The writing here is unshockingly rather cliche and amateurish, but that does suit the production and doesn't really detract from the experience. If it was rather serious and consummately well written, you'd end up taking the rest of the game too seriously. Instead it's a bit juvenile, which helps you parse the low-key, low-budget elements with a bit of a smile on your face. On a basic level you're an evil dude who did evil, before being captured and then offered an opportunity to do the evil again. The motivation at the beginning of the game seems to be little more than 'I am not fond of people'.I'm not trying to malign amateur productions - I mean this is a blog, after all - but when your character calls someone an intrepid instead of insipid fool, well, you're not lifting the heavy word weights. Unless he was trying to say the dude he just murdered had a real sense of adventure, at which point maybe the writing is just going over my head. The dialogue is trite, but ridiculous, with a real b-movie charm. Characters will try to reason with your guy, or prattle on or give hubris filled speeches but all the uncrowned King Asshole comes back with is "I kill you now".
Visually the game is ... Unflattering. There's nothing super attractive here to speak of, and comparing it to SNES games goes in the SNES games favor. I mean I've played a lot of goofy retro games in the last couple years and this one falls into the general category of "not artistically talented". I'm always sort of surprised that people don't just steal art assets from old SNES games no one remembers, though maybe they do and I just don't notice. Anyway yeah, it looks drawn in MS Paint. It doesn't hurt to look at or anything, but it's not winning awards for visual fidelity.The music, as well, is pretty weak. It's not Woolfe bad, but it's pretty bland. It sounds sort of like middle of the pack NES soundtrack, or maybe Genesis/SNES. Not sure how to describe it, beyond "not painful to listen to, but not good either." There are a couple more upbeat tracks here or there, but nothing much stands out.
The gameplay works fine; you have a melee attack, and if you stand still you can fire off charged fireball sort of shots. There's sort of a neat element in that the charge requires you to stand still, but you can hold the charge and move - It just doesn't charge you up any further - so a chunk of the gameplay is finding when to charge, then shifting position til it is fully charged and unleashed the big 'ol triple fireball. Enemies do touch damage, I think, but also usually have melees of their owns or special attacks. You can also cast spells, which is sort of where the boredom sets in, since the game gives you a heal pretty early on and there's basically no tension for the next hour or so I played.
Anyway in the course of the game I broke out of jail after being betrayed by my subordinate Asshole Junior, then went through the sewers and wandered around for a while. You're an asshole in this game, but it also generally comes off that everyone else is an asshole as well which sort of muddies the water a little. You don't kill random townsfolk, but you kill just about everything else. Once you get out into the wilds there's more random stuff to murder, so you murder that stuff too.
In summary EvilQuest is passable, and might be worth picking up in a bundle, but it's not really exciting or great at anything. I did enjoy the moments in the game where people talk trash at your character and he threatens to violent murder them rather than just taking it on the chin.
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