Diorama Break is an upcoming indie turn-based RPG game that wears its OneShot and Transistor inspirations on its sleeves. Because it is just a demo, this review will be a short one.
In traditional games, the player does not canonically exist. There is a player-controlled character but not the player. Canonically, the player-controlled character is the one who slayed hundreds of enemies and saved the princess, not the player. But in OneShot and Diorama Break, the player does not control the main character but a being that assists the main character. This is the case with Undertale as well, but not as in-your-face as they are.
Diorama Break’s story starts with our hero, Pro (haha protagonist) waking up and going to a ceremony where he connects to a Patron. The player plays as the Patron, not as the Pro. This separation between the main character and the player character adds a layer of extra overhead between the player and the game world itself. As the Patron, you can commune with the Pro and shape his choices. But like I said, you can shape his choices, not make them in place of him. He very well can ignore your choices. Unfortunately, the demo does not really explore how the choices of the Patron may affect the Pro or his relation with the Patron. Other than vetoing the Patron’s commands a few times, there is no tension between the Pro and Patron no matter whatever Patron says or commands. Patron is just a friendly voice in his head that cracks jokes and makes some meta commentary. Due to being a game, the number of choices a player can make are limited anyway and bound by the choices of the developers. The devs are very well aware of this fact and they openly reference it in the game as well.
Other than being a voice in Pro’s head, the Patron also aids him in combat. The aid is… somehow making the turn-based combat canon. While in combat, the Patron can stop time for an unlimited amount of time and foresee the opponents’ moves. This allows the Pro to dodge enemy attacks and counter attack without risk. Both the Pro’s and the enemies’ attacks have startup, active, and recovery times, like a fighting game, and when units get hit, their moves will be interrupted. This is a really good system on paper, but it is kinda fumbled in the execution due to the action preview being utterly broken. I definitely was not expecting a full on Yomi Hustle style preview, but this is so janky that I stopped relying on it. At the end, I was only using the preview to only see the hitboxes and the startups of the attacks, not even to see where the enemy will even locate to. Startup hitboxes and the active ones almost having identical colors and the prop collisions only being thin black lines does not help with the readability either. The more complex combat encounters take less than 5 minutes, but they are so exhausting due to the issues I mentioned above that they make me feel like I finished a CHIMPS run.
Deaths and checkpoints are canon and is mandatory at some point. I never died at any encounter other than that one forced death are, so I can’t make any comments on how impactful normal deaths, but it did have an impact on that forced one and I definitively want to see more of that kind of stuff in the full game.
The demo has no native Linux build but works well under GE-Proton 10-28.
Overall, my opinion of the demo is positive, but there are definitely things that need improvement, especially the combat. In the full game I want to see some moves with armor, moves that cancel to other moves (bypassing the recovery), and moves that interact with each other . I also want to see much more meta commentary and some more Re:Zero type shit.
