#Marchen forest review full#

There’s a light roguelike touch in that death means you lose any unidentified items you’ve found and have to restart from the beginning or mid-level checkpoint of the current floor, but you keep any experience, levels, alchemy ingredients, keys, and so on, so it’s far from brutal.īut for all its charm and neat ideas, Marchen Forest struggles in execution. Random encounters pit you against foes in one-on-one battles that play out in real-time, putting particular emphasis on well-timed dodges and parries that knock foes off-balance so you can unleash your strongest attacks.

#Marchen forest review full#

It’s a place full of grim secrets suffice to say that alchemy can be used for good or for evil.Įxploring the dungeon’s many rooms means looking for keys to open locked doors and chests, avoiding traps, activating switches, managing your food level so that you don’t starve, and so on-classic dungeon crawler stuff. That carefree story gives way to something much more sinister, as Mylne resolves to search for her mother, who went into that dungeon many years ago and never came out again.

Suddenly, Marchen Forest becomes a dungeon crawler, as you delve through these undead-filled catacombs in search of treasure and experience points. Related: Atelier Ryza 2 may just be the best Atelier yet, taking everything that made its predecessor such a delightful game to new heightsĪnd then you accidentally uncover the entrance to an old dungeon beneath the forest, and everything changes. There’s a laidback quality reminiscent of Atelier (a deliberate influence, if the way Mylne shouts “Barrel!” any time she sees one has anything to say about it). It’s all humorous interactions with characters that wouldn’t look out of place in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and light puzzle solving, with no real stakes and nothing much to worry about. Creatures like a forest sprite that’s trying to take revenge on a river by emptying it of water, one bucket at a time, or a pair of flowers who constantly argue over which one is prettier, or a penguin who needs your help getting buff so he can impress his crush.įor the first couple of hours, this is Marchen Forest: a surreal slice-of-life adventure game, revolving around point-and-click-style puzzles as you try to get all the ingredients you need to become a full-fledged alchemist. Living and training with her grandfather, her life is a mostly carefree one gathering ingredients for potion-mixing is about the extent of her responsibilities, which mostly involves hanging out with the strange creatures that live in the forest outside her house. Marchen Forest: Mylne and the Forest Gift starts out as the rather innocent, if a little surreal, story of a young apprentice alchemist.