Three Unknown RPGs I Discovered Between QA Shifts

The time after work, lying on the couch with my laptop open, is the best part of my day. During the day, I bash into the same wall hundreds of times chasing bugs in major titles, skip the same dialogue dozens of times, and jot down crash logs. Maybe that's why at night I'm drawn to the opposite kind of game. RPGs buried deep in the store that nobody talks about. Here's an honest rundown of three I played between QA shifts over the past three months.

Moonveil Chronicle

The name gave off a familiar fantasy vibe, so my expectations were low. The store page screenshots were nothing but rough pixel art, and the review count was in the double digits. But the mood shifted with the first NPC dialogue in the starting village. The blacksmith hands you a sword and says, "I hope you never have to use this," and that single line turned out to be foreshadowing for the entire main quest. The combat system is admittedly clunky. Hit detection can be off, and menu transitions are slow, things that especially grate on a tester's eye. Still, the density of the lore more than made up for those shortcomings. Every single book in the library contains world-building text, and the more you read, the more the context of the main story shifts. It took about twelve hours to clear, and the price was under $5, if I remember right.

Saltwick Depths

I found out about this one when a coworker sent me a link during lunch, saying, "I found this weird game." It's a turn-based RPG with roguelike elements, and the setting, a salt mine on the English coast, was unique. The dungeon layout changes every run, and enemy patterns differ from floor to floor. The problem is balance. Floors one through three are reasonably fun, but the difficulty spikes sharply starting at floor four. The healing item drop rate is so low that with bad luck, progression becomes flat-out impossible. There was a night in my Nashville apartment at two in the morning when I wiped three times in a row and just closed my laptop. And yet I booted it up again the next day. The graffiti carved into the mine walls serves as story clues, and piecing them together was genuinely enjoyable. The polish is uneven, but the atmosphere definitely sticks with you.

Vessel of Names

This was the last of the three I started, and the one that stayed on my mind the longest. The protagonist sets out to restore names to beings who have lost them, and the ending branches depending on the order and combination in which you assign names. It's text-driven with almost no combat; choices and dialogue are the core. At first I thought, "Isn't this just a visual novel?" But there's map exploration and item combining, so it does have the skeleton of an RPG. The structure where the act of naming is essentially the combat felt fresh. Each playthrough is short, four or five hours, so being able to try multiple branches is another plus. The UI, however, is not user-friendly. Save slot management is confusing, and you can't review the text log. Maybe it's the habit of writing test reports, but these kinds of things really jump out at me.

All three games clearly show they were made without big budgets. Menus are clunky, translations are awkward, or bugs remain. There's something a little funny about someone who squashes bugs by day running into more bugs at night. Even so, the narrative depth these games carry is a kind I rarely feel in the big titles I run QA on. Next, I'm planning to map out every ending branch in Vessel of Names.