While the PSX retro aesthetic immediately screams survival horror to me, there are so many other genres that were prevalent during that era. This is why I’m glad to see developer Lovely Hellplace apply that visual style to one of my other favorite genres of that generation – the turn-based RPG. Entropy, which was just released in Early Access, embraces that old school vibe to create a dark fantasy world full of strangeness and mystery to be discovered.
In a clever twist, the character creation that kicks off the game is presented as a play you are clearly unprepared for. As you stumble to remember your lines, the dialogue choices you make bring focus to your character’s build. defining your stats and starting weapon. The performance is interrupted by a horde of demons descending on your small town, kicking off your call to adventure.
As you escape the city under siege, you’ll meet characters that join your party, which will expand throughout the game. After this action-packed prologue, which ends with a relatively easy boss fight, the structure opens up by giving you the essential JRPG feeling of exploring an open map full of towns and locations.
The combination of the retro visuals and the classic overworld map gave me such strong feelings of nostalgia, drawing me into the game and the world immediately. While I’m not the biggest fan of the random battles you come across in this part, I love walking around and seeing a town in the distance, or checking out a weird looking tree to see if it’s an actual location to explore.
The four-hour first act that’s presented in this Early Access release is pretty small in scope, but there’s enough to explore that it feels like a satisfying opening to a game of this type. There are a few gates that you need to open as part of your quest, and when those are accessible it’s clear how tight and interconnected the world is, allowing you to traverse it fairly quickly.
A Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Retro World
Locations break down into three different types: towns, combat areas, and choose-your-own-adventure style sequences. Towns are free from danger and allow you to talk to multiple characters, giving you a sense of the world at large through effective exposition. Many of them are pretty standard townspeople archetypes, but the few standout characters, like the Technomychologist, help give the game a bit of personality.
Combat areas are well designed, if a little unambitious, providing a little bit of exploration alongside the fights and putting treasures all over to reward thoroughness. Interestingly, fights here are not random, as the creatures are walking around and can either be avoided or surprised with careful maneuvering.
The choose-your-own-adventure locations put you on a black screen with text and images, telling you a story of what you find there and presenting you with options for how to proceed. Because the lore of this world is rich and unique, even in the brief glimpse that this act contains, I found these sections to be incredibly compelling. It’s a simple way to paint a little corner of the world for you in brief, giving you agency to define how your character would react and see where you can push the narrative.
I’ve only played once, so I haven’t seen multiple options, but from what I can tell these aren’t going to be the type of choices that change the entire direction of the game, but rather just let you tell unique little short stories that yield various rewards or consequences.
Combat Has Great Ideas But Needs More Variety
The thing I’m most torn about is the combat. I’m a big fan of turn-based RPGs like this, but sometimes they do lack a little bit in variety as far as encounters go, and this is something Entropy has issues with. You can have up to six people in your party, and these can be a combination of characters that you meet as part of the story and mercenaries that you hire from job boards in towns. During a fight, there are two rows that you can position your characters in, and the enemy forces operate the same way. If there are people in the front row, they protect characters in the back row from melee attacks, but ranged and magic attacks can target either row.
While it feels like this adds a little planning element to how you build out your characters, wanting to make sure you’ve got some ranged attackers and magic users behind your melee toughs, it flattens the execution portion. Each fight feels pretty similar because it’s about taking out the front row then the back row, which gets a bit repetitive.
JRPGs often get flack for only requiring you to continuously select “attack” over and over until the fight is done, and Entropy isn’t quite fully in that direction, but I would like a little more strategic depth to allow for more variation in tactics.
There are a few other interesting wrinkles that gesture at the depth I’m looking for, if not entirely achieving it. The magic system has a clever twist where it doesn’t rely on spell slots or MP for casting, but instead spells do damage to your character when they fail. This changes it from a game of resource management to risk assessment, which does add a nice dimension. Characters can equip items in both their main hand and off hand, so having your spell book in one and a gun in the other lets you make an important choice each turn.
The main issue I had with this is that the spells didn’t feel as impactful as I was hoping for the amount of risk you’re taking on. They do a similar amount of damage to a standard weapon attack, and the statuses they put on other characters aren’t game changing enough to be worth it in my book. With the game being in Early Access, hopefully this is a balance they can work out, because I would personally like to see them be more powerful and higher risk to really make you weigh your options.
When attacking, you can also target specific limbs, which will give you a chance to disable enemies from doing certain attacks, but standard battles were over far too quick for this to make any meaningful difference. On top of that, the penalty to your hit chance was often too much that I didn’t see the value in using these attacks outside of the boss fights that made it clear this was the way to proceed.
Weapons also have different special attacks that change up hit percentages or damage, but with the cost of delaying your turn a bit. Turn order is always displayed on the side of the screen, and this was actually one of the more compelling wrinkles. Is it worth it for my fighter doing the multi-attack for the chance to take out two foes in one strike if it means that he won’t act again for a while? That’s a good hook for a combat system to me, and I hope they find ways to explore it more and let you manipulate turn order in more drastic ways.
Permanent Death Raises the Stakes
One of the big hooks that the game makes sure you’re aware of is that your characters can permanently die in battle if they are knocked out. At the conclusion of the fight, you are told the fate of any characters that became unconscious, and this can include disfigurement and death. Losing a body part can cause you to have specific penalties in fights, making that character less effective unless they can undergo expensive healing at a doctor. It should be noted that the main player character cannot die, but every other character is on the potential chopping block, adding tension to encounters.
Most of the fights in the game were easy enough that I didn’t have to interact with this system much, but when I did it actually felt really punishing. There was a devilishly hard boss near the end of the act, one so hard I actually thought you were supposed to lose for narrative reasons the first time I tried it, and going back to try it again with my diminished party felt pretty bad.
Maybe if there were more side quests and recruitment opportunities outside of the mercenary board it would feel like it belonged more in the game, but I had to spend a good amount of gold to get my party up to six in order to take this boss on, and it didn’t feel like there was anything I could do outside of grinding to get my party ready.
I know it’s a huge part of the genre going back to its roots, but grinding is my least favorite part of any JRPG, and it always feels bad to me when it’s basically required to make progress. It’s a tricky balance, because I want to feel like loss in battle has real meaning, but a total party kill that ends up with a few dead or diminished characters feels like an unfun setback.
Rich Lore Gives Every Location Purpose
Fortunately, the game has a really compelling world that draws you in with its strange creatures and intriguing hints of lore, keeping you hooked between battles. An example that perfectly illustrates this is a forest that you enter early on in the game. The legend of this forest is that the Soul Gardener, the ethereal creatures that transition the dead into the afterlife, of the woods has gone mad, so people bring the bodies of their enemies to be cremated there in order to trap them in an eternity of misery.
Theater tropes of spies, immortal demonic rulers, and a mysterious event called “the Sudden Silence” all make the world feel unique and lived in, giving you narrative reasons to explore the world further. Learning about the setting was the most engaging part of Entropy for me, and I can’t wait to see what’s revealed when more of the game is released.
The gorgeous low poly art style brings all this lore to life, making for a delightfully grimy world for you to explore. It’s a surprisingly bright game visually, allowing them to get thematically dark rather than visually dark. The creepiness instead comes from the wonderful monster design that includes demons in the form of sentient lungs or piles of stitched together corpses.
Early Access Rough Edges Can’t Hide the Potential
There’s also warped animals that are twisted versions of familiar creatures, but exaggerated in strange ways I’m not used to seeing. Exploration and battles are made to feel more dynamic with unique camera angles that frame the action in a dynamic manner. The music adds a lot to the overall tone as well, with jaunty fantasy fare punctuated by more sinister guitar riffs. The overall audio-visual aesthetics go a long way to bringing the world to life, enhancing the game’s most unique elements.
Given that it’s in Early Access, it’s not without its bugs, but hopefully those will be worked out on the way towards full release. I had issues with sound effects not playing, the camera clipping into walls, and even one instance where using an item completely locked up the game. It’s nothing that ruined my time, just go in knowing that there’s still a bit of polish that needs to be done on this one as it progresses.
The first act is a pretty brief introduction to the world of Entropy, but there’s already so much to love here that I’m eagerly anticipating the next update. The devs have a bit of work to do in order to ensure that its combat feels more tactically rich, but the details of the setting have their hooks in me.
Hopefully they’ll be able to find a good middle ground with the consequences of loss, as it currently feels like it’s too easy to get stuck in a series of cascading failures when you hit a wall. It’s a promising start, and I’m sure the team at Lovely Hellplace will take the time in Early Access to tweak the gameplay to ensure it matches the quality of their excellent worldbuilding.
Early Access code provided by publisher. Entropy is out now in Early Access on Steam.