Somehow made by two people, Banquet for Fools is a dark fantasy RPG hybrid dancing to its own drum. I'm uncertain what it evokes. Nox? Dungeon Siege? Morrowind? "We don't follow a canon, manifesting like it's the first game ever made" - is how I imagine the thought process behind its defiant design. You complete a quest, suddenly, a switch to a glamorous shot of your party posing under a fancy inscription: Aura increased. This one farms hard. A JoJo-style cinematic plays when you perform a rally attack, sending a bomb with a roundhouse kick. Ask for a coffee - and watch a painstaking animation of a woman brewing it for you, then find yourself playing a reverse-Frogger mini-game or rocking out with a music band. It all feels harmonious, bound by solid mechanics and one dummy thick atmosphere. Drenched in sexy thick lighting and electronic music upheld by the lyre, the world is spirited. Sparkling springs flow, critters skitter in the swaying grass near an ancient tomb chock-full of the howling dead. Down to the smallest detail like the cursor or fonts, Banquet has class.

Hannah and Joseph went above and beyond, endowing their child of clay with a beating heart, portraying a grimy, deceptively expansive world, lived-in yet so alien in its customs and shapes, confusing to an unacclimated onlooker. Being a dark fairy tale at its core, the setting consorts cuteness and grisliness. You shall be struck by its stone cold cruelty, then thaw in melodious whimsy the next minute. A classic interplay I associate with the hardcore PG13 of the 80s. Hey kid, look at the fluttering fairies! Wait, why is the meadow covered in gnawed bones? That said, Banquet is only hard in a sense that it forces you to use all of the tools it provides or lose the plot. You get to make deductions, think. It's something that trips a sense of discovery in those curious of us. I was enjoying the game before I started, taking my time creating a party while trying to make sense of everything. The mechanics are well-explained, just peculiar. What really sets people on edge is the fact Banquet possesses sensibilities a modern mind perceives as hostile.

Say, you must mark places on your map yourself, but the self-reliance trend doesn't end there! You should use handy built-in notes to write the important stuff down, the journal won't be kept for you. It's kindly oldschool. Although inventive, often obtuse, quests and puzzles are dispensed gradually. It's a feasible task to track them manually. The record-keeping process is a great teacher, through it I've learned names, geography, social hierarchy - and saw the world's charm, gaining sympathy for its struggling inhabitants. Between wars and otherworldly horrors, the common folk lead a hard life on the island of Invimona. I was eager to aid them and see my mission through. About that. You control a party of Vollings, not elves, sent by the leader of your House to investigate the disappearance of a whole town's population. That's it. You didn't suppose I'd tell you where's the banquet and who are the fools? Be ready for a wild cross-country Indiana featuring cool puzzles left by a lost civilization, abundant combat, and branching conversations. Mildly so, the role-play is limited, for your dutiful Guards aren't yappers, but there are paths to take and dilemmas to ponder. Ending cards included.

Sometimes Banquet throws ultra-powerful foes at you off-curve. I enjoy it when a game shows teeth, it's satisfying to come back later and kick them out. And it's an organic way to direct your otherwise free roaming around the world map segregated into self-contained chunks of lush biomes. The labyrinths of rugged terrain hide many secrets, underground passages rife with imaginative monsters and beasts to fight. The RTWP combat works. The devs wanted Diablo-sized hordes to smash with an oomph, so a turn-based system would grind things to a halt. You can swap characters at will and move freely while their action bars fill up, then pause to issue one order at a time. I see the plan here, however, the inability to queue orders made combat chaotic other than tactical. It's hard to focus one guy and the squad positioning tool is limited. Hence, forget efficient micro, the party can fend for itself, chaining co-op techniques automatically. Treat it as an autobattler where you can pitch in when needed. You get to set the thresholds: when to use consumables or cast spells, how often to perform special moves, etc.

Save minmaxing for boss fights. If you play the progression right, it would carry the party through thick and thin. Despite some unorthodox names, the system is intuitive, I'll touch it briefly. Combat and utility skills benefit from corresponding stats, like bartering scales off Sensory, magic off Pagan and Aura, melee off Strength... it's self-explanatory. While the technique tree adds serious weight to your pain train, providing the party with spectacular auto-combos and wrestling moves like pinning or body-slamming, level-ups are incremental. Upon levelling, you get points to distribute between skills and stats. Skills rise faster if they were actively used. Regardless, it will take forever before you feel the power creep and see double digits on regular attacks. If ever. Paid skill training exists, albeit, at unreasonable cost. Such is the price of balance, I take it. I was amazed by a sturdy difficulty curve in a genre famous for broken lategame experiences. The economy also stood strong, featuring solid money sinks in the form of expensive gear and diegetic instant travel. It's a good incentive to stay mindful, therefore invested.

For another quirk, you're rewarded for choosing not to kill enemies, it's an on/off switch. Not just out of the kindness of your heart. There's only one downside: your mages restore mana on kills. Other than that, it's beneficial. Stunned foes get up after 24 hours, so you can theoretically grind exp (why?), and some people have bounties on their heads if brought in alive. To boot, it prevents the necromancers from turning corpses into waves of ghosts. Sounds annoying? Just use incense globes to wave those away. Likewise, Banquet has a counter-measure for everything. Have a hard time storming a fort? Find a backdoor, sneak in at night, some of them are deep sleepers. Still hard? Signal your allies for help before attacking! It extrapolates. Take hints, use your brain - and you'll find the game forgiving. For one, resource and health management isn't an issue. Unless everyone gets downed, your guys get up after combat instead of dying. Despite that society operates on a schedule, the lack of time constraints lets you sleep your ass off. You'll be fine as long as you have some mead, bedrolls, or don't mind hauling ass over the hills and far away for a free rest.

Banquet isn't unapproachable or weird just for the sake of it. On the contrary, it's welcoming, polished, thought-out. It's nostalgic and novel in equal measure, experimental for the purposes of immersion. I hope I could decipher some of its codes to intrigue you without vivisecting it. Some things are better left to be discovered in person. The game takes time to set in, give it that. When you get the hang of it, it gets a grip on you, and the deeper you dive, the stronger the feeling of longing. When I was away from my PC, my mind kept coming back to the game, teasing me with its hidden depth and personality. Every day I woke up compelled to boot it up because, firstly, I'm unemployed, secondly, I gravitated towards its extraordinary world, indulging greedily like a kid playing with a new favourite set of toys. A sensation it made me remember vividly. I envy those for whom, by luck, this game would be an early formative experience, defining their tastes for life. Such a good influence! And a warm memory to cherish.

My curator Big Bad Mutuh: https://psteamproxy.yuanyoumao.com/curator/35305390/

Finally, it has come full circle! The original game made me who I am today - a compulsive hoarder. Only in virtual worlds, thankfully. I was so traumatized by all the panic and creature horror, but most of all - the inventory horror! Unprecedented for the time, the scarcity angle caught me off guard, and, for better or worse, it was never repeated to the same degree within the main series. To this day, I always have oodles of consumables left unused in any RPG, boast Amazon storages of ammunition in shooters, and I've beaten Silent Hill 2 into submission by primarily using a nail board. Bless your shivering, shrieking core, PTSD! Here I am, sinking my teeth into the necrotic pudding once more. Rich and creamy.

In the light of what I just said, it may sound weird, but RE sort of calms me down. There's no other way - you pull yourself together or get pulled apart. Collected, I tune in to its rhythmic pacing and calculated tension. I soak in the atmosphere, flow with the ambiance, and appreciate how the game treats its ripe horror tropes. While my love for Silent Hill is high-functioning, cerebral, what I feel for this franchise is visceral, almost carnal. Undeniably, I'm a die-hard fan. The last time I could call myself a fan happily, I was playing Fallout 2 while listening to Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water. But it's coming back now, it's coming back. Happiness, not Limp Bizkit.

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I suppose I need to start this thing off properly with the game's story? I don't even think I need to give you my take on it. Who gives a crap about my thoughts on Mozart, for example? Okay, here you go: virus bad, Barry is my hunny bunny, mansion traps, monsters Cronenberg, your inventory is full, Salieri was falsely accused and then the fallacy was sung by poets for drama points. Not that sophisticated of a premise by modern standards, but a trendsetting classic nonetheless. I would never think of adding or subtracting anything like I wouldn't change a thing about a cat. Here, the golden cheese of outlandish voice acting got fixed, however, the old one remains out there forever, so I don't mind.

With a few notable exceptions, backtracking-intensive puzzles boil down to "I can't wait to get rid of this thing to save up some inventory space" kinds of entente. To boot, every so often, you're welcome to die after failing to figure out the logic behind a strict sequence of steps to perform on the double. No hard feelings though. Each time I inserted another object into another slot and heard the satisfying *click* or took the right course of action, it echoed inside my weary soul. I made some progress, I freed up some space, I lived, after all! Indulging an important relieving pause, my mind starts racing again, I'm on the move. I definitely saw a herb and some sweet shotgun ammo during my last impetuous scamper through the eastern wing.

The remake has added an "Alternative" movement type as an option, but I initially went for tank controls anyway. The keyboard lends itself fine to this scheme, this is how I played the original. Yeah, yeah, you can't just lounge back and enjoy yourself while playing, but I'm okay with hunching like a true nerd. Tank controls have their charm, even some nostalgic value to me. Besides, horror only gets juicier the more uncomfortable it makes you feel... so I told myself until I finally found a spare mini-USB adapter, plugged in my gamepad, and tried the alternative. What can I say? Nothing beats instant turning, tank controls have no chance against such an obscene advantage! Although, they deserve to be honored for serving us faithfully - like horses before the age of cars or spittoons before the age of swallowing our phlegm.

Speaking of paradigm shifts, they did a number on this remake's presentation. The competent use of dynamic lighting and crisp shadows makes certain moments even more dreadful than before, and locations - even more memorable, despite being somewhat drained of color. The detailed body horror of smooth models, headsplosions, and grimy pre-rendered backgrounds look fantastic, getting emphasized by the cinematic camera. In professional hands, dramatic camera angles really tie it all together! Nothing can set things up and create meticulously controlled experiences for a player quite as they do. And thanks to them, the perfect 80's horror sets that are this mansion's intricate, interconnected environments are the scariest character in the game.

Remember the room where you see a zombie around the corner in a mirror or these infamous hallways with cracking windows? Such well-manipulated scares! And you don't always need a threat for things to get eerie - like with these menacing staircase shots snatched directly from Alone in the Dark. Creating tension where there isn't a thing otherwise (as yet) and sustaining it is high art where, needless to say, the masterful sound design does half the job. Sure, clutch angles also cause such jarring issues as obstructing your vision when it's least appropriate, ending up with you getting blindsided by something that your character should've noticed from a mile away. I brush it off by saying that beauty requires sacrifice and sometimes it's chunks of your face.

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You know what would be dakka? To just push-kick a zombie. Could one possibly catch your foot? Then again, hit too hard and you'll get stuck in its rotting guts. Zombie theories! Many of us are wired to always loop back to those in moments of respite. Anyway, it took me a while to learn how to evade properly, and even then, I wasn't exactly a floating butterfly, so I died a lot. In RE, however, losing a whole hour of progress is not a huge tragedy since redoing everything in a more efficient way is a treat in itself. To a degree. It's a genuinely hard game full of devious beginner's traps. After 3 hours of rapidly snowballing collapse, I swallowed my pride and restarted on medium difficulty, amply lubing the inverted difficulty curve.

Even with the new controls and the addition of defensive items seen in recent remakes, the game stays challenging, which is appreciated by veterans and amateurs alike. As for me, I'm happy with my humble "easy" victory for which poor Jill had to die a thousand deaths. I can't say I'm dying to experience an even smaller inventory, so, Chris, my apologies. Jill is the one who's packing. But enough about dying! Killing here is pleasant... and punitive. So cathartic, gory, fairly gratuitous, though simultaneously discouraged by sensible ammo shortage and fast Crimson Head zombies who start spawning later in the game from the bodies you made, but didn't burn or decapitate. It sounds like a nuisance, but no enemy is worse than dogs and birds anyway, trust me. The same goes for their in-game counterparts.

Being restricted and weak lends itself to the genre perfectly. Resident Evil knows how to play these cards expertly, it's confident enough to make you cooperate on its terms. I loved every predicament that it put me through! Making someone enjoy a thing they predictably would is admirable, but to think up mechanics that are repelling on paper and make them work in that someone's best interests I call pure brilliance. Every time you have to leave the safe room, you feel the taste of iron in your mouth, lick your lips that suddenly went dry. Thrilled, you tense up, wondering if you have the willpower for the constricting adventure howling in the corridors beyond. Inhale. Clench that shotgun, focus your senses. Turn the knob. Exhale. Run back in because you forgot to put the damn ink ribbons into the box.

My curator Big Bad Mutuh