Genre: Role-Playing
Publisher: Atlus
Developer: Success
Release Date: April 14, 2009

How hardcore of a role-playing game fan do you consider yourself? When you think of games you like, does your mind flash to the Final Fantasy franchise, with fairly easy story progression but tough extra bosses and lots of side-quests? Or do you pine for titles like Wizardry, where the objectives are all very straightforward but victory comes at the cost of hours upon hours of level grinding and slowly working your way through exceptionally difficult dungeons? If your tastes run to the latter, then The Dark Spire is a perfect game for you; but if you prefer a more approachable and user-friendly RPG, then stay as far away from this one as possible.

The Dark Spire is a new game that attempts to recreate the super-traditional RPG experience. There is very little narrative in the title and only one dungeon, but that single tower is teeming with monsters, and you won't take two steps inside before you realize that this isn't one of those games you'll be able to plow through overnight. Rather, this is a title that will require you to draw on patience, tactics, wit and more patience in order to make it through. Ultimately, it's the closest you can get to a pen-and-paper game without whipping out a cardboard screen and the latest D&D rulebook.

Starting off, you're free to set up your party in any way you wish, creating characters and assigning them a race, alignment and class before you roll for skill point distribution. There is no single main character, and you won't be picking up new party members along the way. While you can create new characters at any time, all of them start at level one, and the only way to bulk them up is to proceed in a slow grind through the tower. Again, for traditionalists, this is really the only way to play a proper RPG, but more modern fans will likely find it exceptionally tedious.

This traditional, and therefore difficult, model applies to nearly all aspects of the game, creating a constant environment of tension. Death carries a stiff penalty, as reviving characters is a surefire way to cripple your gold reserves, and nearly every treasure chest you find is booby-trapped, so if you aren't particularly careful and cunning, it's easy to end up decimating your party even after the fighting is over. Starting out, you likely won't make it past the first two or three battles in the tower before you go scampering back to town to lick your wounds. For a handful of gamers, this is nirvana; for the rest, however, it's just a reintroduction of mechanics that we got rid of decades ago because they weren't any fun.

The Dark Spire also refuses to hold your hand, giving you one short tutorial on the most basic of battle tactics and then sending you out to your inevitable death. I actually got stuck in the training area for a fairly decent amount of time due to the fact that I had to pick a lock and a door and didn't even know I could do it. I kept sending my party up to the offending portal and telling them to pick the lock, and the game kept saying that I had failed. I therefore assumed I was supposed to do something else, like find a switch or something, but there was nothing left to do. After searching every square inch of the training dungeon, I went back to the door and began angrily jamming the "Open" button and randomly during the sequence of failure messages, I discovered that the door had finally opened. If you create a game that makes even the training section confusing, what chance is there to retain the audience for the duration of the experience? Couple this with the fact that you have to learn and cast a special spell before you can even see your party on the map (revealed as you go along, of course), and you have a game that seems to want nothing more than to see you fail.

For those who choose to play the game regardless of its difficulty, the sights and sounds are quite enjoyable. The title features a comic book graphic style, with intentionally washed-out colors and exaggerated character features. Those who wish to go really old-school can even essentially turn off the graphics and revert to a wireframe model that will definitely take you back to the "good ol' days." In an interesting wrinkle, the two different display modes each feature its own set of music, and the tunes in the game are definitely memorable. Every new copy of The Dark Spire even includes an accompanying soundtrack CD, letting you carry the music of the title with you wherever you go.

While the game's graphical style is interesting, it's unfortunately drowned out by the title's excessive reliance on menus. Seeing as how this is a traditional game, you have to select from the menu to attack, defend, cast spells and so on, but you also use menus to shop, heal or move from place to place. Rather than walking into town and heading into the item shop or inn, you simply select what you want to do from the menus, eliminating virtually all NPC interaction and freedom of movement. In fact, the only time you actually move your characters is while exploring the Spire, and even that is relegated to the simple up, down, left and right. The menus are boring and can be terribly frustrating, as the game sometimes reorders them or changes their functionality without any advanced warning. So if you've zoned out and are simply tapping the "Proceed" button with the intent to attack, then be ready for all hell to break loose as your characters do something else entirely because you weren't watching the menus like a hawk. There's nothing like dying and having to reboot your last save because something changed on a whim, right?

Games like The Dark Spire prove just how subjective game reviews are; while it is near perfection in its chosen genre, the average gamer would trade in this game or simply throw it away after spending less than an hour with it. The barrier to entry is exceptionally high, just the way a small subset of the populace likes it, but it walls off the game from any legitimate retail success. If you crave a challenging, unforgiving, old-school game, then this is the perfect choice. However, if you require even the slightest bit of accessibility or don't relish the thought of experiencing a game as work rather than fun, then The Dark Spire has nothing to offer you. This is purely a niche game, and if you're not a part of the clique, you're not going to get it.

Score: 6.0/10