Ikenfell

Note: I wrote this review at the time of playing this game in July 2023.

The plot in a paragraph

Maritte Hildegaard embarks on a quest to find her missing sister Safina. She suddenly gains magical powers and has to figure out what that means.

Gameplay

Ikenfell is a turn-based tactical RPG with timing mechanics for attack and defence. It forces some strategy and planning using a 3 character team. The characters can be changed on the save point, reminding me of RTS on the original Final Fantasy VII.

I felt the character progression to be on the slower side, however, if you fight every encounter, and do not flee, it will be mostly fine.

What I liked

As mentioned in the Swag and Sorcery review, I love cats. Having cats as save points is great!

The story is very compelling, and, and I was actively trying to find time in my day just to play an extra 20 minutes to find out what happens next. Also, the humour is quite good, I laughed out loud a few times. Despite touching on some darker topics, the overall atmosphere is quite light and fun. Every character has a unique personality and nothing feel forced. Even the NPCs are very well written!

One thing I have to highlight is the music. I loved the music. The voiced tracks are brilliant and I never knew that vocals could work so well on 8/16 bit tracks. Even if you don’t play the game, I encourage you to listen to the soundtrack.

The pixel art is phenomenal. No surprise that I love pixel art, but because I love pixel art, I tend to be picky. Everything looked great and consistent.

Although I usually like complex puzzles and despite the ones in the game being quite simple, they were exciting and fun to solve, so that’s a plus for me.

Another interesting aspect were the tips on the menu. Whenever I forgot what I was doing, or maybe I skipped some text too quickly, I could always just open the menu:

What I did not like

I have no idea if the issue has been fixed since, but the game had no cloud saves on steam. Since I played the game on both my desktop and Steam Deck, I had to use a Syncthing setup to have my own “cloud saves”. A casual player might find this setup intimidating.

There was also something that I found unsettling: the nod animation. I know I’m probably looking too much into it, but the animation is very weird and the only thing about the art that actually bothered me.

Do I recommend playing it?

Yes.

Even though I’m not the biggest fan of tactical RPGs, this one glued me to the screen. I think this is a perfect first tactical RPG to introduce people to the genre.

Just as a side note, this game played perfectly on my Steam Deck, aside from the issue I mentioned before with cloud saves.

Since I completed 100% of this game and got all the achievements, I do not expect to play it again soon. But I will definitely revisit the soundtrack from time to time!