It's the year 20XX, and the world has been torn asunder. Natural disasters have wracked the land, doing little to hamper the spread of a mysterious virus — one that has terrible effects upon the human body. Civilization has collapsed, as horrifying mutants emerge from underground.
Yet despite everything, there are those who remain willing to shift through the ruins searching for food, materials, anything they can scavenge from the wreckage. These people call themselves 'Questers'.
QUESTER
is a 2023 Dungeon Crawling Eastern RPG found on Steam. Inspired by PC games from the 80s, it centers around exploring the sprawling, monster-infested underground ruins, hack and slashing your way through Turn-Based Combat as you gradually map out the area, finding supplies, fellow explorers and hints as to how the world wound up this way. Resource management is key; while Purification Fuel keeps your Questers relatively safe, you can only carry so much with you at a time, and every step consumes fuel... and the threat of starvation hangs heavily over your heads.
This game contains examples of:
- Abandoned Camp Ruins: As you explore, you can find places where others appear to have set up camp in the past. If you're lucky, you might run into another Quester there. These also serve as potential sites to move your own base camp to, enabling you to start in different locations; every move costs a certain amount of food.
- Abnormal Ammo:
- The Power Shotgun used to be used for firing soybeans during Setsubun. It was modified to work with small rocks and debris.
- Lampshaded by the flavor text for the Recycle Bullet passive skill:Recycle Bullet: Picking things up off the ground is what quests are all about! Creates a Bullet instantly from a used cartridge casing you find. At the end of the turn, you will automatically create up to two additional bullets.
- Absurdly Low Level Cap: Played With as one of the game mechanics. Initially, you can only level your Questers up to Level 20; every time you defeat a boss monster, said Cap is raised by two, naturally incentivizing the player to explore and challenge as many bosses as possible.
- Aerith and Bob: The starting party includes Gotz, Haruka, Dob-rock, Lisa and Edge. Other Questers boast an equally wide variety of names; coincidentally, this includes a Bob.
- After-Combat Recovery: Not only is your whole party completely healed after every successful battle, fallen Questers are revived. This also applies if you flee combat.
- After the End: Society has pretty much crumbled in the wake of the pandemic and all the natural disasters, with the Questers doing their best to scrape together the means to keep themselves alive.
- Armless Biped: TWD, Metrostalkers and their ilk used to have arms, but they've long since rotted and fallen off, leaving behind only the stumps.
- Attack Drone: A type of weapon that typically can only be used by Professors and Scientists.
- Big Creepy-Crawlies: Several of these can be found in the underground ruins, including Giant Spiders.
- Bloodlust: Any Questers with the Blood Sport passive get a combat bonus tied to the Bleeding status, which is described as them "getting excited" at the sight of blood.
- Colour-Coded for Your Convenience: Monster sprites are color-coded on the map so that you can tell how powerful they are at a glance. Blue monsters are the least threatening, then violet, then bright red. Dark red means you're looking at a boss.
- Disaster Scavengers: All Questers naturally qualify as these, as you're searching through the ruins for anything and everything you can use to survive.
- Draw Aggro: Questers accumulate Hatred with every offensive action they take, which makes enemies more likely to attack them. Certain skills, like Advance-Guard and Bodyguard, either generate massive amounts of Hate or transfer it to the user so that enemies pay more attention to them over the other party members.
- Dual Wielding: Every Quester has two different weapon slots. Certain weapons have the passive Dual Wielding trait, which offers a bonus attack point if the Quester's other weapon is in the same category.
- Equipment Upgrade: If you have multiple copies of a weapon, you can combine them to make a more powerful, +1 version. If you obtain two more copies, you can combine them into another +1 version, then combine both of the +1s into a +2. Naturally, this means you need to have obtained eight copies of the base weapon in total to reach +3.
- Giant Enemy Crab: Opponents like Snipclaws, Scissorclaws and Shearclaws fall into this category, getting larger as you go down the line.
- Improvised Armor: Some of the weapons you can find double as this, such as Kick Mitts.
- Improvised Weapon: Questers can arm themselves with things like kitchen knives turned into makeshift spears, squirt guns that tout poisonous fluids, or vacuum cleaners that have been converted into flamethrowers, among many other things.
- Incongruously-Dressed Zombie: Downplayed with TWD and their Palette Swaps, who are walking around with Brown Bag Masks on their heads and nothing else. Not that their withered, nearly completely skeletal bodies have anything to show off...
- Katanas Are Just Better: The Katana is classified as a three-star Knife, and is described as "A Japanese sword. Its very existence is considered a work of art."
- Killer Teddy Bear: Shake is a massive teddy bear (though it's unclear whether they're a Living Toy or somebody in a mascot costume) who accompanies Asuka everywhere she goes. Shake is also dressed in police gear, and the pair are considered Mobile Police.
- Know When to Fold 'Em:
- You can flee any fight, including Boss Battles, so long as at least one party member is still alive and able to leg it. This is far less punishing than the consequences of letting your whole team get wiped out; burning through some extra Purification Fuel as you escape is a small price to pay compared to losing half of your Food and Materials, along with losing any chance to explore further that day.
- This also applies when the Questers discover that the manhole behind Oguchibito contains a staircase leading even further down and decide not to continue since they're not properly equipped to do so.
- Lady Not-Appearing-in-This-Game: Reika is a Downplayed example; while she serves as the 'face' of the game in most of the promotional artwork and advertising, it's not guaranteed that you'll actually encounter her in your first playthrough due to the game's random elements.
- Leaked Experience: Equipping a Live Camera onto one of your active party members enables everyone back at your base to watch your battles, learning from your successes.
- Metal Slime: Gem barnacles and their ilk don't appear as frequently as other monster types; rather than showing up by themselves on the map, they appear mixed in with groups, and are prone to running away. Defeating them before they can escape can yield some tasty rewards.
- New Game Plus: After beating the final boss, you can start a new loop, which has several benefits:
- One character of each class is randomly chosen from the Questers you've discovered to serve as your starting lineup. Their levels revert to the state they were in when you first found them. The rest will gradually rejoin your party one by one after every ten-day cycle.
- You can retain up to sixty weapons, though you only start with up to three randomly chosen items from this list in your initial inventory. The rest can be unlocked by completing ten-day cycles or through random rediscovery while digging through debris.
- Your maximum Purification Fuel level is retained, and monsters become stronger in various ways.
- Palette Swap: Several enemies play this straight, such as TWD versus Metrostalkers and their ilk. Others, like the Giant Enemy Crabs, play this in a different fashion: the artwork and color palette is the same, but the size of the window around them is smaller or larger, with the art resized accordingly to illustrate that Shearclaws are bigger and nastier than Snipclaws or Scissorclaws.
- Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: The main unifying factor for all Questers is that they've survived The End of the World as We Know It. Your starting party includes a former member of the Mobile Police, a Detonator, a Buddhist, a Professor and a Stealer, and you randomly encounter other survivors as you find campsites scattered throughout the ruins.
- Resources Management Gameplay: A central aspect of the game:
- Every step you take consumes a little Purification Fuel, which is also used for things like reviving any fallen teammates at the end of battle. Once you're out of fuel, you're done exploring for that day.
- Food is extremely valuable; Explorations are effectively divided into ten-day chunks, wherein you need to ensure that you've gathered a certain amount of food by the deadline. Every Quester you recruit means another mouth to feed, raising the requirement accordingly.
- Materials are consumed for all manner of upgrades. Including leveling up your Questers from Level 11 onward, alongside modifying and strengthening your weapons.
- Several abilities expend various Battle Resources during combat, like using Drugs for healing techniques or Batteries to keep drones running. These resources are automatically restored after fights, and your stockpile of them can be extended through various means, like equipping certain items that provide more of a certain resource or using certain actions to scrounge up more supplies mid-combat, often at the cost of some Purification Fuel.
- You can only hold up to ten pages' worth of Weapons and Accessories in the Storage Container, and they can only be modified or disassembled at your home camp, in-between missions. The game will warn you about this if you try to leave camp while near max capacity, though the player can still opt to do so should they desire.
- Status Effects:
- Poison inflicts damage at the end of every turn.
- Paralysis has a chance of preventing the afflicted from using battle moves; higher numbers naturally raises the chances of this kicking in.
- Being Burned causes the afflicted to take equivalent amounts of damage every time they attack.
- Bleeding functions much like Poison, with the added wrinkle of triggering Blood Sport for anyone in the battle who happens to have that passive ability.
- Story Breadcrumbs: Most of the Backstory is revealed by finding USB drives in the walls and accessing them.
- Suspiciously Cracked Wall: Breakable walls are subtly indicated by small cracks running along the sides of their bricks, all throughout the square.
- Turn-Based Combat: Each of your party members can act up to three times per combat round. However, each character only has a limited number of points, and several actions take more than one point.
- Universal Ammunition: Shooting firearms naturally requires Bullets, which are considered a combat resource. However, the game doesn't require specific kinds of bullets for different types of guns.
- Wizard Needs Food Badly: While you're consuming fuel instead of food as you explore the ruins, you still need to ensure that you've gathered enough food to meet your goal by the end of each ten-day stretch.
- Year X: The game is set in the year 20XX.
