OFF

The first hour of OFF is a wall, and I want to be upfront about what kind of wall it is. You wake up as the Batter in a grey tutorial box, a cat with a permanent smirk informs you that you have been entrusted with something holy, and nobody explains what purifying a zone actually entails or who signed off on it. The combat you get in exchange is four menu options and a lot of pressing the top one. The sprites look like RPG Maker because they are RPG Maker. The translation reads like someone dubbed a French art film at two in the morning. If you bounce here I understand completely. Push to the moment you cross into Zone 1 and meet your first Elsen, and the thing stops being a curiosity and starts being what three thousand-plus people are writing love letters about. Mechanically this is a compact turn-based RPG built on a party of one plus three. The Batter swings, and his Add-Ons (Alpha, Omega, Epsilon) hover around him as equippable allies with their own turn slots, their own Competences, and their own CP to spend on the moves worth spending it on. Damage typing runs on the world's four industrial resources: smoke, meat, metal and plastic, which are also the economy, also the food, also the reason everyone in this world looks unwell. A masked merchant named Zacharie sells your healing stock between zones and cheerfully acknowledges that you are a person holding a controller. There is no sprawling skill tree and no build variety to theorycraft past hour 40, largely because the entire run is a single-digit number of hours. Anyone arriving for a systems playground should recalibrate now. What it has instead is some of the most confident worldbuilding I have played through in a turn-based game. Each zone answers to a guardian (Dedan barking abuse at his own workforce, Japhet's bird-cult grandeur, Enoch's sugar-slick generosity) and each one says something about labour, appetite and control without a single lore dump. The Elsen, those pale office-drone citizens who apologise for existing and combust into Burnt when the stress crests, are better character design than most fifty-hour RPGs manage with a full voice cast. And the writing survives a second pass. The Judge's dialogue is doing one job on first read and a different job once you know the ending, which is precisely the quality I look for. Alias Conrad Coldwood's soundtrack deserves its own paragraph: grinding, tinny, occasionally beautiful, completely inseparable from the images it plays under. The endgame then hands you a choice that reframes everything you did to reach it, and it has earned that choice honestly. The friction is real and I am not going to sand it down. Random encounters fire often enough that walking back through a cleared area becomes a chore, and the answer to most fights below boss tier is hitting things until the numbers stop. Puzzle design swings between elegant and openly hostile, with a mid-game stretch that expects you to take actual notes and a late-game maze that expects you to have already lost your patience. The final fight is a difficulty cliff that punishes anyone who did not stockpile items, a strange note to end an otherwise generous game on. It is also short, and while I will take six tight hours over thirty padded ones every time, buyers who measure value in hours should know that going in. So who is it for. Anyone who liked Undertale, Omori or Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and wants to read the older text those conversations keep circling back to. Anyone who wants a short, strange, unmistakably authored RPG where the story is attempting something the genre rarely bothers with. Anyone who has ever wondered what a game thinks of the person playing it. If you need polish, modern quality-of-life or deep character builds, this is not the weekend you were shopping for. If you want a world you will still be arguing about in a year, put on headphones and let the cat explain the rules.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

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