Necroboy: Path to Evilship Review (PC)
Release Date: October 31st, 2022
Developer: Chillin’ Wolf
Publisher: Gravity Games Arise Co LTD.
Platform: PC (reviewed) Price:$19.99
Oh-Wah, Tah-Goo, Siam!
Released on Halloween 2022, comes Necroboy which despite its title is neither a pornographic superhero parody nor a terrible new show on Netflix.
Your ascent from the underworld begins with a backstory. Unlike many puzzle games which usually cough up a paragraph to set the stage and then get down to business, Necroboy: Path to Evilship opens with a rather weighty piece of dialog between Necroboy and his apparently long-suffering lackey, creatively named (wait for it) Lackey. Abandoned as a baby, Necroboy survived by using his supernatural powers. As he grew, he became ambitious and vowed to use his powers to avenge himself on those who abandoned him and to take over the world (of course!) Once this introduction is out of the way, we get a nice straightforward puzzle game with each level gradually getting more complex. Things are nice and easy for the first few levels as controls are introduced and demonstrated, but by level four or so the pressure begins to mount.
How do necromancers measure distance?
In GRAVE-YARDS!
Gameplay is essentially three things. Raising the dead, making them perform an action such as flipping a switch and freezing things. This gets a bit tiresome, but the game breaks this up a bit with a boss fight where you can change your undead minions into undead wolves to fight your battle. Difficulty continues to climb as you go along and while there is a great deal of consistency, new dangers like falling off the map begin to become an issue. If you do die, the game is rather unforgiving and takes you back to the start of the level rather than to some intermediate spawn point.
On the downside, the art and music is just average and the story is more of a burden than a bonus. By this, I mean that the developers tried to give the game more character than just running around solving puzzles, but this was definitely a swing and a miss. You endure or just click past the dialog heavy story to get on with the game.
Bottom line: NecroBoy : Path to Evilship is a straightforward, well executed if unspectacular puzzler.
The Good:
Solid Design and execution
Straightforward Introduction
Puzzles are logical and not arbitrarily difficult.
The Bad:
Unexceptional
Story falls flat
Little replay value