Maliki: Poison of the Pastwas a highlight of the Steam Next Fest and its demo was gameplay-rich while also still showcasing some of the story and a gorgeous diorama art style. It was a perfect example of how a demo can properly showcase an RPG, and a turn-based one at that, while still holding back enough content to make you want the final product, and like the legendary Final Fantasy VII demo, balanced that wonderfully. The single-dungeon demo allowed for farming, combat, story progression and a bite-sized gameplay chunk that made it clear why this is a must-buy turn-based RPG for fans of the genre while keeping enough of the mystery alive in the story to make it intriguing.Maliki: Poison of the Pasthas a compelling narrative that keeps you invested at every turn.
Malikiblends a sci-fi horror plot to an extent, but a light-hearted one with a slice of life tale alongside farming. It creates an interesting mix of ingredients because there’s nothing else like this on the market. The adventure begins off of the self-titled Maliki rounding up folks in the shelter known as the Domaine and you’re a new addition to the long-standing group, who all have their own reasons to be in the Domaine – or so they think. There’s a lot of mystery regarding why everyone is there and why Maliki herself keeps information from everyone alongside her half-obscured face hidden by a wooden mask. In theory, she’s out to stop the evil force known as Poison that is destroying the world, but there’s more than meets the eye to the tale she tells and it’s intriguing to see it unfold.
The time-bending nature of the story has you go from Maliki’s childhood through her whole life to unravel the mystery of her past with Poison and it’s fascinating to see things unfold as you and your group meet Maliki throughout her life. The ability to go from era to era is reminiscent of Futurama, and when viewing the story through that kind of lens, it clicks because you’re seeing her growth in real-time alongside things like grief and anger to explain who she is later in life. The entity known as Poison being this ever-present thorn in her side and one that has conspired to hurt her in cruel ways – like resulting her first cat being killed and trauma throughout her life.
Perilous Puzzles
One of the best parts about the full game is that it allows you to fast travel between dungeons and the safe haven Domaine to build up new dishes with things found in the world and feed the Tree of Life to open up new parts of the world to explore. Having different kinds of fast travel points are nice as you have portals in every game world to a healthy degree to avoid a ton of backtracking. There are also signpost fast travel points for the Domaine that allow you to go from place to place faster as you unlock more environments to explore from that gated-off area.Malikiis a bit of a bittersweet experience in some ways, though, because for every great thing it does to save players time, it also has a fly in the ointment that hurts the flow of things.
Maliki: Poison of the Past has a compelling narrative that keeps you invested at every turn.
While the story and turn-based combat are a lot of fun,Malikidoes suffer from obtuse world exploration and iffy objective-tracking. When you move the story along with a new objective or goal, you’ll get a brief rundown of what needs to be done from that character and only that character. There’s an in-game notebook of sorts, but it’s not used to track anything like that, so you’re able to keep track of what needs to be found or where it’s at. There are now in-game arrows to help point out areas you can explore – which even Final Fantasy VII had and would come in handy here too since there are areas that look to be explorable to the naked eye, but can’t be gone into. There’s no arrow system telling you where to go either or even a mini-map to aid you. The player is just plopped into an area, given a brief in-game tutorial on new in-game powers you can use for puzzle-solving and that’s it.
Players are given minimal guidance and while the areas aren’t too expansive, you may find yourself in tough spots where you’re between portals where you can get healed up and get ambushed by enemies back to back. You are given an option to go back to your last portal or retry a battle, but meandering around trying to find your next game-moving scenario can result in needless death and frustration. Modern-day quality-of-life improvements from classic RPG ports have spoiled players to an extent, but there’s a happy medium between holding a player’s hand through an adventure and not having them spend hours over the course of that adventure trying to keep track of objectives or find the path needed to progress.
Farm Fighting
The battle system is a nice blend of simple to execute, but offering depth thanks to the resistance and weaknesses offered up for attacks. It’s rewarding to use a beam attack on a plant-based enemy by chance only to find out that the enemy has a weakness to it – and then you’re able to make a note of that being a weakness for that enemy down the road. One area I could see an improvement on is that being noted literally in the game’s notebook because noting these things one-by-one can be tedious and usually results in just focusing on a few attacks to go through with a weakness. On the other hand, being beaten down only to find that this blow you felt would end your character’s life and finding out that they have a resistance to that attack is a wonderful feeling. Healing items are few and far between in the world itself and it takes time to cook things in the Domaine, so I found myself holding off on using my healing items until I got to a boss battle.
Maliki: Poison of the Past Getting Free Demo During Steam Next Fest
Maliki combines an anime-influenced world with turn-based RPG action.
This strategy largely worked out well as it allowed me to get trial and error down for boss battles by losing a time or two and then figure out a way to take them out – usually involving taking out the goon characters first and then focusing on the big boss itself. The goal of any battle is to reduce enemy numbers as much as you can since the turns come in team-based waves and it’s like pro wrestling’s War Games in that regard – you want to have the man advantage as much as possible to give your team the best chance of success. Whittling down the enemy numbers also feels rewarding to do in real-time, especially if you’re facing foes that have been respawning their fallen allies. For those you generally want to lead with a mix of single enemy attacks but then use party-based ones to have the best chance of taking out at least 2/3 or 3/4 rivals in one go.
A Time-Bending Tale
Maliki’sinclusion of a healthy amount of puzzle-solving is something you don’t see a lot from turn-based RPGs and having multiple characters to use to solve puzzles comes in handy. The former excels at bonking things with a pitchfork, while the telepath can move things around with the power of their mind and another can move things around thanks to the power of magnets and you may even use plant powers to open gates or form new ones. It’s an interesting blend of powers to get things done and enables the player to experiment with different characters and achieve different results. Sometimes using one character to solve a problem allows you to get a certain item on the field, but then using a different character to solve a similar problem enables you to get further into the game world and get a better item, thus rewarding that explorative mindset.
Maliki’svisuals are a perfect mix of simple and beautiful because the diorama-looking worlds are vibrant and full of life when needed, while also doing a nice job of evoking their era. The downside to the art style used is it can be tough to tell what areas you can jump into and where you can’t, which makes some of the platforming challenges and just getting to certain people in the world itself rather tricky. It’s a nice art style overall, though, allowing the characters' body language to shine even with limited animation. The vibrant colors pop and every era you’re in feels different thanks to each having a different color scheme. The older eras have more vibrant colors and as things move forward, the joy drains from the world just a bit more and colors fade and give way to more metal and concrete.
Maliki’ssound design is rock solid too with catchy music during battles that gets the blood pumping and more somber tunes during emotional scenes. There’s no voice acting, which can make for a better experience because you may supply your own voice to the characters and the self-titled Maliki gives off vibes of being a tortured soul while others felt lost in their lives and wanting direction. The sound effect work is effective, with battle impact sounds all seeming different. Magic sounds sound different than, say, spiking someone with a pitchfork or thwacking them with a giant vine. The overall audio/visual side of things may not be for everyone since it isn’t super-flashy and is a throwback in some ways, but if you love crisp graphics and a catchy soundtrack in a turn-based RPG, you’ll loveMaliki’spresentation.
Closing Comments:
Maliki: Poison of the Pastis one of the most enjoyable turn-based RPGs that’s come along in a while. It evokes the joy of the best of the PS1-era of the genre while also featuring some of the most frustrating time-sinking puzzle design and objective fulfillment as well. It winds up being greater than the sum of its flawed parts due to the compelling time-bending narrative, but it would be even better with quality-of-life improvements down the road. As it stands now, it’s still an easy recommendation for turn-based RPG fans and also a fine game to give a go if you love time-bending stories in fiction, killer soundtracks and interesting diorama-style art design.
Maliki: Poison of the Past
Maliki: Poison of the Past provides a blend of farming and RPG in a way that hasn’t been done before. The storyline-driven narrative makes it easy to come back for longer play sessions.
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