KEL Reaper of Entropy Review – Vengeful, but Silly, Death

Skeletons have it hard: They’re flimsy.

Skeletons have it hard: They’re flimsy. Not as popular as zombies. Poorly-dressed. Normally they at least show up with a couple of friends, but Kel from Tavern Games’ KEL Reaper of Entropy doesn’t even have that. The only stroke of luck he’s had is that there doesn’t appear to be any fantasy heroes or necromancers around to give him a rough time, letting him cause as much trouble or good as his brittle heart desires. Given a village filled with people with various wants and needs, will Kel cast off the evil nature of the common skeleton and help them, or will he kill them all? Probably one, then the other. Needy people can get annoying, right?

Kel awakens in a stone circle with no memory of how he got there or why he’s dead, but then again, he doesn’t especially care. He’s got other things to do, depending on how you intend to interact with the people and world he’s in. There are ten other people in the game world, and it’s up to the player to decide how to interact with them. You can annoy people, frighten them, or be nice and give them what they want. It’s entirely up to the player, and the game just goes with whatever you want to do, often with silly results. Kick the gossip girl if you don’t believe me.

Note: IGM does not endorse harming gossipy women

That might be hard to do at first, what with the whole being a skeleton thing. People tend not to trust you in that state, so you have to do a few things to make them like you. You can put on a magical disguise to help yourself out at first, one that’s fueled by mana potions you can get from the crazy hermit outside of town. That will keep you for a while, but if you do some good deeds in town while you’re disguised, you can build up good will and eventually reach a point where the townsfolk don’t kill you on site when you’re in your skeletal state. If you’re a really nice guy, the people of town become much more accommodating of your lack of skin, reaching a point where you can even try to get married. Or at least have a fling (the mechanics of which I don’t want to consider).

Helping people often requires items. You can get a lot of what you need through harvesting items outside of town. You do this by hugging bushes, giving flies to rotten piles of meat, and in general, agreeing to bizarre trades that don’t cost you anything. A saucy wink at a flower is enough to let you pick it, giving you the stuff you need to appeal to a certain special lady in town. Trade is huge in the game, and getting a few free items outside of town will let you trade for better things on the inside. Everybody needs something, so getting items and giving them to the right people will get you in the town’s good graces. Soon, you’ll be a skeleton hero to the people!

Still, once everyone loves and trusts you, you might notice a couple of unsavory people lurking about the quiet town. Some folks like to make money in more underhanded ways; for instance, through poisoning and healing people. Some of them have murderous pastimes. Not everyone in this town wants something nice, so you can’t actually help everyone without causing a little mayhem. Even tattling on these people will often get them killed instead of their prospective target, so eventually, people are likely going to start dying.

Maybe you wanted that from the start, though. Kel is a skeleton, after all. Not exactly a fan of all these people being so high and mighty about having organs. Through your trades and discussions, you can learn things about people that can get them killed. Tell or show the right people the right things, and you can get someone in town offed. There’s a trick to getting rid of most of the people in town without attacking them at all, and finding out how to do it is a big part of the game.

You can attack people outright, but remember your brittleness when you do so. Kicking and intimidating people can get you some of the items you want in the game, but doing so against the wrong people (the game has a percentage system to show you when you’re about to make that mistake) will often start a fight. You can’t directly attack back, only being able to weakly curse people at first. It’s literally shouting at them, and is as effective in combat as you would think. This means that starting a fight often ends with your broken bones getting tossed out of town, forcing a respawn a short distance away. This also wounds your reputation in town, so you might find you can’t enter without your magical disguise back in place next time.

You can boost your cursing power a little bit through some strange means in the game, eventually reaching a point where you can kill people quite quickly. Even so, you can’t use this on everyone in town, so while it will let you cheat a bit and off many of the townsfolk, some can’t be affected. You can’t outright kill the people you can intimidate and kick without repercussion though, so you have to find underhanded means to kill them.

That sounds like a nuisance, but having that in place means you have to carefully choose how and when to kill someone in town. Yes, you can kill a lot of people with a powered-up curse, but you can’t get everybody. This means you really need to make sure you’ve used up every clue and quest in town before you give up and just kill someone yourself. You do need everyone dead to finish the game, but you need them alive to ensure you know all the town’s secrets. It might seem fun at first to just kill people willy-nilly, but the real meat of the game is knowing the right order in which to wipe people out. If you want to see the end, you’ll need to be very particular about this killing spree.

While I liked killing people, it was much more satisfying to make the townsfolk do it for me. It had the nice benefit of not hurting my reputation, and it also left me feeling like an evil schemer. You feel clever when you trick the whole city into thinking the baker tried to poison children, and it’s just a lot more enjoyable than running up and cursing someone to death.

The interface works, but is a little clunky. If you can interact with something, you can click on it and bring up a wheel of options. These allow for talking, trading, gossip, and a couple of other options. It’s easy to work, but when I just want to pick flowers, having to navigate the wheel felt a little clunky and needless. Also, you have to choose to leave an interaction by hitting a button rather than just walking away, which would have sped the game up a bit. It’s functional, but it could be improved.

The visuals were nice, reminding me of many of the top-down dungeon games I’ve killed skeletons in. It’s a nice setting for a game about a skeleton getting back at the idiots in town who likely sent heroes to have him killed in the first place. It’s a small environment full of trees, houses, and people, and while it’s nothing earth-shattering, it’s the perfect visual setup for a parody game. There’s a little bit of ambient sound to back it up in the city, but it’s really just enough to make the setting feel right for the silly gameplay.

KEL could been kind of awful in its own way, had the acts of violence been taken seriously. Poisoning people can seem pretty serious given a game’s tone and narrative, but the goofy delivery and dialogue in the game make it all in good fun. The writing is genuinely funny, turning a murderous, scheming skeleton into a funny anti-hero. As terrible as it is to waltz into town and slowly convince everyone to kill each other, Tavern Games’ writing in the game makes sure it’s light and fun. The tone makes the gameplay that much more fun, which is why KEL Reaper of Entropy is such a charming, if bloodthirsty, romp.

If you’ve ever felt guilty about bashing a skeleton’s head in, consider grabbing KEL Reaper of Entropy and helping one of the poor guys come out on top for a change. It’s a funny game that involves some careful play to see through to the end, engaging your mind in some harmless death and destruction. If you do your job well, Kel just might find himself with a horde of bony friends to hang out with again. After all, there’s nothing sadder than a lonely skeleton, is there?

KEL Reaper of Entropy is available on Steam for $2.99. To learn more about its developer, you can go to their website, or follow them on Facebookand Twitter.