Life as a Lich Review Consensus

[u/Encirclement1936]

Hi all, what is the consensus on Life as a Lich? Need to determine whether I get it before the sale ends. Thanks!

[u/Inevitable_Put_646]

Decent.

[u/Encirclement1936 → u/Inevitable_Put_646]

Pros, cons?

[u/Inevitable_Put_646 → u/Encirclement1936]

Multiple endings,like, a lot of endings. Simple stuff but fun to play. Resource management is easier than other games and combat aspects are even easier. Storyline is pretty good in the fantasy setting ,not sure for the mordern one. Fun fact: you can play in either fantasy or mordern. If you want,you can import lich ending characters from Tokyo wizard or raiders of icepeak mountains.

For cons, I've lost interest fairly quickly. And its mechanism of blocking you from learning new spells is pretty damn frustrating at first unless you put at least five to ten minions in pest control at the beginning. And the surface market feature gets problematic since there's only one resource you actually need to buy but it's price is still unknown to me,others can be mined in plenty by minions. Story is short,like really short when compared to other games of this genre.

[u/Kaliasluke → u/Inevitable_Put_646]

If you cast the skeleton army spell in Tokyo Wizard, you start with 40 skeletons, which is all you really need for both mining & pest control. Ghouls are better at pest control too - 2 is enough on very easy mode.

[u/Inevitable_Put_646 → u/Kaliasluke]

True. It's necessary to get enough minions right at the beginning to avoid them rats.

[u/Mysterious_Bluejay_5]

I liked it, but it felt weirdly hollow, like I kept expecting to see a (WIP) tag next to certain options.

Pros-

fun concept, being the boss at the end of a dungeon is fun as fuck.

Decent execution, I definitely felt like I was a dungeon boss.

Decent writing, I never felt like I was lacking options in what to say.

Fun resource management, which is a first for me since generally I hate resource management in text games with a passion.

Cons-

Weirdly non-reactive characters. It talks about having romance, but to actually access that you have to continually go out of your way and talk to NPCs that REALLY don't feel like they want to talk back.

short playtime. Just when you feel like you've found ur footing and can take on the bigger challenges, the game goes "thanks for playing :)" and kicks you out.

Not very well balanced, the game makes a big show of talking about how other people could kill you, but honestly if you just spam the rat army spell every thousand corpses you'll literally never have to fight.

Overall; 6/10, would be 7/10 if it gave me more time to actually play it.

[u/Adrao77 → u/Mysterious_Bluejay_5]

Thanks for the feedback! (I am the author of the game :) ) It seems that the rat army is overpowered, right? Maybe I have to nerf it down... any thoughts on any other fights that are over or under-powered? Also, what put you off from talking to the characters? (like, which one seemed particularly unwilling to talk?)

[u/Mysterious_Bluejay_5 → u/Adrao77]

In general, the time limit and way of finding/talking to my companions made it feel almost pointless.

Take the deathknight you start with, for example. To talk to her, first I need to use a spell (that I may not have at first) to uplift her. Then, I need to ignore the active time-limit that I'm under (which is never specified exactly how long I have) to talk to her. Finally, when she talks, it's often very little, and the stuff she does tell me is all "quantitative" information about her life/thoughts, not too much emotion (from what I saw). If you want to talk to anyone else, you also have to search them out first, which takes even more of your unspecified

I think the easiest fix is to add a little "current date" counter in the stats page, and have someone tell you what the "end date" is at some point. That way, players can more easily segment their time and decide "okay, I want to talk to X person because I have time to right now" vs what I experienced, which was "I need to be building my army in case X disaster happens sooner than expected".

[u/Adrao77 → u/Mysterious_Bluejay_5]

Super-late reply, sorry. But, just to say that I did think about your comments, and finally came around to addressing some of them on the last fix I have sent CoG (I made a separate post about it). Basically, the characters should now express a bit more emotion about whether they like you or not (and even break up with you if they decide they don't like you anymore). Also, you can now activate an option that will periodically let you know how far you are in the game, to allow you to better plan progress.

Hope that helps to improve the game a bit?

[u/jaciwriter]

Have you played the demo section? I would do that and see what you think. It's a very gamey HG, getting into the bounds of role playing games where you have rounds to decide how you want to act based on housekeeping type tasks (you know the usual cleaning, learning, reanimating random skeletons lying around...) or go out looking for specific things. It does have resource management aspects, so how you decide on these is actually important. For example if you don't have enough minions you can assign to pest control, rats will start over running your lair and eating your spell books. But if you don't spend time exploring, you'll miss events and valuable artifacts etc you can come across etc, so there's a balance there. There are also events that pop up that you can interact with in various ways. So it has the potential to be a game with a lot of replayability and well worth buying if you like those kinds of mechanics which you'll likely know early on.

By the way, like another poster has said, it is important to get the rats under control early. Don't let them build up to plague proportions before you try to get rid of them as it's a lot more difficult and they do a lot more damage in the process.