Crudelis Review

Role Playing Games have never really been my cup of tea; I’ve only played Pokémon games to completion despite loving the main settings of RPGs: sci-Fi and fantasy. The games were always too long for me, the towering list of quests and side-quests quickly make the games seem like jobs and that is too much like hard work. So, when I heard about Whiskey Jack’s 60 minute RPG Crudelis, I was very hopeful that I would finally see the end to one of these stories.

The steampunk car looks so cool

Crudelis centers around Henry Shackelton, a scientist in a steampunk-inspired city who, in the opening sequence of the game, is stabbed in the stomach by some mysterious home invaders. Using one of his inventions, he gives himself 60 additional minutes alive to work out who his murderers were, and who they work for. Or alternatively, spend all the money he has access to in the world on prostitutes and booze.

The game is charmingly hand drawn in a very dirty, grimey style; fitting for a setting where everything is coal powered. The main characters are mostly unique, but as with all low resolution sprites the background characters are often seen repeated throughout the world map, which itself has 27 unique looking buildings, each with a different purpose. Overall, the game looks great, which is a pleasant change from the standard screenshots we see from other RPG Maker games.

An area of the map reserved for a lower class of people

Boasting 12 endings, I thought that I could get to a couple of them and have a good understanding of how to get the others. I’m not entirely sure I met any of the endings, unless the endings all involve dying with a Dark Souls-esque “You Have Died” message popping up and throwing you back to the main menu. Not through lack of trying though: I’ve played this 60 minute RPG for five hours now and still have no idea why Shackelton got killed at the start of the game.

This is one of three main faults I have with : a big chunk of why I don’t feel like I’ll ever finish this game is because I’m bored with the opening sequence, which is entirely unskippable, takes about five minutes to complete and is the same every single time. Each playthrough probably won’t last more than about 20 minutes on average, so a quarter of every new game is spent doing the exact same thing with no changes. Einstein would call this madness.

The cement factory that is always on strike

My second complaint is that it’s an RPG Maker game, and so is limited by that engine. The UI and menus are clunky and awkward to use, the NPCs get in the way and are solid so you often have to wait for them to move, the dialogue system auto selects the top answer and there is no midgame saving. These are things that, in a more customisable engine and with a bit more time and experience, are pretty easily fixed.

The third complaint is with what seems to be the random nature of how the interactions in the game work. One of the routine things I ended up doing was leaving my house and going straight to the bank to retrieve my money. After another sequence that is the same every time, you can withdraw around 80% of what is in your account, which is normally about 650 ducats. Except when it’s 780, for no discernable reason.

The bank that can't work out how much money I have

This causes problems with achieving the endings: at one point I reached a decision, chose one way and was killed pretty soon after. I obviously wanted to find out what happens when you make the other choice, so I repeated the playthrough to get back to that point, but I was inexplicably killed at an earlier point, having not done anything obviously different.

I wanted to get this ending but I have no idea how to get back there

This is where I think the game should take inspiration from one of my personal favourite games, Zero Escape: Virtue’s Last Reward, and how it handles multiple endings. ZE:VLR uses a timeline map, where each decision and outcome breaks off the main timeline to form this sprawling tree. Using this tree allows you to skip the large sections of the game you’ve already played and don’t need to see again, but you can only jump to places you’ve already been.