Radix Chronicle: Gameplay, first impressions, and review

Hello again, let’s take a little detour from our regular programming.

Turn back time a decade and a half, or something, and I was spellbound by the game Dark Souls from FromSoftware. Like many others, I eventually stumbled upon the EpicNameBro YouTube channel. ENB was an American living and working in Japan who frequently posted interesting gameplay videos from the Japanese edition of Dark Souls.

It was my first (and last) experience with watching other people play games on YouTube. EpicNameBro had a special knack for analyzing and breaking down the gameplay. His opinions on game mechanics and storytelling resonated strongly with me. Fast forward to the present day, and ENB and friends just released their first game.

Radix Chronicle

Radix is a tactical skill-oriented RPG inspired by SNES and PlayStation classics. The genre is far from my wheelhouse, but I feel the least I can do is to give the game a go after consuming all those hours of ENB’s Dark Souls content.

First impressions

Radix Chronicle from Luna Flora is my first introduction to a tactical RPG game. That makes it hard to give a good assessment of how it stacks up to other titles in the genre. However, I gave it an honest shot, and I’ll share my uneducated opinion.

The story, gameplay, graphics, and sound

We meet up with our merry band of heroes in the unnamed Kingdom when they learn that a pack of awfully cute dogmen has started to wreak havoc in the nearby forest. Our heroes leave their bickering and infighting behind and travel out to face this unexpected foe.

Radix has a turn-based gameplay where you’re in control of a party where each character can wield brute force or dabble in magic. The player must work out which strategies to employ depending on the battle scene. We can modify the terrain to our advantage, identifying enemy weaknesses, and hopefully plan a few turns ahead. The skill part is based on your timing with weapons and magic. Perfect timing inflicts the most damage, but it’s also easy to miss completely, as different items require different timing.

I had planned to play this game for an hour, but when I slowly got the hang of the gameplay, I was kind of hooked. I spent five hours replaying the first missions so I could complete all the challenges, and I had an enjoyable time mixing up strategies and perfecting my deadly set of skills.

The pixel art is beautiful and gives the game a polished look. The finished product looks way better than the early gameplay videos, and I would say their effort and attention to detail really have paid off.

The soundtrack is, in my opinion, even better than the graphical artwork. The game has some sweet tunes that sent me back to my childhood in a burst of nostalgia.

A short review

It’s an impressive first effort from Luna Flora. They got a lot of the important bits right, but there are also some parts that I thought didn’t work.

The good

The gameplay is fun, challenging, and surprisingly addictive. As with Dark Souls, it can be frustrating and difficult until you figure it out. I got plenty annoyed with my failing reaction time while replaying missions. Good stuff. And as previously mentioned, the soundtrack is a real surprise that showers the game in a cozy kind of atmosphere.

The bad

The storytelling and dialogue between party members never caught on with me. After the first few missions, I skipped the story scenes completely. The wall of text approach to storytelling didn’t capture my imagination. Though there was some mention of bondage in there, so I might be missing out. However, the white font in these story scenes is almost unreadable, and it’s accompanied by an awful repeating ’typewriting’ kind of sound.

And to my dismay, starting a new game will wipe out your existing save. Any progress you made in the game is gone, forever. Now, how’s that for old school?

The ugly

The aspect ratio.

I believe Radix Chronicle was initially going to be a mobile game, but for some reason, they stuck with the aspect ratio. Thus giving you the impression of playing a mobile game on your computer. That boils down to a lot of wasted screen estate.

Conclusion

Rating: Mixed

It’s not an epic game, bro, but it’s still better than 50% of the games in my Steam collection.

Radix Chronicle is available for 20$ on Steam as of writing. I bought the game as a token of support towards ENB, but I believe I got my money’s worth. It’s a fun little adventure with lots of charm. What more is there to say than praise the sun and consider picking up Radix if you’re into tactical RPGs?

• Played on MacBook Pro M1 with macOS Sequoia
• Available now on Linux/Windows and macOS
• Get Radix Chronicle on Steam

Btw, I heard through the grapevine that Luna Flora’s next project will be a Metroidvania game, and that makes me excited.