I tend to avoid RPG Maker games. There’s not really any one reason for that; Doom & Destiny left some scars, sure, but the way the generic bubble text boxes and same-y art render so many of its games utterly generic and interchangeable is also a huge factor. After all, a lack of effort and creativity in one facet generally implies that other more important facets will be similarly wanting. Then there’s Void Monsters: Spring City Tales, a game that looks just enough like an RPG Maker game to be recognizable as such, but with enough surprising features to stand out. The ones that caught my eye were “multiple ways to complete the game” and “break into and steal from any building,” because the thought of completing a jRPG-styled game as a sneaky, economy-destabilizing thief was simply too good to pass up on.

Researching didn’t help

As with all games that pique my interest, I started looking into the game and developer to find chinks in the armor, but this only left me with more questions than answers. Usually it’s possible to watch a game in motion and get a better sense of its quality than screenshots provide because of little tells—cheap fonts and menus, multiple art styles that don’t mesh with one another (for example: a hand-drawn main character navigating through a pixel dungeon), bad lighting in 3D games, etcetera. These are the kinds of things that are easily worked around in screenshots, but making a misleading video typically requires more effort than a bad developer is willing to expend. Nothing in particular stood out in this case, though, and the density and distinctness of the art was only making me more and more interested.

When I started looking at the developer’s previous games on Steam, however, the amount of customer negativity I saw was overwhelming. Normally that’d be enough of a red flag that I’d mentally file this away as a lost cause and move on, but I was interested enough that I decided to skim through the user reviews and get a better sense of why there were so many negative ones. Filtering out the blind rage and one-sentence trash, I noticed a handful of reviews that boiled down to “this has a lot of potential, but [the performance is bad/something is broken/the game keeps crashing].” Eventually it dawned on me that I’d been looking into Void Monsters for something like 45 minutes and that it’d be faster to request a key and determine its quality for myself than to continue playing Internet Detective to no avail.

So I did

Right off the bat, the performance is definitely a bit of an issue. It’s not always sluggish, but the effects can cause some massive slowdown at points. Movement is already on the slow side, so slowdown on top of that can feel like moving around in molasses. Of course, I went in expecting this, and it’s nothing that can’t be circumvented with Cheat Engine’s speedhack if the rest of the game is good.

I like everything but the combat

There are lots of things that you can do in Void Monsters. You can plant seeds, craft a dizzying amount of items, undertake quests that grant you experience without the need to engage in combat, breed/milk/shear/slaughter goats, and manipulate economies with the aim of increasing your leverage over the bank you’re in debt to. There’s a day/night cycle, with thievery only being possible at night, and your skill at planting can increase to provide more materials with which to craft consumable lockpicks. This in turn allows your lockpick crafting skill to go up, which gives you the opportunity to make better lockpicks to open up more fortified doors and chests. The game also seems to recognize the play style you’re focusing on, as I started getting a fairly steady stream of thievery-related quests from the morning postman (who delivers new quests each day) once I had broken into some homes.

Needless to say, I’m finding a lot to like about Void Monsters. The only downsides right now are the bad music looping (a minor flaw) and the combat’s adherence to traditional jRPG combat (a bigger flaw). Leveling up nets you new attacks, and you need them because combat can be hard. Healing spells are incredibly powerful and normal attacks don’t do much damage early on, so getting into a fight can feel like a war of attrition more than anything. That’d be fine if you could ignore it to focus on the other mechanics, but you really can’t. Many areas have enemies roaming around as balls of energy that you can avoid, but other areas also have random combat encounters in addition to the ball-of-energy enemies. It’s incredibly frustrating trying to run around a forest to grab seeds for the fun part of the game, only to get hit with random battle after random battle. Worse, sometimes the escape button is grayed out, ensuring that you’re forced to slowly slap the enemies to death before you can get back to what you were doing. The random encounters drag everything down.

Thievery is fun, even if it’s fairly simple. Lockpicks are consumed whether you successfully pick the lock or not (which isn’t how lockpicks work, but there are so many inaccurate lockpicking details in movies and games that this isn’t remotely surprising), necessitating running around grabbing seeds from people’s plants so that you can craft more. That usually eats up most of the day, and then it’s robbery time. There’s a kind of stealth system here where staying in a house too long causes you to build up noise that can get you caught, but that hasn’t been enough of a factor yet to get a feel for how it factors into things. All I know is that my skills are slowly increasing, which is good because I’m going to need some bigger scores soon. The bank that the main character owes a large sum of money to charges interest every day, meaning the owed sum continues going up as time passes. I haven’t made enough money yet to know if burglary is sustainable, but I’m enjoying robbing people blind regardless and look forward to Robin Hood-ing the rich.

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