Through Dark and Liar's Soul

Through Dark and Liar's Soul is a short dungeon crawler-style RPG created in RPG Maker VX Ace for the Swap in the Middle With You event. As such, the first half of the game was made by Liberty, while Red_Nova took over for the second half. Following a very mixed group of characters as they struggle to find their way through a twisted cave system known as the Under, the game introduces a number of interesting plot threads, clever mechanics and optional mysteries. Unfortunately, most of these concepts end up being used only in rather superficial ways, causing the game to utterly radiate unused potential.

Considering the circumstances in which this game was created, I found it quite impressive that I was unable to pinpoint exactly at what moment in the story the transferring of the project to the second developer had taken place. Although the different styles of both creators are noticeable sometimes, there is a sense of seamlessness in the plot, very much to the credit of both developers. However, in a contest such as the one Through Dark and Liar's Soul was created for, communication errors and problems of continuity are bound to happen.





Initially, the story of the game seems quite simple: Three lost surface dwellers who happen to meet in the dark halls of the Under attempt to find their way to the exit with the help of a friendly native. Yet as the journey progresses, secrets, conflicts and more complex backstories are revealed. Through cutscenes and optional lost letters that can be found on the corpses of less fortunate victims of the Under, the player learns more about the characters and the sad histories of the game's world. A nifty detail is that during dialogue, no character portraits are shown, but rather each character can be identified through a unique colour of their text (and name, if others mention it). While creative, the one problem I found with this is that one character's brown looks too similar to another's orange, causing me to have difficulty distinguishing between them.
While it is obvious that a lot of care went into each party member, the small scope of the project noticably limited their characterisation, causing them to stay limited to one or two visible traits each. It is not the characters themselves or the story as such that I had an issue with, however, but rather its direction and presentation. Right at the beginning, the player is confronted with a huge amount of dialogue before even being able to do anything other than walk around, and just one introductory fight later, a lot of text follows again. A certain clumsiness of the storytelling can be found throughout the entire game, as it has a tendency to feel slow or inefficient at times, providing information that sometimes just seems to not go anywhere. Apparently, there are five possible endings to find, but I only ever managed to get two.
Despite these problems, it's important to emphasise that overall the writing in Through Dark and Liar's Soul is still very well done, and in fact the narrative is probably the strongest aspect of the game.

The aesthetics are not necessarily special, but solid. Most of it is RTP-style with a few very interesting design choices that are even explained within the story. The battler graphics used for enemies in combat however have been taken from RPG Maker MV's resources, which turns out to work quite well. A greater problem is the audio aspect, as there is normally no music to be heard on-map, just some ambient background sounds. While I understand that this decision was made in an attempt to enhance the oppressive atmosphere of the Under, it honestly didn't work so well for me, and I believe that ironically enough, some actual music would have been less immersion-breaking than the constantly repeated howling of the wind.





The gameplay part however is where Through Dark and Liar's Soul both shows and wastes most of its potential. On-map, most of the player's time is spent walking through the caves of the Under, picking up collectibles. While this is fun for a while, it begins to lose both its appeal and its impact fairly quickly, as the ultimately rather linear dungeon turns out to not be as exciting as it could have been.
This ties into the problems of the other components of the gameplay. An important part of what makes Through Dark and Liar's Soul special is a simple cooking system that allows the player to combine unusable resources into consumable items. It's a cool idea, although the fact that the effects of the crafted foodstuffs aren't explained before making them is a little frustrating. But the real issue is that not only most foodstuffs turn out to not be that useful, they also simply aren't necessary most of the time. Due to the overabundance of ingredients, the ability to rest and fully heal at campfires and the short duration of the game, the crafting thereby loses value. Why is this such a problem?
Well, this may be a more personal approach to the game, but the one part that I was initially very excited about was a certain survival aspect I believed to have found in its concept. During the first part of the game, you have to move through a rather vast area consisting of many maps, with no campfires to rest or cook at in between. As a result, I got the impression that preparation through cooking is very important, as that must be the only way the player could last long enough to survive travelling between campfires. Unfortunately, it turned out that this is only true for the area between the first two campfires, and even there you can get through relatively unharmed once you know the correct way. I found that to be a pity, as the creators' decision to not focus on this survival aspect turned the entire cooking system - and by extension a large amount of the exploration - from a strategic core element into an unnecessary chore.





Combat is by far the weakest aspect of Through Dark and Liar's Soul: The best word to describe it would probably be shallow. Enemies very rarely do anything else but simply attack, and even the playable characters don't have a lot of interesting mechanics. While there are some twists to some of their skills that are interesting enoug to keep the battles from becoming outright boring, they generally lack depth. Two characters use skills that are fueled by points generated by taking damage, which means that it can easily happen that they don't get to use those abilities very often. One of the characters even possesses literally no skills apart from his normal (double) attack. The overly simple enemy design also causes certain foodstuffs to lose their value: What good is an item that removes negative states if you never get inflicted with negative states? Another oddity of the battle system is that allies and enemies can seemingly randomly get multiple actions per turn from time to time, and I could never find out whether that was intentional and what it is caused by.





As is to be expected from a contest game, there is also the oddball bug or typo here and there, and while annoying, they weren't game-breaking or heavily influential - with one exception. A specific restriction placed on the player is that they can only carry up to a certain amount of bottles, which are both used to carry normal water (a crafting ingredient) and Pure Water (a consumable item that revives a fallen character). This way, access to raising items is limited, and the player has to decide how many to keep versus how much water to have ready. Except they don't, because regardless of what the tutorial text says, the Pure Water does not take up a bottle after all, allowing the player to keep as many portions of it as they want.


All in all, Through Dark and Liar's Soul is an interesting little game that tries to do a lot of brilliant things, but ultimately doesn't manage to deliver the experience it sets out to convey. It is definitely not a bad game, but it falls short of its potential repeatedly, and ends up simply being playable and somewhat enjoyable, but neither terrible nor great.