LISA: THE PAINFUL first two paragraphs are completely spoiler free meaning i wont even go over the intro and stuff and the rest may or may not have light spoilers.
lisa the painful is an rpg where you play as some guy named brad armstrong and follow him on his quest across the wasteland. stuff gets forgeted pretty quickly due to lethal combat and the vicious dispositions of many people met along the journey. battles are hard, although the player has to battle obscure mechanics instead of mechanical or strategic decisions. to add frustration, there is an optional "pain mode" difficulty setting which makes saving limited and adds some other minor trivialities. the limited saving is bullstuff and only adds wasted time and frustration in a game that forces trial and error to understand the mechanics and find optimal strategies in the first place, moreso than most rpgs. furthermore the game has instant death cliffs throughout that are easily walked off. you will walk off one if you play and then cry because you are in pain mode.
this isnt one of those gameplay games where the mechanics are stressed over everything else and the amount of random death bullstuff that can happen at a moments notice is used to accentuate the atmosphere of hopelessness excellently strung up by the writing and graphics, both of which are good enough to ignore some of the poorer gameplay decisions. the writing isnt flawless and lots of information about the background stuff dealt with by the player such as how people actually live in this setting and the whatever the deal is with the warlord groups. it certainly isnt one of the best games i've played mechanically but is carried by story and setting into being one of the best games i have reviewed. take heed that that does not mean its incredible its just pretty alright man as i have not reviewed many good games.
you build a party of you and 3 other characters out of like 30 different guys and go forget around killing stuff in mostly nonrandom encounters. most rpgmaker games have piss easy gameplay but lisa does not forget around and you will get your ass kicked multiple times as motherforgeters you fight will have a stuffload more health than you and deal at least half of your hp per turn. status effects are extremely important as there are multiple stacking stuns and devastatingly powerful poisons as well as damage boosts for specific types of damage. if you do not have good party composition you will die which is an extreme pain in the ass in pain mode. the game sort of forgets up with many of the endgame and boss enemies being immune to a lot of status effects and doing as much damage as possible becomes the only viable strategy but that is far from the worst problem concerning gameplay.
the game does not give you any information about how the mechanics on anything work so enjoy figuring out how you can kill people efficiently by repeatedly dying or reading a wiki. by all mechanics i am really talking absolutely everything by the way no part of the game is clarified. the items you buy in the shop have unlisted special effects. there is no skill tree or obvious progression for any party member so building a party that synergizes well enough to handle late game is guesswork unless you grind everyone up. the percent chances of all buffs to work and their specifics can only be learned with trial and error. enemies have an unshown percent chance to resist a debuff more than normal and some are immune to some debuffs entirely, also not shown.
dying in pain mode is a bitch. dying in normal mode is fine as you can save infinitely before any encounter but dying in pain mode is an absolute loving chore and yeah i get that pain mode is supposed to be hard but any game that becomes actually painful to play is bad. in pain mode you get one save at designated save points littering the world and the save points are actually pretty common most of the time and only become super bullstuff although they are never not arbitrary as they fail at savescum prevention while common and create periods of extreme repetition as players who died now have to watch the same expository cutscene and fight the same battles again, perhaps multiple times if failure continues, completely killing any flow. additionally some savescumming is required in order to deal with the games whack difficulty curves properly as there is no indicator of how hard a fight will be and how to prepare for it which i get is supposed to be part of the atmosphere or whatever but on pain mode its just obnoxious. i would advise anyone playing on pain mode to make multiple saves in case they forget up and save at an inconvenient time.
continuing the trend of complete bullstuff and obscured everything i have to shout out the endings of the game of which there are three. if you play pain mode you can only get the pain mode ending regardless of the actions you take to get the other two endings and the game does not tell you this. the game also doesnt tell you how to get the other two endings but you know i guess everyone was expecting this. all 3 of the endings are just an extra loving cutscene that explains the background situation so if you dont want to go through the game again just watch that stuff on youtube as the game has little replay value unless you missed a ton of stuff.
moving on from how the game forgets up, haha just kidding forget you. for some godforsaken reason the environments have these instakill cliff things which you can walk off and die instantly. instantly. take in all that bullstuff about pain mode again and think about instant death by accidentally walking too close to a cliff.
i took a spoiler free video of this. at the end where it says "game over" that translates to "you loving died starfish" in case you didnt catch that or are stupefied at this being a real mechanic in a real video game. even worse, the observational eye saw that the game is divided into "squares" where you can move on. this means there is no precision cliff avoidance or that you have to be extra stupid to walk off. being next to a pit is just one a or d press away from the grave. it gets even stupider because there are /secrets that require you to jump into the same pits the game conditions you to avoid like aids/ with only, at most, the vaguest hint that something is down there. granted these secrets arent too common but for real what the stuff is this.
the game has limited grinding mostly to save your sorry ass from the disaster of having a bunch of party members that dont gel being high level and the rest garbage and to let players actually buy things from the shops. there is a lategame area specifically designed to let players grind and it gives out massive xp and research magazines, the currency and no you cant look at them, for 0 risk whatsoever. like you can die and it wont even matter but you wont since the main character can solo them and theres free healing nearby. furthermore there are dark caves with random shadowy figure encounters which give stuff xp but a lot of mags and are also piss easy to kill. so yeah if you ever get forgeted up or something you can always grind your ass out of any situation most of the time although i am not really sure how effective the stat boosts are or however damaged is decided or some stuff because lol mechanics obscuration but more is better and it seems pretty significant. just putting this out there because forget any amount of grinding.
now after all that bullstuff most people would be like but destroyer why would anyone play this game and i will tell you why; basically the game has good enough everything else to make up for the stuff gameplay. its not really a mechanically focused game and it feels like a lot of the complete horse stuff ambiguity and whatever is used to build an atmosphere of despair which it might be too successful at as shown by any time death occurs in pain mode. everything about the game combos into a "stuffs forgeted but everyone is dealing with it, often violently" vibe instead of a "wow this game sure has good mechanics" one, although both are certainly complimentary. i dont really know if what im talking about is complete stuff or not but just reread the first sentence after the semicolon because thats what im going for i think.
the writing is good for the most part. everyone is either funny or depressing or brutal and it really brings the whole thing together as a world where everyone got over the apocalypse and just forgets around now. the game is able to swap between moods with ease and does whatever its doing at the moment superbly. my only gripe is that there is actually too little writing to do the entire setting or all the characters justice. the game, while dialog heavy, is certainly not hugely dialog heavy which can become a problem if it has to flesh out like 30 characters worth of party members so instead of writing character interactions between most of them it doesnt. yeah i hope you enjoy getting about 10 lines max from each party member and then never hearing from them again. also you wont get any info about how all of the gangs and stuff work either. really the only character that gets some spotlight is brad it isnt even that much in comparison to other games of the genre. i didnt feel like i got into the head of any of the characters which is an issue if the game centers on them overcoming their inner demons and stuff and this one sort of does that but only with brad. its still pretty good writing though just dont expect to get down with the characters and stuff.
the art is some good stuff and matches the writing's moods shifts instantly. the art style is some pixel art looking stuff that shys away from a lot of bright coloring and really ties that hopelessness thing in even when comedy is happening. everything is a little bit surreal whenever anything terrible is happening trust me it gets real. that dude getting his head beaten in above is pretty tame as lisa gets into body horror and stuff right quick. its really good yo.
the music is also really good yo
just take a listen. that song is easily the goofiest one in the game though but all of the other songs have the same sampleyish amateur musician feel. the whole pretty good fits the mood and stuff and its certainly unique so give it a listen.
all in all its a pretty decent game although i would buy undertale or something for $10 if i have it to spare. i dont know maybe get it on sale if you are in the mood for some wacky stuff.
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