I love myself a good RPG and this game takes RPG to the next level even though it isn't really one at all in a sense. Just take a look at the name of the game, Pen and Paper, that's right, it's a game about people playing one of those old written out RPG's. The concept is really unique, I've never seen anything like this before which is why when I was given the chance to get this game, I old myself that playing it would be a fun way to pass the time and that it would be a pretty cool experience. When I got the game I didn't really have the time to play it much, I hadn't even downloaded it until maybe half a year after I got it but once I actually started playing it I was able to see why it was as popular as it was. Honestly, aside for a few major RPG series that I have grown to like in the standard RPG format, I would probably choose to play a game like this in terms of the game play because I really like how the game is set up and the way that you play it.

THE GAMEPLAY

This game is an RPG, yet in terms of the game play, it's not even close to the format of the standard game and I like the way it is. You don't walk around these giant worlds and have these great battles with monsters, but instead you are pretending to do that from your own home or wherever, but it can be just as good. On the screen you a table where the person controlling the game sits and a few of the players who can range from pizza delivery guys to even your own younger brother. Even though you are pretending to play a game, you really do get a full RPG experience. Just imagine having a full RPG written out as a book, that's exactly what happens with the guy at the other end of the table who basically narrates to you everything that happens from actions to dialogue to everything in between. It gets even better because the background, everything behind the able will change to make it look like you are actually there and this is where the battle system comes in which works like a regular RPG battle. Both your players and the enemies are given all sorts of HP, attack, defense, etc, and if you are in a battle, you click the enemy to attack when it's your turn.

Even the animations make it seem like you are actually playing one of those retro RPG games and I think this is a really cool concept that makes the entire game so much better. Heck, the ONLY thing that I truly hate in games such as Pokemon is those times where I am actually trying to go somewhere and Pokemon keep jumping out of nowhere and battling you, or trainers, or even when your next location is far away and you need to walk so far for no apparent reason. Having a game play out like this takes all of that out because you can control the the game at your own pace. Sure, there's going to be a lot more reading, but you don't actually have to go anywhere and unless a battle is mandatory or you want to train, you can just go straight through with the story. I would never play one of these Pen and Paper RPG games because I wouldn't be able to last through doing nothing, but this makes those games really fun.

GRAPHICS 8/10

You might think that the graphics would be lame since it's just in your imagination. Well apparently your imagination is really good because there's nothing stopping the graphics from wowing you. Depending on where you are, everything around the table will change to reflects the scenery of what's going on in the game. For instance, when you first start off the game you will see dark and scary dungeon rooms and later on you see a nice and sunny village. it all changed almost all the time, oceans, mountains, whatever you can think of will eventually become the background as you play the game and choose what to do. Then of course you have the actual animations, which all have a retro style feel to them. The clouds are moving, fire is growing, and the characters jump when they are all attacked. There would have been a time when these graphics would have looked stunning to most gamers though that time has been long gone but even though today we have top notch graphics in almost every game, these still look wonderful. Even if this was a standard game where we had to walk around and look at things, I bet graphics like these would have been able to flow smoothly and would have still worked really well with the game play. Overall, the graphics have been really well made and along with the other aspects of the game make this one of the coolest Indie games that you can get, and for that, my grade for graphics is going to be an 8 out of 10.

SOUND 10/10

The music of the game is 100% awesome and brings us some of the best retro and 8 bit songs that we can listen to, and a lot of them as well. When you first turn on the game you are met by one of the games main songs and it's a pretty cool song that lasts for about 20 seconds or so and keeps looping over and over. Just having a song like this in an indie game is great because it means that the game has a lot to offer since most games that I have seen use very small and basic music and don't really go through the effort of making a good soundtrack and focus more on just the game. It isn't just that one song though, there's plenty more to listen to, like when you actually go into the game you will hear another looping song that's just as good as the main menu song, but then as you play you realize that these songs are nothing compared to what you are about to experience, I'm talking about the battle music. The battle music is fast paced and it's electric and it really does get you amped up for a battle with a guard, rat, or whatever wants to kill you and that song is followed by a little victory tune, if you win of course, you don't deserve any music if you die.

Those aren't the only songs that were thrown into the game, there's plenty more music for you to listen to as you progress through the game, in fact there's about 10 songs littered all over the game, with some of them being really short like 20 to 30 seconds and a few that are longer than a minute, and all of them are really good. Once you get past the music if you still want to talk about the sounds there's a lot more. Every little click comes with some sort of a tune as well as the attacks and if I'm not mistaken, each of the monsters and enemies that you fight will have their own sound when they are defeated which is really cool and then on top of that there are other sounds all over the place like coins and whatnot. All of the sounds are great and all, but the music is really what pushes this aspect of the game to its limits because it's just so good and you hear it almost all the time, at least 95 percent of the time there will be some song playing. Overall, this aspect is as good as it can get so for a grade, sound can't get anything lower than a perfect 10 out of 10.

ADDICTIVENESS 10/10

I found myself loving this game in just a matter of minutes because of all the stuff that the game has to offer. It's as if the developers turned all that extra space that an open world would have been used for to make all sorts of new features and other things to make the game fun. This game has all the aspects of a standard RPG, just that you can't really see most of it. If you are a fan of the pen and paper RPG games, then this is just the game for you because it has petty much all of those aspects as well. One of these examples would be when you are traveling, you have to roll a dice when you travel and if it lands between two numbers then you get to the next place safe, but if it lands on a different number then you have to battle something. I have never played any of the pen and paper games before but I can tell what aspects and features are taken from them and there's a lot, probably enough to make fans of those kinds of games play this, even if they don't like video games. I'm no exaggerating when I say that the game has thousands of things for you to do nor am I when I say that every little one of those things is fun. There's really never a dull moment when you're playing this game, you are always caught up in the events of the game and you are always eager to find out what's next for you to do.

Instead of going around a city, looking for people to give quests to you like in most games, you are just given a list of quests for you to choose from and there's a lot of them. There's about half a dozen different quest types for you to choose from such as Attacking, Rescuing, and Escorting, and each one will have a variety of people for you to work with. Quests are great and all, they are fun to fulfill, they offer a ton of exp for your characters, and more gold than you could count, but even though I had access to so many different quests, I chose not to take on any of them for a while. It's not that I didn't find them to be fun, I was just having so much fun going back and fighting random monsters over and over. I was having a blast battling and gaining levels and I did that for maybe 3 dozen battles before I finally moved on to a quest because it was just so much fun. RPG games are always a lot of fun in general, there's just something about battling and leveling up that always makes you come back for more and you can never say no to that urge, no matter how much you have already played. You could be an experienced gamer who has played this game for well more than 200 hours and you will have the same amount of excitement and wonder as some newbie who has just started playing the game for the first time. That's what the standard RPG does to you and this game is no different, it offers the same feeling that makes you want to sit in front if your computer for weeks without ever going outside and that's why this aspect can't be anything lower than a perfect 10 out of 10.

STORY 7/10

Like most RPG games, this game has a full and huge story, though it's a bit different because instead of going around and seeing everything for yourself and battling and such, you are told the story as dialogue by the narrator who is controlling the game. I'm going to be honest, it's a bit hard to keep up with what's going on if the entire story I told through continuous text boxes, have you ever played Pokemon or some other RPG and then got to that one guy who talks a bit about the story but then the text boxes just keep going and going and by the time he stops talking you can barely remember half of the stuff that he said? What I'm trying to say is that since it's all text based, it can be very easy to lose track of what's going on and to forget bits and pieces of some information. The game starts off with you escaping from some sort of a dungeon prison and into a village. From there you do all sorts of various quests, some if them are small for a few people and earn you some gold, while some of them are a lot bigger than they appear as you try to save people from monsters who want to destroy everything. Just because you can lose track of what's going on every now and then doesn't mean it's bad, the story is pretty solid and it's huge, and for a grade this aspect is going to get a 7 out of 10.

DEPTH 10/10

This game really has an unlimited number of options for you to choose from. First, lets just go over the stuff that you can buy with the gild that you win, which alone makes the depth grade high. First you have the regular RPG stuff like potions and weapons which can be bought to help the game but then you have stuff that the people who are playing the game can buy to make their room better. You can buy different types of snacks to eat, walls, tables, doors, you can even buy a pet and a new narrator, among many other cool things to make your room look better. Not only will all of these things make your room look better, but they will also give you all sorts of boosts inside of the game and in total, there has to be at least 50 different room items that you can buy. That's literally just the start of it all, there's oh so much for you to do, just take a look at all of the quests which has been mentioned earlier.

First, you have different types of quests, and then you have different quests within each type, and they all change depending on where you are. You could have a bunch of village quests, Forrest quests, mountain quests, etc. All in all, there really has to be hundreds upon hundreds of quests and they are all just little side things compared to the other things you can be doing. Let's not forget the amount of monsters that you can battle, which has to be at least a few dozen, and then the number of locations that you can visit, which again has to be well over a dozen. No matter how you look at the game, there are always so many cool aspects and amazing features and when you look at the game at an overall scope, there's easily enough stuff that would require many many hours to get all of it checked out. There really is a lot to the game and this is another aspect that doesn't deserve anything lower than a perfect 10 out of 10.

DIFFICULTY 3

For the most part, the game is really easy and the only thing you need to worry about is having enough gold left over when you die so you can continue to play. I'm not exactly sure what happens if you die and can't afford to bring yourself back to life so that's the only thing you really need to keep an eye out for and it's really easy to die. If you try to take on multiple enemies at once, you might not make it more than 3 or 4 battles before one of your characters die, even if you were doing well. Other than that, the battles are fairly easy and there's always the option to sleep so you will always easily get your HP and MP back right after a battle. If a battle turns out to be a bit hard, the only thing that you need to do is go back and fight a few weaker monsters over and over again so you can gain a couple extra levels and stats as well as some gold so you can buy some weapons and helpful items. That's really all there is to it, the battles and becoming strong are the only things that you need to worry about because everything else is a walk in the park so my grade for difficulty is going to be a 3.

OVERALL 9.5/10

This was truly one heck of a game. It was so much fun and the fact that it had all these cool pen and paper aspects only made it better. I played this game for a bit, I fell in love with it right away, and I found myself incapable of playing anything else for a while because it was so good and I'm pretty sure that if you play this, you will experience the same feelings which is why I will suggest this game to any and all fans of RPG games. This game offers one of a kind fun, the kind of fun that no other RPG can offer and I love it for that. This game was a blast and my overall grade is going to be a 9.5 out of 10.

Wow, no wonder why you are in charge of the Windows section. This is one of your best reviews ever! The game looks so huge that, even though you didn't make comparisons with other games, only focusing on it was plenty to yield this excellent article.

Great job on the review man. As always, I enjoyed reading it.

As far as the game goes, I wound up purchasing it awhile back from a user because the style and concept of the game intrigued me as both a video game RPG fan as well as an old school pen and pager RPG player in my younger days.

This is a good game, but I would stop short of giving it a 9.5 out of 10. Although I enjoyed the pop culture references, the art style of the game and the overall concept, I found this game to be bland at points. I mean all you are really doing is clicking a few commands and moving through the story in linear fashion. You don't have too many SERIOUS decisions to make in the game and there's not really a whole lot of adventuring to be done. The game is WAY too easy and holds your hand through the entire process. This sort of thing winds up turning me off to games as an old school gamer that enjoys a challenge.

I would give this game a 7.8/10 with hopes that the sequel (Have yet to play it) is better.

Good work on the review, man. Literally my only complaint is the length, as I can't even read my own review if it's that long. lol But quality wise I can't find any problems here.

I tip my hat off to you. At least you are filling us in on obscure Windows games ya'll never heard of. Despite all the length complaints as your reviews are convincing enough for people to buy them.