monster Rancher, but adding permadeath and that injury system is just wild and I feel puts this one over the top.

 

[CryptRat]

Yes, the game does not have the dungeons of classic SMT games nor the pokemon non-combat interactions with the world but has its own cool mechanisms which make monster management particularly interesting.

 

[Vecna's Hand]

I've never felt compelled to post on here before, but I wanted to give this indie game positive feedback. I found this game browsing here and after reading CryptRat's posts I decided to try it as I was looking for something to play and sink my teeth into for a few hours a day for a while.

This game is fantastic, best Monster type game I've tried over the years! I'll try and post a bit about content when I'm further along as I've only unlocked the 2nd map, and I'd rather not just echo what CryptRat has said. I fell in love when my favorite Evowok, a Chamelight, died in the group pit fight in Sardonyx, because they kept beating on him while the fight was ongoing.

The only negatives I can speak of right now is a crash with error #62 on the map, an event I assume, and the game moved too slow. I remembered that CheatEngine might be able to speed up games so I used that with 5x speed and it works really well to make any grinding much easier. If possible it would be nice to do that with some in-game settings, perhaps to make battles faster with a setting.

 

[CryptRat]

Welcome.

Hmm...

Spoiler

Everything was stolen from my house (my trophies especially) because I hadn't closed the door before leaving.

One cool thing (there are so many cool things in the game) is that valuable items which were stolen from you can then be bought from some (wandering) merchant somewhere.

I'm wondering if the game has an ending, maybe there's no ending or only an ending implying autistic completionist stuff, in both cases that would be very , and I wouldn't really be surprised since the game is .

 

[YES!]

Should this be in the Asian games forum per the moderator's rules?

 

[CryptRat]

I have clocked 188 hours and I think that at this point I have explored most of what the game has to offer.
I have explored the entire world, even if I may have missed a few locations. I also won every official match I'm aware of, although I'm certainly missing one match somewhere because I need 1 more renown point to the next grade level ; my current grade is 'famed' and I don't know if this next grade is the 'star' grade or if there's more that I'm missing.
The game is really worth it if you're into monster breeding games, more detailed impressions to come.

 

[Beastro]

Has George Lucas swooped in to sue like mad over the name yet?

 

[CryptRat]

You know, I didn't dare to use the comparison with Fallout (or did I?), although it's really the game I had in mind regarding how the quests are made, at least narratively, with a similar tone, weird situations, quests and events, unexpected consequences, sometimes requiring proper exploration and sometimes requiring some high skill score although don't expect any non-combat skill gameplay even half as deep as in Fallout. But now the developper himself used the comparison, answering a question of a player, so it's not a coincidence and really his main inspiration regarding this aspect :

Is there an actual main quest? Or is the game literally how you want to make it?

...The main quest is to become the world's most renowned evowok breeder, of course.

The open-ended gameworld is very intentional. One of the things that struck me when I first played the original Red/Blue Pokémon games was that by shifting away from the usual storyline-centric approach of most traditional adventure games, and even having the player take a back-seat to the combat, it was a style of game that could potentially allow for a very free level of interaction with its setting while still keeping the central gameplay intact - even moreso than very open-ended RPGs like the classic Fallout games which I also loved, perhaps.

 

[Grauken]

The thing I can't get over is that its a Pokemon-type game. I have no problem with the x-th save the world plot or to go down a dungeon to get a magic gimmick or kill an evil overlord. But breeding things to let them fight against other things just seem stupid. Not saying it is, but it just feels that way

 

[CryptRat]

That's totally understable, and that's fine.
The developper surely knew he was just making the game he would personally want to play and that it would not appeal to many people, it's free so it's not an attempt at making money anyway. The game is a CRPG meet pokemon (with a real pokemon vibe, not with a try to be cool look like the SMT games for example) with a hard beginning, rough and slow and with low production values, that combination of features limit the amount of potential players to a very low bar. And even probably knowing that few players would play his game he made a very big game, bigger than most commercial RPGs with many cool features here and there and a lot of handcrafted stuff. The game is very unusual all things considered, it's fun, big, relatively hard, relatively deep. The developper definitely spent an indecent amount of time working on the game and belongs to the real video game enthusiasts who gave us good games recently by making the games they would personally want to play.

 

[CryptRat]

Here we go.

Disclaimers : - It's been a while I've played the game, and while the review was half done a while ago I completed it recently and there may be some mistakes about things I don't remember right.
- The review is totally not without spoilers, I think this hidden gem needs more love, and since nobody would play it anyway I can give some reasons why I liked the game. The game is free, if you want to avoid any spoilers then don't read further and play the game instead.
- The review would be slightly more digest with some screenshots and I have none to provide other than those already posted, sorry for that.

The game is a top-down cRPG very inspired by Pokemon. You're playing as an evowok breeder making his way through evowok fighting competitions. You'll spend most of your time exploring new areas, catching new evowoks and fighting evowok matches. The world has its own structure and problems, but you're not there to save the world, only for the prestige inherent to famous breeders. The game has a detailed in-game manual.

One important feature of the game is that you can't manually save the game, the game uses an autosave and every action is saved. The game is structured around its save system and would be banal if you could save as you wish. Typically if it's the first time you play the game then you will probably run out of money in the beginning town where you won't get back from losing a couple of matches (or maybe not since they made the beginning easier since I've played it but I don't know how exactly). The game is very long, your actions have consequences and you have to live with them. Note that past the beginning I didn't have to restart my game again, but I always chose to keep away from nasty situations, nasty deals and nasty characters.


Unfortunately there's no character creation, you just choose a gender, a name and one of 3 starting evowoks. Some skill point allocation would have been welcomed. Your character has a couple of skills and stats.

Skills basically increase by using them but depending on the skill the amount you'll learn alone is capped and you'll also have to learn via books or teachers.

The tracking skill, sometimes also mentioned as your survival skill, allows you to survive better in hard climatic conditions, and also allows you to spot bandits on the world map before they spot you and be able to flee. A lot part of your teaching will come from people working under hard environnement.

The catching and taming skills work together and are used to get wild evowoks. When you try and get a wild evowok, there's a catching check, and if you pass the check then there's a taming check. A high catching score is necessary to get fast (agile) evowoks, while a high taming score will allow you to get high level evowoks. There are various ways to influence both tests, for example there are different kinds of nets efficient to catch different evowoks, and if you fail to tame an evowok then using a treat will give you a second chance to tame it.

A higher training skill allows your evowoks to gain more experience and to learn skills faster, in particular skills that you've personally learnt.

The first aid skill determines two things, the speed of your evowok's healing while walking, and your efficiency when using first aid kits.

Note that a couple of additional skills will be learned during the game.

You've got your own experience points, that you gain after each won match, and can be used to improve the level of the skills of evowoks. That's an important feature, because if you fight evowoks with higher levels than yours or just if you fight high level evowoks, the experience you gain is much higher than what your evowok skill gains by using the skill, which means you're ultimately very free to assign evowok skill points as you wish.

Your bravado is your trust in yourself, and must be kept high, otherwise your character becomes bad at doing anything, especially at taming evowoks. Besides when it's low people think you're a loser, so they're less likely to give you a quest, but can also occasionally take you in pity. Your bravado decreases when you fail at something, like when you lose a match or fail to catch an evowok, and increase when you're successful. It can also be manually improved by eating, drinking, smoking, ...

Your luck points act as extra lifes, meaning that instead of a terrible situation implying damage or even death, you'll lose a luck point and face a bad but not as bad situation. I actually don't know what happens when you're facing such a situation without any luck point left, but I don't want to know. One way to keep some luck points is to travel with gri-gris.

Your karma increases when you do a good action. It decreases when you act like a dick. I don't think your karma score has any inherent outcome, but there's a chapel where you can rest to transform some karma points into one more precious luck point. The number of required karma points you need increases by one with each new luck point gained I think.


The world is big and is a walkable map composed of towns and arenas. You can never travel further than what your map contains, and you need to find cartographers to expand your map. The maps are very expensive, sure it's satisfying finally buying the next map but I tend to think it limits exploration to a fault.

Towns contain shops where you can buy tools helping your fights and exploration, breeders you can decide to challenge in ante-matches and various characters sometimes giving you hints or quests.

Talking about quests, they range from boring delivery requests, that you'll perform anyway because you're always craving for money ,to quests requiring exploration, figuring out (I've got several quests remaining in my log I am unable to complete), that you can fail or involving choices often with unexpected consequences.

One quest involves a girl that you find in a part of a town, she asks you for 300 gold in order to leave the town and her mother. I didn't have the gold when she asked me, then I left and when I returned to town she was at her mother's house and asked me for herb known to allow aborting but not to tell her mother about it, which makes sense. I returned with the herb, left the town and when I got back she had used the herb as a poison to kill her mother and left the town.

The game is very dark, it couldn't be further from Pokemon on that aspect. There's a town infested with plague, slavers, wild evowoks kill people, and all these things are often presented in a quite crude way ; ransackers are just there, very proud, and there's not much you can do about it, or to be more precise I don't know if there's anything you can do about it since I stayed away from them as much as I could. As someone who's not really into this kind of grimdark plots I can't say I particularly liked this kind of stuff but it didn't annoyed me that much either because all the writing in the game feels like the writer just put everything he could have in mind at the moment so it's a big mess of everything one could imagine and maybe it's very stupid but if anything it's also the opposite of dull, many quests which seem banal end up with someone dying or similar consequences you really wouldn't have presumed, at least before having played a big part of the game, then you kind of imagine any quest can end up with someone dead.

Choices are not limited to quests, you'll deal with smugglers, pirates and all kind of nasty persons you really don't want to upset. As an example after you find a pirates'lair they will ask you for some money, stating that if you pay them and don't denounce them to authorities then you'll never have to face any assault on the sea ; that's after you may have lost some money that you invested on some merchant boat which of course never returned and that the authorities already asked you to signal where the pirates'lair is. Very banal you'll tell me, so I guess it's worth reminding once that the game is very easily 100 hour long and that death is “definitive” (you've got a few luck = life points). Risks vs rewards takes all its sense in this game, and sometimes you'll just choose not to interfere with people's affairs, especially nasty people's ones.

The first time I roammed through the desert I got dehydrated, my horse died then I losed like half my luck points and got close to a game over ; I can say that after that I did everything else I could do before entering the desert again. I don't think you can get a game over easily after a point but I think it's definitely possible if you're not careful enough, I think I got something like 15 luck points in total and lost like 10 during the game, and that's being very cowardly regarding quest, I quickly stopped accepting any quest which could seem suspect.

If you're into open-ended quests and like having to face the consequences of your actions then this game is for you, due to its very appropriate saving and luck system it puts most games to shame in those aspects. I wouldn't want to spoil everything, but they are some very cool and unexpected events, for example you'll buy a house at some point and will put your trophies in the house. First time I did that I didn't close the door, why would I close any door in the game, and when I got back the trophies were stolen. Hint : bringing a Yeti to a desert is not a good idea.

There are random events happening occuring while walking in the world map which depend on the part of the world. Your survival skill can allow you not to face one of this event based on the description (for the record there's a good one I kept avoiding before finally facing it).

The common bandit event is interesting since it's a good representation of how polished the game is. So first if you pass a survival check you can choose not to meet the bandits. If you're walking with a big evowok then the bandits themselves will choose not to meet you. Now when you face the bandits you have two choices, giving them everything you have, or trying to flee I guess. You're not a warrior in this game, you're just a breeder, the world is clearly not a safe place and you would often like to be able to fight people, fight back at the minimum, but you can't. That's very cool. Now only once I've tried to flee from the bandits and they left me half dead (I've lost one luck point for sure, maybe I also got injured but I can't remember) and had stolen my stuff. The following times I just left them take my stuff, there's a bank where you can leave your money anyway and since I've been stolen before there were not that much left to steal again. Now when your gri-gris and such are stolen, they don't disappear forever, they reappear later at various itinerant or sedentary merchants' shop where they were certainly sold by the thieves. By the way I also bought back the stolen trophies I mentioned earlier.

That's one part of the game, and it's well done, although I would have preferred if character stats were more involved. Now let's talk about the meat of the game, the evowoks.


In towns many characters will engage you in ante-matches, which will be one of your two main ways of earning money, the second one being to sell evowoks. In the beginning town especially you may end up in a game over for losing your money during ante-matches (as long as you haven't won an ante-match you can try it again, but the lost money is lost) without any way to get enough money to buy the first map which allows you to leave the town to be able and catch evowoks to sell, which is at least in theory some infinite way of income.

You can travel with at most two evowoks, which is an important feature. For example bandits will be frightened and won't rob you if you're travelling with a big (not high level, just big I think) evowok, now if you want to be able to catch a wild evowok it means it's the only evowok you'll be travelling with.

A second important feature is that during matches with other breeders the total level of the (1 or 2) evowoks you're using for the match is capped to the multiple of 5 just higher than the total level of the (1 or 2) evowoks used by the enemy breeder. This feature may be the first reason why the game is a very good game, since it's what makes you manage your evowoks cleverly, as well as choose the fights you can participate in and win. I can attest I've got pages of notes about the types and levels of evowoks of about every breeder in the game. The evowoks really vary in power, so as you get to know them one of your evowoks will be able to win a lot of fights even a lot above its level while some particular fights will require some time to find and build the appropriate evowok(s). A beaten breeder may be willing to teach your evowoks some skill. Some (all?) towns contain a pit, where fighting every breeder will give you some renown.

Besides towns there are fully dedicated arena areas where you get to fight strong breeders, beating all of them will give you renown and those you beat will accept to teach your evowoks skills.

Note that same evowoks you catch, high level ones especially, can come with no attack skill at all or with some skill they're currently very bad at using or on the contrary with some very strong skill they're good at using, some skill that aquiring via teaching would require levelling up one basic skill then learning and levelling up an intermediate one before being able to learn. So once you've catched an evowok it really does not mean you don't want to catch another one of the same type. Catching the different evowoks in the game is important because you get to have them identified by a specialist then, and your evowoks are significantly stronger against a type of evowoks you've identified.

Combat uses asynchronous turns (turns come faster based on the evowok's speed). Your evowoks can learn up to 5 different attacks at a same time, and the meat of the game is as much in the preparation, knowing the different evowoks you may encounter, knowing which fights to pick, sometimes using some items prior to the fights as much as the fights themselves. There's some interesting balance between evowoks, some big evowoks are undoubtly the stronger ones, they'll win their fights, but being slow they'll always take at least some damages so they are expensive to heal compared with small, fast ones which can fall to a few kicks but if they are fast enough they can also win easy fights without being injured, especially since damages to a body party will appropriately reduce its user's accuracy with skills involving this body part. The fights are not extremely complex but they are not brainless either, you can target body parts and different body parts control different stats, while the different evowok's moves also depends on a specific part (teeth to bite …). Also not every evowok is as good as another, for example the 3 ones you can choose at the beginning are good ones and at the beggining you don't really want to fight those especially before you get to identify them, and especially from good breeders who trained them well (which means good chances to hit). There's no fire vs ice « It's super effective » damage type, specific efficiencies are more subtle, for example it's possible to make flying evowoks fall down for high damages and biting a shell will damage the teeth of the attacker. The chances to hit with a technique increases with uses, but your character also gains a lot of experience which you're free to spend among skills among evowoks. There are not many different afflictions in the game but like many other things in the game they are well done. Burning is a good example, at the beginning of each of its turns the evowok burns for twice damages than the last turn, starting from 1, but it can choose to lose a turn to get back to half damage and so in particular in the first turn to stop burning ; in practice it's often a headache to decide between accepting to endure the successive damages or stopping the fire immediately (intermediate choices seem more stupid) depending on the ewovoks involved in the fight. When one of your evowok starts suffering too much blood loss you'd better resigning, especially if you don't own an item to heal it afterwards because it won't stop after the end of the battle, losing a fight is a big deal but having an evowok killed is a bigger deal. You can't use items directly in combat but you can use items before a fight for example to enhance your evowok's poison resistance or to add poison to its claws. Organs can be broken, then they won't heal anymore. One fun thing is that an evowok can live without a non-vital organ, possibly with some disabled skill then, while it dies when a vital organ is broken. Your evowoks will rarely die, in general if one of your evowok dies it means you searched for it, for example by bringing an evowok to a fight whose enemies' levels are too much higher or by never resigning from a very long fight you can't really win anyway.

Not every combat is one breeder against another breeder, there are free-for-all matches where several breeders bring their evowoks. Free-for-all ante-matches are a very good way of income, they are easier to win than duels because other breeders target randomly while you target cleverly and each of the defeated enemies gives you the ante after winning.

There's one important arena place where you need to win tournaments (a series of prestige matches) to gain trophies which come with big renown.

Let's talk about renown. First you need some renown to unlock some things such as being given quests and participating the prestige tournaments. Secondly the higher your renown the higher the ante during an ante-match. Note that with a high renown you're a rock star, for example a random event can then pop where you get to bed groupies.

Improving renown for high antes is important because economy in the game is tight, it's another well made aspect of the game. At the beginning everything from having an evowok identified to even switching the evowoks you're carrying is expensive and you'll be starving for money during the entire game up to the end. The maps unlocking new parts of the world are increasingly expensive (maybe even too expensive but anyway), you want to buy a boat at some point and you have to buy many useful items (potions, nets, which break, …). Itemization overall is good, you need to buy utility items and some specific items are used for quest. Besides ante-matches the second way to earn money is to sell evowoks. The average evowok will be sold for nothing, in particular at the local merchant (surgeons may want some for their organs and will pay you better), while so-called rare ones, often not available anywhere but if you know where to search you'll find them in infinite amount, can be sold for many more golds.

In my opinion the game does not have a lot of flaws. Compared to Pokemon it lacks the monster non-combat interactions with environments (cutting bushes, swimming ...). Interaction with environment overall is not a game strength, if you own the required item it's generally (always?) used automatically. Also if the evowok combat stat system is pretty complex and freely spending your character's experience points on evowoks' skills is very interesting, the character's own progression is unfortunately automatic. Also I don't know if the map unlocking new parts of the world being so expensive is such a good thing, sure you'll catch higher-level evowoks in further areas but you're not allowed to use them during fights against low-level ones, and renown is what determines antes, so I don't think it would break the game if they were cheaper. Finally I like dungeons, and the game does not have proper dungeons. But honestly these are almost details.


On more technical aspects, graphics are under average, but the game has a lot of different songs (I think there are like 100 but I can't remember where I've seen that), from what I remember I didn't like all of them but it's still impressive and I did like most of them anyway.


17 years of developement, and the game is huge. I put about 200 hours on my main playthrough. The game is free and is very easily the role-playing game with the most content I've played in a long time. I've seen most of what the game has to offer during one playthrough, but can't talk about quest branchings. There are some quests I refused to get involved into, some others I didn't solve, often because I could not, and I didn't try to deal with the completionist aspects (you gain a trophy for catching every evowok, and another for reaching maximal fame I guess). I have no idea if there's an actual ending to the game or not. I liked the hard and complex approach to Pokemon, the fights don't involve big parties but as far as small party fights go the game is complex, and the preparation part especially. The open-ended quests with no way to save your game were also somewhat interesting. Overall they're tons of little systems and the game tries to take into account many things that most other games don't. The game incorporates features which couldn't work in a traditional RPG but work very well in a Pokemon-like, like the level cap for battles and the forced ironman mode (your character can't die in combat). More than often the game seems to be a very polished and well thought combination of many features the developper wanted to see in a game. It couldn't really be more niche, Pokemon being very easy while this one is quite hard, lighthearted while this one is dark and, although Fallout is specifically described as the inspiration for open-ended quest by the maker of the game, the first game you would present to some Fallout fanboy is clearly not a game inspired by Pokemon, and it's not like the character stat-based gameplay is any deep in Evowok Breeder unlike in Falout by the way. Also the high amount of content may not totally justify the 200 hour playtime, the game is particularly slow, and you'll probably end up needing to grind if you've not played the game before. This game is a game which appeals to noone, and which requires some time to get into, but for me at least it was totally worth it.

Finally the developper is currently working on more content to add to the game.

 

[hello friend]

I just wish it would be possible to turn off the music, if you play for too long it will drive you insane.

 

[lightbane]

One quest involves a girl that you find in a part of a town, she asks you for 300 gold in order to leave the town and her mother. I didn't have the gold when she asked me, then I left and when I returned to town she was at her mother's house and asked me for herb known to allow aborting but not to tell her mother about it, which makes sense. I returned with the herb, left the town and when I got back she had used the herb as a poison to kill her mother and left the town.

The game is very dark, it couldn't be further from Pokemon on that aspect. There's a town infested with plague, slavers, wild evowoks kill people, and all these things are often presented in a quite crude way ; ransackers are just there, very proud, and there's not much you can do about it, or to be more precise I don't know if there's anything you can do about it since I stayed away from them as much as I could. As someone who's not really into this kind of grimdark plots I can't say I particularly liked this kind of stuff but it didn't annoyed me that much either because all the writing in the game feels like the writer just put everything he could have in mind at the moment so it's a big mess of everything one could imagine and maybe it's very stupid but if anything it's also the opposite of dull, many quests which seem banal end up with someone dying or similar consequences you really wouldn't have presumed, at least before having played a big part of the game, then you kind of imagine any quest can end up with someone dead.

It's like Pokemon Uranium, Pokemon Detro- I mean Reborn... Actually, every Pokemon fangame is grimdark like this. RPG Maker-tier graphics though.