Toymaker - Prologue

It's a rare dev that custom-builds every part of a one-man project. Save for a few key scripts, Toymaker - Prologue looks, sounds, and feels like a very different creature than RPG Maker 2k3 usually wants to create. Moody and atmospheric, it depicts what I can only describe as Santa's North Pole undergoing some kind of Game-Of-Thrones-ian ragnarok, and it manages to present that setting with such gravity and clarity of purpose that the places where the game is lacking feel more like rough patches than oversights.

On top of that, Toymaker - Prologue isn't simply a demo. It's a complete story, separate from the upcoming Toymaker title, and a non-trivial effort for someone who is also single-handedly custom-building a feature-length game from scratch at the same time. It has branching paths, multiple endings, and the kind of slow-burn lore that makes Souls fans quiver with anticipation.

I didn't feel fully engaged every moment I was playing it. The map navigation is sometimes cumbersome and the plot sometimes feels like there is a story that the player is supposed to already know by heart, even without taking the deep secrets of the setting into account. Still, the moments where I was pulled in were powerful ones, and the game lingered in my head after I'd finished.

There are far worse things to build than a story that stays with the player, and I will be checking out Toymaker when it gets its 2017 release.

Mechanics

The crunch of the game is a side-view battling ATB, done in the Final Fantasy VI style. Meters fill fast, actions come frequently, and attacks are blink-and-you'll-miss-it quick, rather than lavish Chrono-Trigger-esque spectacles of light and sound. Only a few characters join your party, one of which you can ditch, and they only get a few special abilities apiece. MP is very limited, healing in combat is almost exclusively done through tricklingly slow regens, and there are a wide variety of deleterious status effects to counter those out.

Combat in Toymaker - Prologue feels like rolling around in the mud, trying to stab your opponent in the kidneys before he can do the same to you.

And it works.

There is an element system with possibly the four grimmest elements I have seen vying for dominion over Toymaker's hardscrabble world. Root, Spirit, Frost, and Snow make up a bleached, unhappy pantheon, and they are a strategic choice more than a tactical crutch when the fades to black and the battle music plays.

You don't typically kill enemies in Toymaker by guessing their elemental weakness and then hammering them with spells. You maybe tag a durable enemy in the back line with a DoT and then go to work on the frontline with knives and spears, but only if you're sure you need to spend that MP now, or else blow through your limited out-of-combat healing items afterward because you couldn't finish the fight quick enough.

The game does boast a small store and a currency system, and you won't get stranded out in the wild, unable to replenish your stock if you make a point of fighting everything you come across, but gear options are very limited. Furthermore, monsters don't respawn, making money and exp both finite resources. Some monsters run from combat, taking their rewards with them, although I did not find myself falling behind the curve because of this. On the contrary, difficulties were very carefully balanced, and my deliberate efforts to break the game in my favor only resulted in the end fight being a moderate challenge, instead of a dire one.

Aesthetics

The first thing that drew me to Toymaker were the enemy battlers. Gaunt, winter-starved bears rearing up on their hind legs. Giant foxes, their muzzles daubed with gore. Something called the Straw Goat, which somehow succeeds in giving actual menace to the name rather than being a laughable bit of Pier One kitsch, slouching slowly into view. All of these are picked out in a gloomy, low-res style that absolutely works. Everything you meet feels dangerous. Nothing is fully understood. Nothing is mundane.

The game uses a muted color palette, favoring icy blues and whites, raw browns, and the occasional warm yellowy-orange as contrast. These are implemented perfectly in combat and on the overworld map, and they help smooth out some of the roughness of the town and dungeon maps, which otherwise feel 2k3 in sort of a garish way.

Those town and dungeon maps were probably the second weakest part of the game during my playthrough. The distances between places felt long and empty. NPCs had little to visually distinguish them. I felt sort of lost each time I returned to town, and a little bored when I was between battles in the wilderness. Laying out dungeons and the town in a context map, like the overworld, would have been a fun, neat, and still atmospheric alternative, and I feel like this was a missed opportunity by the game.

Although not as missed as finding someone to write the music would have been.

The soundtrack is where Toymaker - Prologue falls flattest. In a game where the scoring should echo the themes of isolation, threat, and the slow unraveling of a mystery, only a few of the tracks felt like they hit the right notes - and then only sometimes. The town's theme was by far the most hodgepodge of the lot, but none of the others truly shone. Fortunately, I was able to mostly tune them out because of the...

Setting and Story

This is Toymaker - Prologue's single best attribute, and I will buy the full game on the strength of it alone.

The player starts en medias res, journeying through the dark with a friend, to find a girl lost in the root-caged tunnels underground. There's a bit of prologing before that, just enough to drop a tantalizing cluster of setting hints, but mostly it's a cold open. Nothing is tutorialized. The world is not hastily explained. The player is handed the story like a puzzlebox and told "here. See if you can put it together while you're trying not to die."

From the tunnels, Toymaker unfolds into a wintry wasteland to which the last non-supernaturally-parasitized people in the land barely cling.

NPCs complain about food, predators, muse about whether the gods are truly dead, take comfort in small rituals and closely-bonded societies, and display exactly the sort of superstitious xenophobia that you would expect of a colony of elves who have long been living in the ancient shadow of evil santa.

Toymaker is a Christmas story, by the way, but more in the pagan-yule-and-entrails-on-the-tree sense than the presents-and-family-and-a-Tim-Allen-movie modern style. It goes to some pretty impressive lengths to talk past this without actually hiding it, and only occasionally did I find myself drawn out of the plot to snort at the gaunt, cannibal snowmen or the gritty, survivalist anthropomorphic reindeer (which all wear Christmas sweaters.)

A few moments felt narmy, but one of the strongest points in the story comes when one of those reindeer, cradling a grisly wound, calmly asks you to kill him, because he knows what is coming for him if you don't.

Without getting into mild spoilers, it is difficult to talk about my favorite points in the plot, but I do want to say that the developer, Red Skald, has a very strong sense of what the fundamental appeal of RPGs is versus other games.

Toymaker - Prologue's branching narrative is built around the idea of semi-informed choice; where you suspect you might know what's going on behind the scenes, and the dialog options let you play your hunches. Every choice, important or not, is dripping with characterization and flavor. I never felt like I was making a right choice or a wrong one - merely learning different things as I went.

On top of that, the ending crawl is a series of consequences caused by the different actions you took, rather than a single monolithic cutscene. Even in places where I'd screwed up, I felt rewarded by the things I learned - and like the story had come to a natural (if abrupt) conclusion.

It was satisfying (and more importantly, not frustrating) in a way that AAA titles frequently aren't.

In Summary

If you don't mind a little clunkyness, you're the sort of gamer that puts story first, you like a sense of grim, desperation in your setting, and the soundtrack is not a deal-breaker, this is your jam. Fans of the Souls series' lore, in particular, I think will really like this.

If music is critical to your game experience, you want something light-hearted or easy to follow, or 2k3 hurts your eyes, this will probably not be your best gaming experience.

Still, on the balance, I think Toymaker - Prologue is better than its missteps. I think it takes a tired concept and executes it in a very fresh way, and I think Red Skald has a knack for making the player care about the characters - which I will take over a good soundtrack any day.

I look forward to seeing how Toymaker expands on this, as well as to finding out what other reviewers think.