Princess Remedy in a World of Hurt
Platform: PC/Steam
Developer: Ludosity, Remar Games
Premise: As a recent graduate from a school that trains healers, you must venture through Hurtland to heal the Prince and any passers-by who happen to be in need of your services.
Release Date: 01/12/14
I picked up Princess Remedy a while ago, mostly due to it being both free and widely regarded as being pretty decent. However, I never got around to playing it because I had other stuff to play and limited time to dedicate to doing so. Recently, I found myself in need of something quick and easy to review so that I wouldn't have to worry about it interfering with the pointy-end of this term and preparations for going on holiday, so here we are. The first comparison that springs to mind is with Undertale, because it feels very much in the same vein humour-wise, with interesting background characters and things like a jealous chest that won't let you open it if you've opened other chests in that run through. Like Undertale, 'combat' also consists of a fairly simple system of dodging incoming projectiles that gets steadily harder to the point of ludicrousness the further you go through the game; and like Undertale, the aim of the game is to help people.
'Combat' in Princess Remedy takes a route somewhere between bullet-hell shooter and puzzle game. You enter by offering to heal someone, which then takes you to a separate area where you have to shoot all the enemies to cure the random passerby of their malady. This starts off fairly easy, when the game only throws one or two non-projectile enemies at you at any one time, and gets even easier when you start to unlock the AOE flasks. However, the difficulty swiftly ramps up throughout the game as they introduce projectile enemies. In addition, at certain points in the game your upgrades start to be a disadvantage, or at least a duel-edged sword. For example, cover is fairly necessary during a number of the later-game encounters. However, because combat involves the Princess constantly shooting, and because her shooting destroys cover in a fairly indiscriminate manner, if you have enough combat upgrades unlocked that you can destroy the average piece of cover in only a few seconds then you, like me, will swiftly find yourself in a situation comparable to being stuck up a particularly foul-smelling creek in dire need of a paddle on more than one occasion. In addition, it has a fairly annoying tendency of being easy to fail and taking a fair amount of time to retry an encounter. That being said, the difficulty curve is competently mapped out and I never felt unfairly weak or overpowered against the enemies.
