REVIEW – An old-fashioned side-scrolling game that starts off very slowly and will therefore quickly grate on a large part of its audience, but for the more persistent players it should be a reasonably good experience, because despite the slow start, Space Fox Games’ first game (which has had a demo for almost a year and a half) is not particularly bad.

Join Rin, the last child of the Creator, on a journey to restore order to a mystical world.Collect aspects and runes, craft spells, and face powerful bosses – your transformed siblings.The fate of the world is in your hands. Can you restore harmony to this enchanted realm?

The Storyteller

The story is inspired by the ancient myth of the conflict between Cronus and his children, and thus the theme of the old gods being replaced by new ones. This is to be imagined in a dark fairy tale, so there is no trace of humans, but the more often we see magic. There is another motif in the story. There is the conflict between obedience to the Father (the Creator) and free will and responsibility for oneself and one’s choices. Based on this, we can have several endings at the end of the game (which shouldn’t take more than about four and a half hours in the best case). Until then, we have eighteen basic moves at our disposal (or literally in our hands?), five of which can be used for defense and ten for attack. The spells are brought together by Aspects of Magic and Spell Patterns, and can be enhanced by the smaller runes and modified by the larger (Lesser/Greater) runes, the latter of which can be upgraded.

Three can be used quickly, but can also be swapped out for another set of spells. According to the developers, there are more than 7,500 possible variations, and you can even dismantle the spells later to use the items in other ways. There will be five boss fights, because our protagonist Rin (no, we are not going to write capitalized names like that…) has five siblings and she is the youngest, and of course they have twisted it so that they are not like us, but rather unknown and therefore not so easy to prepare for. There will be both big and small enemies, and most of them don’t require any serious preparation with skills and spells, so they will be easy to beat. But compared to that, the user interface is subjective and maybe not as appealing to look at. The same goes for the dialog.The characters don’t speak to each other verbally, so you can only read their lines, but maybe that’s not a shortcoming here (we’re talking about a small studio, not a AAA team).The design is a somewhat unusual choice, especially for the effect used for the text.We found the way the dialog “jumped in” letter by letter a bit confusing. What was the point?

The little sibling

Rin:The Last Child starts off very slowly.No joke.It just has a hell of a slow pace until you get to the dash move, because after that you can keep running left and right fast.While it’s understandable that our character needs to improve, it shouldn’t be solved by creating a breakpoint because we’re too slow before the dash, and then we don’t stop using it.Opponents can often be the same in different colors and looks, and the accuracy of platforming segments may not be perfect.The quality is not bad, but it is not the best.The basic story is good, but it can have the effect during gameplay that it doesn’t really want to progress in any direction.

The visuals (apart from the interface/dialogue pairing) are unique, but the style is a bit hard to digest. It’s not ugly, but it takes some getting used to. The gameplay feels more like something from the early 90s, because it can’t be considered a modern Metroidvania, for example, in the sense that the smaller enemies seem like minimal, mindless obstacles at best, and it’s perhaps a strange design decision that getting the first smaller rune doesn’t work until you buy the first rune slot. For some reason, it feels like the game doesn’t really explain everything. It is not the expectation that everything will be explained letter by letter, but rather that it is not always possible to spell out what to expect in every development.

The last paragraph

Rin :The Last Child scores between 6.5/10 and 7/10. For a first game it’s not bad, and it seems that Space Fox Games needed some time to finish it (the demo is from 2022), and you can be glad that they finally finished the development. The soundtrack is pleasant, the atmosphere is not bad, but it’s not excellent in any aspect (though it’s not bad either). The demo of the game is worth checking out, after that it’s an easy decision whether to invest in it or not.

-V-

Publisher: Space Fox Games

Developer: Space Fox Games

Style: side-view platformer

Release: January 25, 2024.