Middens started off with real promise. It had unique collage art style, a world unlike any other, promising combat system, and an intriguing opening with enigmatic side character. Those were elements of a great game, but instead of building on them, John Clowder has chosen to expand outwards, and they were buried under mountains of pretentious filler.
The art tries to do too many styles at once, and later levels become an overblown parody of the pleasing early designs. Backgrounds animated with some oily paper effect will outright hurt your eyes, and the painfully white rooms with random objects dropped alongside them aren’t much better. There are literally hundreds of rooms within the game, but most of them are junk, their forced weirdness just feeling tiresome after a while. These rooms often have an NPC or two, and they’re always limited to one line. Some games (i.e. Standstill Girl) create interesting stories when isolated quotes are taken into account, but here it’s junk that never comes to anything. You have a choice to kill anyone or leave them alone, and the game tries tempting you into murder through placing dangerous-looking NPCs that won’t actually attack, or including fetch quests that apparently require killing peaceful inhabitants until someone drops the item quest-giver seek. However, there’s never a reason to bother, and I walked past everyone but the mass murdeder guy. It might’ve been intended as a dream world of some kind, but those dreams aren’t worth a damn.
The “plot” isn't no better. Protagonist is a player insert with zero personality and Genie is the only real character in the entire game. After the tutorial, he suddenly goes silent, and leaves you with zero direction or reason to keep playing. He speaks about ten times less often then he should’ve had, and the conclusion, is abrupt, unsubtle and largely nonsensical, with little new to say.
Weirdly, the actual combat is quite good once you level up enough to unlock status effects. All aggressive enemies have boss-like stats and a few abilities, but are not fully status-immune, and each battle is a satisfying puzzle to pick the right effect to neuter them before exploiting the elemental weaknesses to finish them off. You can also collect worms on the map to use as healing items/elemental grenades, but they rarely make a difference.
A real disappointment.
Middens started off with real promise. It had unique collage art style, a world unlike any other, promising combat system, and an intriguing opening with enigmatic side character. Those were elements of a great game, but instead of building on them, John Clowder has chosen to expand outwards, and they were buried under mountains of pretentious filler.
The art tries to do too many styles at once, and later levels become an overblown parody of the pleasing early designs. Backgrounds animated with some oily paper effect will outright hurt your eyes, and the painfully white rooms with random objects dropped alongside them aren’t much better. There are literally hundreds of rooms within the game, but most of them are junk, their forced weirdness just feeling tiresome after a while. These rooms often have an NPC or two, and they’re always limited to one line. Some games (i.e. Standstill Girl) create interesting stories when isolated quotes are taken into account, but here it’s junk that never comes to anything. You have a choice to kill anyone or leave them alone, and the game tries tempting you into murder through placing dangerous-looking NPCs that won’t actually attack, or including fetch quests that apparently require killing peaceful inhabitants until someone drops the item quest-giver seek. However, there’s never a reason to bother, and I walked past everyone but the mass murdeder guy. It might’ve been intended as a dream world of some kind, but those dreams aren’t worth a damn.
The “plot” isn't no better. Protagonist is a player insert with zero personality and Genie is the only real character in the entire game. After the tutorial, he suddenly goes silent, and leaves you with zero direction or reason to keep playing. He speaks about ten times less often then he should’ve had, and the conclusion, is abrupt, unsubtle and largely nonsensical, with little new to say.
Weirdly, the actual combat is quite good once you level up enough to unlock status effects. All aggressive enemies have boss-like stats and a few abilities, but are not fully status-immune, and each battle is a satisfying puzzle to pick the right effect to neuter them before exploiting the elemental weaknesses to finish them off. You can also collect worms on the map to use as healing items/elemental grenades, but they rarely make a difference.
Final score: 4/10