30 Minutes With AR-PUH-GUH!

In this series, I'll be examining the Heart of the OHR contest entries in brief 30 minute sessions. As soon as the timer in-game hits 30 minutes, I quite and write this review. 

Author: TheCube (Clint Emsley)

AR-PUH-GUH is a strange game. In the first 30 minutes, I met a giant disembodied head (called a yapper) who saved my game, was told to exterminate some bug by some random person, captured a monster and stole its skillset, and was lied to by a sign.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.


(For posterity, I want to note that all these screenshots show the Warrior class. I lost my Berserker screenshots.)

The game opens with an infodump about elements, classes, skills, and other stuff that I have no idea about even after playing. It's very old-school in this sense. I take it on faith that these bits of info will come in handy later in the game.

After choosing a class (Berserker) and naming my new character (Zerk), I appear in a gray sort of yucky place. A big yapper tells me that not only can he save my game, he can heal me for free! I'm quite happy with this, because I quickly find out that the Berserker is not exactly prone to long bouts of fighting. In fact, I can only kill one enemy before I run out of energy points and have to go back to heal. I sense a lot of grinding in my future.

Despite this seeming inability of the Berserker to be useful, I press on. The encounter rate feels just right. I can walk for a good deal without getting assaulted by an enemy. The battles flow well too: not too fast, not too slow. The enemies are already quite strange, including a disembodied alligator head named Ankle Biter, a bizarre little puffball called Qwerty, and the not-yet-infamous Pixlor. After about 20 minutes of grinding, I level up...to level 1! Somehow, starting at level 0 is quite depressing. In any case, my Berserker can now successfully fight 3 or 4 battles before going home. This is quite nice.

I finally reach the first boss (after running away from everyone in-between to save fighty points) and beat it to a pulp. It seems that the Berserker is actually quite strong when he's not busy taking naps.

Aaand...that's when I ran out of time!

From my brief playthrough of AR-PUH-GUH!, it comes across as a very interesting but esoteric game. Its charm is undeniable, and I find myself having flashbacks of Earthbound and Mario RPG. Little touches, like attacks going "whiff" when they miss, and the strange dialogue I encountered during my short time in the world, add immeasurably to the experience. I feel like this is one of those games that takes at least an hour to get into mechanically, and I plan on playing it a lot more when I get the time.

My one big snag was playing as a Berserker. Not only did I have to go back to town every fight, I couldn't even see the names of the enemies. I messaged Meowskivich, the creator of the game, and asked him why the Berserker was so hard to play. His response was that the class was for advanced players and required a lot of technique. I wish this warning was in the game, but to his credit it is in the documentation online. I tried the Warrior class, and true to Meowskivich's word, playing as the Warrior was much, much simpler and faster, making the game flow a lot better. I think I'll stick with Warrior for my next playthrough.