A while back I posted about The Desolate Room, a game that never quite grabbed me. I’ve argued before that bad games can still be worth playing if they’re interesting enough, and there were in fact some interesting mechanics at the hart of The Desolate Room, but the game’s flaws outweighed these for me. I was left, however, with an interest in checking out the newer offerings from ScottGames, like the fairly recent sequel, The Desolate Hope. But rather than jump right to their most recent release, I decided to go through the ScottGames catalog in order, which meant starting with their next game, Iffermoon.
Iffermoon, like The Desolate Room, could be classified as a Japanese-style role-playing game due to its party-based, separate-screen battle system full of charge bars and special abilities. But that’s pretty much where the similarities end. Outside of combat, the player guides Silence, the young protagonist, through the various locales of the planet of Dinostria in side-scrolling fashion, stopping to chat with the diverse inhabitants and collecting various items along the way. There’s no real platforming; the side-view is merely the method for traveling around, and acts as a showcase for the strikingly imaginative and beautiful locations as well as some really fantastic character designs for the people you will meet. These, as well as the rather unorthodox story, were the main draws for me.
