Miwashiba's LiEat

On the Steam platform, I do follow a few curators since I have a strong preference for Cute games. The reviews for this super cheap RPG were Overwhelmingly Positive, so I thought I'd try it out. LiEat runs in some uncommon, low resolution like 800x600, and it only runs in a window that can't be resized. Since this game uses pixel art, I figured this scaling issue was an artistic choice, to honor the game's aesthetic or something. But I was wrong.

When pixel art was the norm for modern games, developers would often do all they could to make the most of their set limitations. And with LiEat, all I see is laziness. Despite the top-down sprites and nicely colored, but lifeless map tiles, there's no conformity for scaling and pixel size. In menus, instead of drawing more detailed portraits for our heroes, the developer just stretched the faces of the tiny people walking around.

But they make up for that with dialogue portraits, like they're from a highly decorative manga. That being said, I'm not often sure what I'm looking at in them. Speaking of dialogue, I think they used far too many ellipses. Maybe that's normal talk for the hardcore weebs who are more likely to enjoy this game than people who want to play something fun.

LiEat is the story of a tiny girl who is actually a dragon who eats lies. Looking like a tiny human girl, she's carted around to different places by her abusing caretaker to solve mysteries. So the play is much more like a mystery visual novel, than it is an RPG. The RPG elements only exist to demonstrate that a fight is happens in the story. The battles aren't hard enough to count for anything, and there are only a couple enemy graphics. And they don't animate. They just flicker into a different 24-bit palette when you hit them with the same sound effect you hear when your man-friend slaps you.

So you spend most of the game going into every room and talking to every person until you trigger the next event in the story, which requires you to once again go into every room and talk to every person. There aren't a lot of good clues given, and there's no real reward to progression, because you just keep doing the same stuff.

The music in the game is all right. I guess it fits the vibe of the whole thing, with nicely voiced strings and piano. It doesn't annoy me, but I'm not going to pay an extra $4 to download it. I know I'm being kind of hard on this game, but I'm baffled by the otherwise positive reviews.

Style: 3/5 - Substance: 1/5 - Music: 2/5 - Fun: 1/5