This is the two hundred thirteenth entry in the Scratching That Itch series, wherein I randomly select and write about one of the 1741 games and game-related things included in the itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality. The Bundle raised $8,149,829.66 split evenly between the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund and Community Bail Fund, but don’t worry if you missed it. There are plenty of ways you can help support the vital cause of racial justice; try here for a start. Lastly, as always, you may click on images to view larger versions.
Our two hundred thirteenth random selection from the itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality is giving us a taste of what’s to come. It’s Gataela – Demo by Atemly Games, and its tagline in the bundle reads:
Uncover schemes, investigate mysteries, and debate the citizens and nobles…
Uncover schemes and investigate mysteries!? I’m in.
That big “Demo” tacked onto the title means just that: this is a demo for a game that is not yet released. But, despite nearly five years having passed since the bundle launched, Gataela appears to still be in active development, with a progress update posted on its itch.io page just a few days ago at the time of writing. In fact, the demo has been updated a few times over the years, to reflect improvements made in the game’s design. That means it very much serves its purpose as a taste of the game to come.
Gataela is a Japanese-style role-playing game, although Atemly Games are based in Ottawa, Canada. We’ve had a pair of Japanese-style role-playing games pop up recently in this series: Moonstone Deep and its sequel, Benjamin of Blackstone Edge. But where those are made with RPG Maker, a popular tool for creating games in the genre, Gataela is instead made with the more general purpose GameMaker, and strives for a more modern look and feel. It retains the classic three quarters view used in so many such games, but opts for sleek, high resolution art. Characters move about the various towns and wilderness areas smoothly, without the grid-based designs of yore. They’re also given huge, crisp portraits reminiscent of visual novels during conversations. (I should note here that one of these portraits stood out as oddly sexualized: a female officer whose uniform seemed designed to accentuate her bosom, all the stranger given how reserved her male counterpart’s uniform is. Fortunately, the rest of the cast, male and female, avoid this fate.)
In fact, those conversations are one of the headline features. Most are standard chats, where players click through text boxes, but sometimes players can enter “debate battles” with another character, touted as one of the game’s two battle systems. In practice, these are simply conversation trees with a (generous) timer, tasking players with carefully choosing their words as they try to convince their adversary. I completely flubbed my first such debate, hoping that honesty would sway my opponent, but the game continued anyway, making we wonder how differently these can turn out. In the demo, each debate seemed to be a critical part of the story, so perhaps the outcome is largely the same but players reap greater rewards for better performance?
Like most Japanese-style role-playing games, the story is a big focus in Gataela, and I liked the way it’s introduced in the demo. Players assume the role of Zack, a young man who works at the food bank in the town of Vuni. A necessary institution, given how rampant poverty has become in the town. I saw the lines of people outside the food bank, spoke to merchants in the market who struggled to sell their wares, saw youths living on the street who resort to stealing to stave off hunger. And I met many people, including Zack, who are trying to help. The opening of the game does an excellent job of setting the stage and getting players to care about Zack and his friends, before hinting at larger happenings throughout the titular kingdom of Gataela. I was constantly curious to learn more right up until the demo ended.
I’m less sure about the mechanics. The standard, non-debate battles look fantastic: Zack and his allies square off against their enemies in a genre-typical side-on view, with a detailed backdrop matching the location, each turn-based attack or other action lovingly animated. The fights are quick, too, since players can click with their mouse to rapidly issue commands. But my strategy rarely deviated from simply trading blows. I thought that things would change after Zack’s early unarmed fisticuffs, when he finally got a pistol. The pistol does give him a new “shot” ability, but since the pistol just grants a measly 1 extra attack point, it’s barely stronger than his punches were. It’s weird when enemies take a half dozen gunshots to go down.
Leveling up makes a much bigger difference, since it grants two points that players can allocate between a character’s four main stats: attack, defense, critical, and speed. It’s unusual to have this degree of customization in a Japanese-style role-playing game, and Atemly Games excitedly note on the itch.io page that it lets players develop their party however they want. In practice, however, speed and defense hardly seemed worth boosting, as my characters routinely acted before all of their enemies and took only a single point of damage when they got hit. I’m guessing this is because they were gaining levels really fast, and that raw level makes a big difference. So, I ended up putting all my points into attack and critical for all characters, and honestly the critical hits were a bit disappointing so I wonder if I should have just gone all-in on attack for everyone. Making them functionally the same in battle.
This is weird, because turn-based battle tactics are well established in the genre. Typically characters have a bunch of special abilities (extra-cool attacks, magic spells, etc.) that can be used to exploit certain enemy weaknesses, but draw on a limited pool of points, so players must do some resource management as they face repeated combats. Maybe there’s elemental magic, and you have to pick the right elements for certain foes. Or you can have one character stun an enemy, then have another use an attack that does extra damage to stunned enemies. That kind of thing. In Gataela, all I got were some speed and defense buff abilities that seemed largely useless, and healing abilities I never needed. Abilities can level up with use, but it wasn’t clear what that actually does. There was exactly one tough fight during the demo, which I squeaked through by chugging a lot of healing items. After that every combat was a breeze.
Not to mention a bit immersion-breaking. Imagine this scenario: you are an unarmed, desperate bandit prowling the roads. You encounter a guy with a pistol traveling with two police officers who each have rifles with bayonets. Do you 1) run away or 2) charge forward and attack? The bandits always chose 2, and maybe it’s not as nonsensical as it seemed, since they could shrug off bullet after bullet?
That was a lot of complaining, but! I actually quite liked the Gataela demo. Combat mechanics in a game like this are relatively easy to tweak, rebalance, or even redesign. And the setting, characters, and events are already well done and left me wanting to see what would happen next. In the demo I wasn’t able to get to the schemes and mysteries promised in the tagline, but I got some hints of what they might be, and am now anticipating a tale of twisting political intrigue and turmoil from the full game. There are a lot of other design touches I like too: there’s no zoomed-out world map as there so often is in the genre. Instead, the regions between towns are the same scale as the towns themselves, and I was free to run off in random directions to explore instead of heeding advice to stick to the roads. Enemies are visible while exploring, and can often be avoided if one doesn’t feel like fighting. There were some places that I wasn’t allowed to enter yet, but overall I had surprisingly free reign to wander.
I think Gataela has a lot of potential. It’s undeniably a slick production with lovely art and animations. I’d like to see more interesting combat, but even if it remains a largely inconsequential distraction I’ll still be intrigued to learn what happens to Zack and his friends. I’m heartened that Atemly Games are still working on it, and I’ll be sure to keep an eye out for the full game. It sounds like they’ve largely finished building the world and story, and are tackling combat tweaks and various other polish tasks next, so maybe we’ll see the full release soon. If you want a taste before then, the Gataela demo is completely free, even if you missed it in the bundle. Recommended for fans of Japanese-style role-playing games and political stories.
That’s 213 down, and only 1528 to go!
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