Difficulty:

Just Right

Time Spent:

10 to 20 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Almost, but not quite"

It is very rare for an indie game to be competently made and satisfactorily fun during The Spirit Engine's time. The Spirit Engine came very close to being one, but instability in its code and certain flaws in its gameplay designs prevent it from being so.

The Spirit Engine is a game that combines elements from the squad-based, pseudo-real-time segment of the RPG genre and elements from the puzzle game genre. It also features a premise that combines sci-fi themes with high-fantasy.

The game is set in a world where magic and mysticism co-exist with science and technology, thus giving rise to scenarios such as soldiers with guns fighting alongside mages against inhuman creatures and undead monsters. The contrast can be a bit uncomfortable to players who are used to playing games with either sci-fi themes or high-fantasy but not both, though players who are used to hybrid themes like steampunk would find the Spirit Engine to be quite familiar.

Upon starting a new game, the player is prompted to select three out of nine possible characters to form a party with. This segment may yield more than a few hints to constitute a spoiler if the player bothers to read their backgrounds, but the game attempts to divert the player's attention away by raising a text message that advises the player to go for a party with a balanced mix of careers, of which there are three that will be described later.

This is an especially important message, as "themed" parties will suffer down the line; only a party of characters with different careers can prevail in the game. Yet, the game still allows the player to form a party that is composed of members of the same career anyway, though of course, the player has been warned early on that this is not optimal.

What the game does shoehorn the player into doing is to pick one character from each category of personality. There are three: a naïve/goofy/dim-witted archetype, a brash/aggressive/bitter kind of person and a well-travelled and level-headed sort. The writing for the dialogue in the game is rigidly written around these three personalities. Regardless of whom exactly a party member is, much of his/her dialogue will follow the lines written for his/her kind of personality.

There are minor variations and unique secondary quests depending on the characters chosen, but these are not numerous enough to disguise the rigidity of the story-writing.

This can be a bit of a disappointment to players who expect variations in storylines according to differences in the characters that have been chosen to fill out the party with.

On the other hand, the writing is generally very competent at developing the characters as the story progresses. In fact, the player characters are more than likely to endear themselves to a player who is playing the game for the first time, such is the efficacy of the writing. Even playing the game again with different characters and realizing the aforementioned rigidity of the story designs may not damage the emotional attachment that the player may have developed for the previous party of characters (though it likely will prevent any attachment to the second party).

However, the writing is not technically flawless. Aside from the rigidity regarding personalities mentioned earlier, there are spelling and grammatical mistakes, which not only suggest lack of proofreading, but also the lack of quality control in story designs. For example, there is one segment in the game where a player character refers to another in the plural sense, suggesting that this part of the story may have involved not just one other party member but more than one.

Of course, one can argue that this game is mostly the work of one person, namely the creator Mark Pay. Yet, these are undeniably flaws, which should not be glossed over or, worse, ignored just because much of the hard work came from an irrefutably diligent and remarkably talented person.

Another, but more minor, complaint about the writing is that there are lines that have been written for parties with characters from the same career. There is a bit of banter between characters of the same career about certain aspects of their profession, or more often than not, some chiding at one another for not being up to the expectations of their career. The player would be forgoing these if he/she goes for a party of balanced configuration.

Anyway, returning to the premise of the game, the prologue starts with an exposition on a mining incident that has gone wrong, suggesting that a crisis is afoot as well as hinting at the overarching story. The prologue moves on to show the player characters, who apparently are still very much absorbed in their current lives. A magical intervention later has them standing together in a glade far away from where they were, with a mute rotund fairy for company.

Bewildered and lacking answers, the protagonists have little choice but to follow the fairy while figuring out what to do next, not knowing that they would embark on an adventure to save eternity itself.

The game's controls for moving around in the game world are very simple, due to the fact that the game world is 2-D. Players who are used to side-scrollers would be quite familiar with this game, though it has to be mentioned that the party of player characters do seem to move about rather slowly. On the other hand, most levels are not very great in length, and there is a handy feature that makes trekking more convenient, which will be unlocked for each level after the player has managed to get the party from one end to the other.

The player will encounter NPCs, which mainly serve to provide exposition on what is happening in the story. The progression in the dialogue is generally linear, so the player should not expect RPG elements like dialogue options. The story merely sets the tone for the game, and rarely affects the gameplay.

Most of the actual gameplay involves combat, which is fortunately sophisticated enough to be interesting and fun.

Combat involves two parties, one of which is the player's and the other is the enemy's. The members of either party is lined up in rows that are facing each other. The position of a character relative to those of his/her/its team-mates and those of the enemies is an important factor to consider in combat. In the case of the player's party and certain enemy parties that benefit from more sophisticated A.I. scripts, this position can be changed by shuffling the members around. This is called "rotation" in-game, and is the aforementioned puzzle game element.

As an illustrative example of the importance of positioning, the foremost character in a party, from the perspective of the opposing party, is the one that bears the brunt of direct attacks, so this position is usually reserved for the party member that has the tanking role for the time being.

Another example is that although direct attacks that have been made by a party member would pass through other party members in front of him/her/it, the attacks may not hit immediately if they are composed of projectiles that have to move across the screen to strike members of the opposing party. In other words, the projectiles fired by the foremost party member would generally hit first.

The position of party members also determines who gets struck by attacks that come from above. There are many enemies that are capable of doing this, and all careers for player characters have one or two skills that can perform such attacks. Such attacks that come from the sky (or ceiling) bypass any barriers that may have been erected for defence. The player has to look out for any signs of such attacks, such as incoming projectiles from above, and shuffle his/her party accordingly to distribute the hits or to concentrate them on one member.

If there is a complaint about the positioning system, it is that the player cannot change the order in which the player characters are arranged. The party will always be arranged in this manner: the cynical one is preceded by the well-travelled one and succeeded by the goofy one, the goofy one is preceded by the cynical one and succeeded by the well-travelled one, and so forth. There is no way to rearrange this order, which can lead to problems when trying to have specific characters take or dodge attacks.

There are also attacks that the player's party cannot dodge, despite the player's efforts at positioning. There are enemies that can fire ethereal beams, arcs of eldricht lightning and rays of energy from above that strike instantaneously; the most that the player can do is endure them and heal when necessary.

Fortunately, enemies cannot keep doing this, due to a system of mana points that affects both the player's party and the enemy's.

Every time a character on either side uses a skill, he/she/it may need to consume mana. This is especially the case for player characters, for whom just about every skill requires the consumption of mana. Enemies get to have skills that do not require mana, but these tend to be weak attacks that the player can weather better than abilities that do require mana.

For the player characters, their mana does not replenish automatically, at least not without help from the items that they may equip. They have to take the "Recharge" action to regain mana, which takes up valuable time in which they are vulnerable to any incoming attacks. In the case of characters of the Mage career, they must have mana to do anything other than Recharge.

On the other hand, most enemies do not have to spend time to actively replenish their own mana reserves, which are ever invisible to the player. Some do have to perform animations to prepare for their next attack,and some do have animations that clearly show that they are collecting mana (usually also for an impending attack), but the rest have self-replenishing mana. This can seem quite unfair, but if the player has observed and noticed how useful and powerful certain player character skills can be at wiping out the opposition, this is quite understandable.

Speaking of player character skills, these are split among the three careers, which are the Rifleman, Priest and Mage. (It should be pointed out here that all Riflemen and Priests are males, whereas the Mages are all females.)

Generally, each skill is unique to one of the three careers. The only exception is Rifle Attack, which is common to the Priest and Rifleman, though the player would discover that it is of more worth to the Rifleman than the Priest. It appears to have been included for both careers so that the party can inflict damage even when they lack mana, because this is the only offensive skill that does not need mana to use. Despite this, a discerning player would notice that the Priest is much better off spending his time on something else other than Rifle Attack.

The Rifleman is perhaps the main damage-dealer in the party. Most of his skills revolve around firing bullets of a few kinds at enemies, in addition to less offensive skills like throwing lassos at enemies to paralyze them and self-replenishment of health (which is useful for having him take the brunt of direct attacks).

The Priest is practically the "battery" (for lack of a better word) of the party. He can expend his mana on recharging his team-mates' mana, or to heal them, whichever is expedient at the time. He also has combat skills that make him far more efficient against undead or demonic enemies. It should also be noted here that the Priest is incapable of healing himself, which is a deliberate design decision intended to make sure that the player cannot win via attrition so easily.

The Mage is the party's best source of defensive measures. She can erect barriers that block direct attacks, as well as most of what enemies may throw over their heads. There are two types of barriers, each associated with one of two skills, and deciding which to raise (or both, or none) is an important consideration when balancing the survivability of the party against its damage output.

The different careers can do more than just the above, but a meticulous player would discover that they are most efficient at doing just these and nothing else. This is so because of certain designs of the combat system and the designs of enemies in this game.

One of these designs has the player's party returning to full health as soon as a battle has ended in the player's favour (if it did not, this usually leads to a straight game over). This means that the best strategy is the one that ends the battle as soon as is possible, and this is generally only possible with party builds that focus on doing as much damage as possible while preventing party members from being taken out, but not necessarily unharmed.

Other builds, such as those that favour survivability, are just not as efficient. This is especially so when there are enemies that can heal themselves, which can stretch out a battle for too long, which is not in the player's favour because of the game's instability (which will be described later).

Moreover, some of these skills have luck as a factor, which is never a reliable game design. For example, the Priest's Hand of the Gods skill is described as being able to autonomously go for the enemy that is most vulnerable to magical damage, but this only happens if the digital dice roll is in the player's favour'; the skill may well hit some other enemy instead, and not necessarily the optimal one.

There are factors other than those associated with the player's party to be considered in battles, which gives the some subtle sophistication to the game's combat system. However, like the designs for the player characters and their skills, these are not entirely flawless.

Attacks that are composed of projectiles have their effectiveness determined by the placement of the party member that made them, as mentioned earlier. However, this is not the only factor governing their effectiveness. The speed of the projectiles is also another factor, e.g. faster projectiles may be able to overtake slower ones.

The significance of these two factors becomes apparent when the player attempts to time projectiles such that they hit the best target in the other party. If the projectiles do not make it in time, the other team may shuffle its members (in the case of parties that have the A.I. scripts to do so) or its members may use abilities that block said projectiles or otherwise render them inefficient. The player may also be attempting to time the erection of Kinetic or Magic Shields such that they block enemy projectiles in time, so knowledge of these two factors help a lot.

(Of course, this means that the player will need to have fought the enemies that fire such projectiles more than a few times and observed them all the while.)

One of the factors that govern the party's power is the level of the party; all characters share the same level. The party's level can be raised by earning experience points from completing quests and defeating enemies in battle and having the experience count breaching thresholds; this is a mechanism that veterans of RPGs would be quite familiar with.

With a higher party level, the player characters' skills become more powerful overall. In addition, achieving a level grants a point to each party member that can be spent in any of their skills to augment it further. Certain characters favour certain skills more than the rest, such as a hard-bitten priest who happens to specialize in dealing divine damage to undead, but is not so skilled at healing the party.

As mentioned earlier, the game uses a pseudo-real-time system for combat. Every individual has a queue of actions that he/she/it has to enact. The game uses the term "skill chain" to describe the queue, supposedly because the character must follow this queue without any deviation. The player can set chains for his/her player characters to follow.

However, in practice, they are rarely of much practical use. The player is more than likely to forgo them altogether and meddle with the player characters' actions on a moment-by-moment basis. That the AI does not follow any chain at all and has characters under its control taking any action according to its whims makes skill chains even harder to use for the purpose of defeating enemies. This is mainly so because chains can only be composed of up to three actions, which is too little for sophisticated chains.

Unfortunately, the game does not provide enough tools to assist the player with the timing of attacks and defences. As an illustrative example, there is no way to pause the battle while retaining a view of the action. The only way to pause during battle is to access the skill chain menu of any character, but this removes the player's view of the battle, which is undesirable.

Most of the battles in the game are a matter of timing and planning, so they reward experience and familiarity. Unfortunately, for players who despise unpredictable game designs, there are factors of luck which affect the gameplay.

To cite one such design, the A.I. appears to be quite random in selecting which of the abilities that an enemy with multiple abilities will use next, which can lead to some frustration, especially in the latter parts of the game where there tend to be more of such enemies.

For example, there are enemies that can render themselves ethereal and become virtually invulnerable, so if the A.I. has them resorting to this a lot, it causes the battle to stretch for longer than the player would be comfortable with.

To cite another example, there are enemies that may choose to use abilities that stun the entirety of the player's party instead of attacking, which can lead to problems in timing attacks and defences. This is especially a problem in the last part of the game, where there are enemies that can inflict a lot of damage and which are supported by such multiple-skill compatriots.

To cite yet another luck-dependent design, enemy attacks that toss projectiles in arcs follow trajectories that are randomly directed at the player's party members. They may be tossed low enough for any shields that the player has erected to block, or they may be tossed so high that they go over the shields and hit the party member at the rear.

In addition to fickle mechanisms, there are design flaws to deal with during combat; these are worse than the aforementioned unsatisfactory skill chains.

For one, the display interface that appears during battle is inadequate. There are numbers floating above the heads of player characters that denote their hitpoints, but there are none for enemies; instead, to know the health of enemies, the player has to hover the mouse cursor over their sprites and read a text display that appears at the bottom of the screen.

Moreover, that the hitpoint numbers above player characters are by default in white means that they lose visual contrast if the player enters a level with a light-coloured background. A similar problem may occur for the blue mana counters below the player characters' sprites.

Then, there are the icons that are supposed to represent the skill chains that the player characters use. All of them appear as circles with stars. Their colours differentiate skill chains of different player characters, but not between different skill chains of the same player character. There is no visual indicator for which skill chain is currently being selected either. The most reliable way to know which skill chain is which is through their tooltips, which only appear a second after the mouse cursor is over them; this is not optimal.

All these design flaws make these icons rather useless at managing battles.

The barriers that the mage can erect are some of the most important tools at the player's disposal, but they are affected by a design flaw that affects player characters too.

Player characters are knocked out when their hitpoints are taken down to zero or below it. To revive them, the party's Priest must use his Party Heal skill until their hitpoint counters are raised above zero; this can be a source of frustration. The game could have just set the downed characters' health counters to zero instead of sending them to the negative regions.

(As a side note, player characters can have their hitpoints and mana going up to twice their starting amounts during battle, but this is not much of an advantage as the time needed to achieve this is not practical, especially when the A.I. will not give the player the chance to do so.)

Kinetic and Magic Shields also have hitpoint counters that are similar in design to those that the player characters have. However, these counters are not visible to the player in any way, which is a major inconvenience. Shields can also be brought down to negative "health", and they will only reappear when their hitpoints are brought above zero. Until then, the shields are non-functional.

On the other hand, Shields do not have a limit to their hitpoint counters, which means that they can be brought up to tremendously high levels through repeated use of their associated skills, which can sometimes make battles a forgone conclusion. This is especially doable if the player can obtain a couple of items in the game that raises shields automatically.

Shields have very generous hitboxes, but they do not go below the strata beneath player characters. Although this is generally not a problem throughout most of the game as there are no enemies that can attack from beneath, it does pose a problem much later in the game when there is an enemy that bobs up and down as it makes its attacks. Some of its attacks may actually go below the shields. These hit the foremost party member automatically, thus showing an oversight with the design of hitboxes for shields.

Other than the issues mentioned above, most of the battles are very fair and interesting challenges that require the player to analyze any advantage that the enemy party has and counter it. However, most of these advantages can be neutralized by having the player's Mage erect shields repeatedly, which can seem a bit rote. Fortunately, some other fights require more than just this.

For example, there are enemies who generally hide behind their compatriots while performing attacks that while powerful, can be interrupted as long as the player can injure them, which is easier said than done when there are meat-shields in front of them. The solution is to use attacks that bypass said meat-shields, of course.

Another example involves noticing that enemies that have the capability to become completely immune to all attacks are not necessarily very good at protecting their fellow party members. For example, there are more than a few ghostly enemies that can hide away in their own dimensions, such that all attacks pass through them harmlessly – to hit anyone behind them. After the player has figured this out, he/she may exploit this by simply killing any enemy behind them first before turning his/her attention to them.

Yet another example is a certain enemy that appears late in the game with a powerful laser cannon. Having just one of them is still manageable, as this enemy has a very slow firing rate. However, the game often has more than one of them; they will fire simultaneously because they start the fight at the same phase in their attack cycles. To prevent them from attacking at the same time and overwhelming any defences that the player has, the player has to stagger one of them such that they attack out of phase.

Some of the solutions can seem a bit cheesy (especially those that involve the party's Mage doing nothing but raising shields), but they can be very satisfying when the player has figured them out for tackling enemies that once gave the player a lot of trouble.

On the other hand, once the player has figured out the easiest solution for defeating a certain set of enemies, the player can resort to cheesy grinding to build up his/her levels. The game will respawn parties of enemies whenever the player re-enters a previously explored level, so the player can exploit to grind on the same sorts of enemies over and over just to accumulate experience and money. The game designer has thought of this though, and has wisely implemented a system of diminishing returns if the player is grinding on enemies with power levels that are below the level of the player's party.

For the ease of the player that is going through the game for the first time. There are notifications that will pop up to inform the player of the capabilities of new enemies that the player will encounter. These are very handy, as these enemies can be a handful to the unfamiliar, but the notifications do somewhat spoil the suspense.

The game is undeniably an RPG, albeit one with a rather linear story with next to no decisions for the player to make. A system in the game that would be familiar to RPG veterans is the inventory system and the gear in the game. However, this aspect of the game is very underwhelming.

Every player character at most will have only three slots for items: one for armor, one for a talisman or amulet, and one for rifles. In the case of the Mage, her Rifle slot is completely useless, as she is restricted from using a Rifle. Moreover, the player can store up to only six spare pieces of equipment. Such limited gear options can seem rather stifling. On the other hand, there won't be much variety in the gear selection in the entire game, though this does not make the limited inventory system any less dissatisfying.

The documentation of the game includes a list of all items that can be purchased in the game. This was intended to compensate for the inventory system's inability to provide any further description for an item beyond a very short line of text that appears in the bottom of the screen when the cursor is hovered over a mouse. Unfortunately, the documentation is also a spoiler of what to expect from the game, and also highlights the lack of variety in the items.

However, the documentation does not inform the player where in the game that they can obtain the items. Some of the items are associated with some of the nine characters and the secondary plotlines associated with them. There will not be any more elaboration on these for fear of spoilers, but it should suffice to say that most of their worth is to the benefit of the game's story and not necessarily the gameplay.

The game depends on stylized pixel art for its visual designs. They may seem archaic to some, but for works of pixel art, they are rather detailed and never show any sign of laziness. The background is lavish, especially in the more rustic regions of the world that this game is set in. Even the ground beneath the player characters have been given details, though some of them appear whimsical, such as checker and diamond patterns appearing within the earth for no discernible reason that can be explained with geology.

Characters are portrayed using sprites of whimsical bodily proportions, but otherwise they have enough details to suggest that they are human. What is disappointing though is their lack of animations, especially during non-combat situations.

It would not take long for an observant player to notice that sprites for human characters can be generally lumped under several categories, three of which are for three careers. Many characters share the same animations, suggesting that the sprites have merely been generated from a few original ones.

Frames are often recycled for expressions that are similar, giving the impression that while the game designer has thought of the need for some authenticity in the story proceedings, he did not have the time to implement visual variety. Of course, he is working alone, so this setback is understandable.

On the other hand, the player probably would be looking at the text that pops up on-screen whenever there is dialogue or monologue. As mentioned earlier, the writing is surprisingly good, though spattered with typos here and here. A player who is concerned with the story probably won't be paying much attention to the animations on-screen – not that there is much to see anyway.

It should also be mentioned here that the creator of the game had made quite a competent attempt to try to work hints about upcoming challenges into the writing without including spoilers. For example, there is a segment in the game where dialogue in the game suggests that the player should be redistributing gear for the benefit of one particular party member.

During combat, the variety in animations increases a bit, but there are still many recycled animations for sprites, especially for player characters. For example, the Mage may have different hand gestures depending on the character chosen for the Mage role, but she has the same hand gestures for all of her spells. Another example concerns enemies with melee attacks, all of whom appear to just slide forward to come into contact with the sprites of the player characters.

Speaking of sliding sprites for enemies, enemies that resort to close combat attacks will not die when they are performing such animations, even if they have been dealt the killing blow; they only die when they return to their original positions. This means that the player is not able to stop charging enemies in any way, which is a lost opportunity for more sophistication and authenticity in the designs for battles.

At least the sprites and animations for anything other than characters are quite pretty to look at, though it has to be kept in mind that being a game that depends on pixel art, Spirit Engine won't be offering pizzazz that even very old RPGs like those from Black Isle can offer.

In fact, the game has very low resolutions: it is only around 500 by 500 pixels. The small screen size does not hurt the visual clarity of the game, but it does render the composition of enemy parties ahead impossible to scout out. The entirety of the enemy party can only be known when the player initiates battle, which can be a problem to players who prefer knowing what he/she is going up ahead. That the game randomizes the composition of regular enemy parties only adds to the frustration of this problem.

The sound designs of the game are more satisfying than its graphics. This is likely due to the fact that the sound designer for the game is not Mark Pay, but Josh Wheschel, who is surprisingly talented at composing aural content.

With the exception of dialogue and just about anything associated with communication between humans, there is a sound clip for just about every on-screen occurrence, especially during battle. In fact, they are a lot better at indicating changes in the situation than the visual indicators.

The most impressive aspect of the game's audio designs is its music. This is where Josh Wheschel's talent shines. Most of the soundtracks are surprisingly pleasant electronic tunes, which are generally appropriate for the current situation. In fact, much of the immersion factor of the game can be attributed to the music.

The game comes with a manual that is also designed with the same development software as the game, which is the first version of Multimedia Fusion. In addition to the list of items that has been mentioned earlier, the manual has useful information that the game's settings menu lack, such as the list of hotkeys for the game, as well as more in-depth information on the skills that the player characters have, including even the equations which are used to calculate the numerical output, e.g. damage, of skills.

However, there are still a few things that the documentation omits. For example, the manual does not inform the player that skills can only reach a maximum level of 30. It also does not inform the player of the significance of visual indicators for status effects.

With all of the designs that have been mentioned above, the Spirit Engine would have been a flawed but still decent game, and an impressive one too for being mostly the work of a single person. Unfortunately, it is very unstable.

Playing more than half an hour raises the risk of the game crashing, especially after a battle has been concluded in the player's favour (which makes such a crash even more infuriating). Even though the game has been patched four times, the final version, 1.04, is still crash-prone. A meticulous player may figure out that quitting and restarting the game after saving helps, but this is not a satisfactory work-around.

In conclusion, The Spirit Engine would have been a good game, especially when it is a garage game that is made from scratch mainly by a single person and one that is now freeware too. Unfortunately, instability and design problems, which are acknowledged by its creator too, make this game difficult to recommend despite being free.