Smoke’s Review Of Blind Quest

I Think I Have CTE

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Role playing games, they are a popular genre for a reason. Recently a new title was released in the audio gaming world. It is named Blind Quest, not exactly original, but you can’t go complaining about a title and expect people to take you serious afterwards. I’ve been playing the game, and after a couple days I feel confident in my ability to review the game fully. Is that good or bad? Well you’ll have to read on to find out.

Disclaimer:
Thoughts and opinions expressed in a blog post are those of the author. They are not the thoughts and opinions of Black Screen Gaming.

Game Info

Developer: Max Depa via Audiogame Association
Platform: Windows & Mac
Developer’s website: audiogame.store
Price: €5.90
Demo: no
Genre: RPG

Developer’s Summary Of The Game

Blind Quest is a fantasy role-playing game where you will guide Nathan the mercenary in an epic adventure across the lands of Aetherna.
The Enchanted Castle of King Alen is invaded by ghosts. His daughter, Helen, is in search of a hero who can defeat this supernatural menace and only Nathan, a solitary mercenary, dares to help her.
Explore incredible locations such as the Desert of Sarteras and the Dungeons of Curigos and other 50 maps in 10 different scenarios to explore and interact with!
More than 20 enemies to face in an engaging turn-based combat system! Battle against terrible foes like the Necromancer, the Crystal Dragon and many more!
With 3 or more hours of gameplay and a high level of replayability Blind Quest – The Enchanted Castle is a true fantasy epic!
Save the reign of Reldia and princess Helen! Become a LEGEND!

Lets Play The Game

Download the game play

Smoke’s Thoughts

I went into this game without knowing anything about it. This was a blessing and also a curse, I didn’t know what to expect, but I assumed this was a PC RPG similar to others. I was expecting a smallish game I could spend a couple hours with, then write a review for. The price helped with this a lot, it is pretty cheap. With the first week sale of 20% off it is under $6.00, cheap enough to justify picking it up and trying.
First the good thing about the game. The story isn’t that bad. It isn’t the best, but then again it isn’t the worst. Normally I wouldn’t care about the story that much, but it is really the only semi-decent part of this game. The world is fantasy, and for some reason mercenaries are hated, doesn’t make sense but okay. I’m going somewhere with a princess because her soldiers are too afraid to go to this place, but after I agree to do it one of her soldiers comes with us. Again okay…it doesn’t make sense but I’ll roll with it. I talk to a game warden who warns me about wolves killing peasants, then right next to him is a peasant and a wolf living in perfect harmony that would make PETA proud. That is until the wolf decides the guy with a sword is better to attack than the de fenceless peasant, and of course I have to fight said wolf. At the start 1 silver coin is enough to live for 1 day, but 1,000 gold equals enough for one year, that seems a bit off unless they have really long years. Again this isn’t horrible, just ungood. I’m not going to go into pure story review mode, if you want that check out Smoke-j on Goodreads.
The voice acting in the game isn’t all that bad, a bit over the top yes, but not that bad. Though calling it a voice acted game is technically true, it is just one voice actor narrating everything in the game. Whenever you talk to someone the narrator gives you a summary of what they said, it is a bit odd but I get why and it does work. I personally prefer being able to use my screen reader for games so I can control the speed of play, but more about that later.
My positives are the story and voice over, that’s what I got, but it doesn’t make up for all the issues and problems with the rest of the game. I put in positives, so don’t go saying I’m just a cranky old man being negative all the time. It took a lot of work to think up those positives and I demand credit for it!

First things first, this is only an RPG in the loosest definition of the genre. This has none of the aspects that someone who enjoys RPGs would expect to have in a game. You’d expect weapon upgrades, armor and kit upgrades, skills, XP, different attacks, maybe some magic, a class system, world exploration, turn based combat, just normal RPG features. Well this game actually has none of that, you could sort of say exploration, but it isn’t exactly an enjoyable experience. These are all aspects someone would expect from a RPG, and since Blind Quest doesn’t have any of these I don’t even feel good saying this is an RPG. You are a person playing as a character, this is true but that is technically also true for every other game ever made in the history of video or audio games.

The navigation is so slow and clunky it makes the game hard to play. You cannot walk around, there is no controled character movement built into the game. It is not 2D or 3D, it is purely 1D. Each greater map is made up of sections you can move between. When in each section you use tab and shift tab to cycle through the different things to interact with, or to choose to move on in a cardinal direction. You cannot move around within the world first hand, you just move to a section and can hit tab and shift tab, then control to interact with something. Each section you are in has between 3 and 6 or so items you can interact with. This is annoying all on its own, but what makes it worse is the slowness of the voice over and the delay that forces you to cycle through options so slowly. Once you hit tab you have to wait for the item’s name to finish being spoken before you can tab to the next item. This is true for everything, almost always you have to wait for the item or dialog to stop speaking before you can move on. The first 50 times are annoying, the next 1000 times make you want to jump up, lower your head, and charge into your wall at full speed.
When tabbing through the item listing, if you come across an enemy you are automatically put into a fight. This is where the real fun starts. Dependant on an unknown stat either you attack first or second. Fighting consists of this. You press left arrow, wait to see if the thing is dead. If not it attacks you. You press left arrow again, repeat until the enemy is dead. This is the turn based combat, you don’t pick attacks, there is no strategy, just left arrow, a sword ching, and that’s all. To say it is disappointing is an understatement. It is only turn based combat in the fact that you take turns, it is not what everyone knows and has grown use to when the phrase turn based combat is used. If you are still conscious after your headlong plow into your drywall, combat is a brainless and refreshing way to relax and ponder your continued life of CTE.
After you kill an enemy you get XP. How much XP you ask? Well I don’t know and neither does anyone else because the game doesn’t tell you. How do you know how much XP is needed to level you ask? Well again I don’t know and neither does anyone else because the game doesn’t tell you. You get mythical XP and when the mythical XP reaches a certain mythical number you increase your pretty mythical level. If this is getting the sense of being snarky I assure you it is intentional. The snarkyness is a result of a splitting headache and realizing you might be talking like Mike Tyson if you keep playing this game, that and the cost of repairing that hole in your wall.
When you level what can you spend skill points on? Well funny you should ask, again no one knows because skill points are not a feature of Blind Quest. This is something most would expect in an RPG, but not in this one. I’m sure levels have something to do with health, damage, strength, but again no one knows because your health is a percentage, not a specific value. Also you never see how much damage you do, and you never see how much you are getting hit for. It’s all magical mystery, if it doesn’t make any sense don’t worry…that’s just the CTE talking.
So what about upgrading your stuff, with all this monster killing you must be getting gold to spend on upgrades. Well actually that is a false assumption, there are no upgrades to be had. There actually doesn’t seem to be money in the game at all. In fact there really aren’t even items in the game except for about ten thousand healing potions. You are doing this quest for 1,000 gold, but that’s really about it. Then again maybe that’s the CTE talking and I just forgot all about the plethora of weapons and armor, or maybe it all got eaten with the children. (No children were harmed in the writing of this blog post, if you don’t get the joke google it)

I’m sure someone somewhere is complaining about the sounds in the game. They aren’t the worst thing, but they can’t really be classified as good either. This is not a sticking point for me however. If a game is full of content and has a rich story and game play I think a lot of people are willing to forgive generic unexceptional sounds. Make the prettiest sounding game, and if it is a crap game then it’s still poop, just pretty poop. I’m not saying you can’t like poop, and I’m not objectifying poop, I’m just using it as an example. Everyone is free to poop their own poop no matter how I feel about it.

Though it is hardly even worth mentioning, the game isn’t without bugs on top of everything else. There are multiple points where you are told to go west, but you actually need to go east or vice versa. Also if you press tab too fast while waiting to be able to press tab you skip the continue prompt, and are put in the map, but then brought back to the continue prompt. Then when you press control to continue it also inspects the item you tabbed to. Not horrible, but it gets annoying nevertheless. There is also no conformation to exit, so if you didn’t save your game and press escape to exit a menu instead of backspace your game is lost and will load at your last save point. Finally of course it launches at 100% windows volume and you are deafened on first launch. I have no clue when developers will stop doing this! It is annoying, unnecessary, and it pisses me off with every game.

Who is this game made for? I really don’t know, maybe for really young kids? It is so simplistic that it would probably be good for the under 10 crowd. I know some people like simplistic games, but this goes way beyond that, it is overly simplistic to the point of satire. If you are a kid…well don’t read or listen to stuff on this site, go watch PewDiePie videos or whatever you do. If you are not a kid, well read the conclusion if you don’t have the picture yet.

Conclusion

I’ve honestly ran out of things to say. I normally write up a suggestions section in my reviews, but that is sort of pointless here. The game needs more to make it feel like a game. More items, faster game navigation, xp and levels, skill points, weapons and armor, different attacks, it needs so much that adding those would make it a new game which is no longer Blind Quest.

this is technically a RPG yes, but it is hard to classify it as such, even with my new case of the CTE. I didn’t enjoy this game at all. More than anything I don’t like a world I cannot move around in first hand. I strongly disliked the non-existent combat system. The forced delay on button presses was so damn angering. Then the lack of any RPG features you would expect in a game claiming to be a RPG just ruined everything.
I wouldn’t suggest purchasing this game, you won’t be getting your money’s worth out of it. If this was a free game I still wouldn’t suggest spending time testing it out to see if it’s worth getting into. I know that is harsh, but I’m not going to female genitals foot around the point.
I’m usually pretty generous with my ratings, if there are good aspects I try and let them balance out the bad. That is a lot harder here, and well, this was not an enjoyable experience for me at all.

rating: 2/10

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