Labyronia - INFINITE LOOPS ALL DAY

Always wanted to relive oldschool turn-based RPG. Saw this game on summer steam sales, reviews pretty good too. So why not! I played before final fantasy 1 and 2 on gameboy and this game is pretty similar in terms of gameplay and story.

No. of hours in: 15 hours
Level: 32

Started off as Arres, an old poor guy later known to be created by gods to collect the 4 elemental crystals in hope of salvaging the world that was plagued with monsters after the presence of labyrinths. Classic and simple story, rather interesting actually.
Labyronia encourages use of hp pots and debuffs removal, players could have a more full experience of the game. Due to monsters ability to `blind' and `confuse' you, it will be so much better to just use items to recover. Unlike some games where you can just grind through without the need of using a single pot.
`Cues' are skills that you can collect by exploring the whole labyronia world. Instead of the usual learning-skills-through-leveling, this game encourages players to exlpore every inch of every maps in order to find and learn all the skills available. However, this can only be done if you have a full team. So that would meant re-exploring if you do have Ann/Garic earlier on. Exploring could also be a pain in the ass due to presence of infinite loops in maps.

Because of the presence of labyrinths, some of the maps felt like infinite loops as there are no ends to them! This makes exploring so much more tedious and can be rather frustrating. For example, if you keep walking left, you will eventually come back to where you started, and the map is huge as well! This makes searching for cues so much harder and if you do have a good memory, you might get lost in the map as well.
Labyronia is definitely not a straightforward game, you have to interact with every single object of the game. Even a single word in books could be the key to advance forward! I, myself have go on google couple of times for help because i was stuck. Every single detail matters!

+ POSITIVES

• Simple and smooth mechanics
• Encourages use of `Items'
• Cues are really useful and motivates player to explore despite the loops

+ NEGATIVES

• Infinite loops can be really frustrating