Masquerada is set in the city of Ombre (Umbra), so named due to being situated inside the fissure of a large mountain. Graphical prowess in games is definitely becoming less of an important factor to me - just give me some strong art direction that my potato can handle without a coughing fit. I'm a fan of the game's cel-shaded look and angled perspective, though I naturally had to turn the settings down to get anything close to a stable framerate. That said, the combat still has some nuance to it even if I've found it generally a bit too easy and straightforward, and those limitations haven't diminished the overall experience of playing the game too much.

This choice of priority might not be to everyone's liking, though it is relatively uncommon to see an RPG where what few combat mechanics there are present exist to prop up the story rather than the standard inverse, especially for sub-genres like loot RPGs and roguelikes where the narrative barely factors at all. It's a briskly-paced game at something in the region of 15 hours long, and it's one that prioritizes its storytelling and worldbuilding over the nuts and bolts of RPG combat and character development. Masquerada: Songs and Shadows exhibits both the qualities stated above. Crowdsourcing has proven that many times over: if you make a very specific type of game for a very specific type of audience, they will find it and support your endeavors partly in gratitude for restoring what was once lost and abandoned by the video game industry's titans. They're not so much beholden to focus groups and content for the sake of content it's important to the game's success and their future livelihoods that the games are still good, of course, but they can pursue niche audiences more readily if they feel that approach is more integral to their style of game development without facing a net loss with the revenue it creates. However, a corollary to that rule is how Indie RPGs are more flexible when it comes to prioritizing what, to their developers, is most important to the genre. That's certainly been true for many of the RPGs I've covered in this particular feature over the years. The greatest strength of the Indie RPG, I've often believed, is in how it is able to truncate what is normally a 50-plus hour experience into something less than half that - usually out of necessity, due to the limited resources available to them and the importance of turnaround to a smaller studio - and still retain the core strengths the elements that, for me at least, make the RPG genre so compelling.

Indie Game of the Week 245: Masquerada: Songs and Shadows

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