Game:

Sweet Home (1989)

Duration: 7:28:14

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I wanted to play this for so freaking long and just never got around to it. This game, along with Alone in the Dark, is what inspired Resident Evil. It's a top down JRPG survival horror game. A weird but cool concept. You play a group of 5 investigators trying to discover what happened to the fresco artist Ichiro Mamiya. Each of you team members has a special talent or ability. Each character posses one of the following a camera, a vacuum cleaner, a key, a medical kit and a lighter. Each has its own use. The crazy thing is that you have perma-death, so if any character dies they are gone for good. You find weapons strewn throughout the mansion, most party members can equip any, but some are limited. You also have very limited healing resources like most survival horror games. Your inventory consists of your key item, a weapon slot and two open slots. So you do have to worry about your inventory space. The menuing is a little clunky and unintuitive. You can swap items in and out which is neat, but you cannot drop anything without swapping. And there are puzzles a plenty which range from pretty obvious to wildly obscure. You get hints about the major puzzles from the frescoes around the mansion. To get those clues you need to take a picture of a fresco, sometimes they are dirty and you have to clean them with a vacuum cleaner first. And here is the first rub. Your party is only 3 members, but there are 5 characters. You can switch to any character at any time. So you'll end up with 2 parties. One of 3 and another of 2. You can switch and swap whatever members you want to travel together and sometimes you have to swap around to solve puzzles. Then there is combat, it's your standard turn based JRPG combat. The catch is that you go first every round, so essentially you can kill enemies before they even move. Enemies only appear 1 at a time so you don't ever have to deal with a horde. Considering the game had perma-death I wanted to make sure that before any new area was really explored I wanted to make sure we were killing enemies in 1 round. There is quite a bit of grinding in this game. It goes fairly quickly but there is grinding. Overall, this game was pretty damn cool and with some quality of life tweaks could be a really awesome game. Enjoy my blind playthrough.

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