Developer: IKIGAI Play
Publisher: IKIGAI Play
Platform: PC
Tested on: PC
RUNNER HEROES: The curse of night and day – Review
Temple Run has been a really popular game on mobile and there are several games with similar gameplay also available on mobile devices. However, there aren’t that many on PC, but that might change soon. Recently a new game has been released with Temple Run-like gameplay, RUNNER HEROES: The curse of night and day. This game goes even further and doesn’t just let you control one character, but two. RUNNER HEROES was developed and published by IKIGAI Play and we got a chance to try it out.
Story
Colwyn and Lyssa have been friends since they were kids and they have always loved racing against each other. One time, which is where we begin the story, Colwyn nearly drowned after he messed up his footing, and fell into the water. Lyssa didn’t know he couldn’t swim but she managed to save him by dropping a magical healing flower in the water. This was also the trigger for them to feel something more than friends for each other.
Years later Celuria is still at war like it has for centuries however out of nowhere another greater enemy appeared. Appearing from beyond the Great Rift, the red witch joined the fight. In the blink of an eye, the Technological City of Vursuc fell. The Witch soon made it to the White Tower of Tazawa where the magicians fought back fiercely but their defeat was only a matter of time. King Colwyn of Olvium came to the aid of the Kingdom of the Magicians. Olvium’s army was at a disadvantage yet they fought bravely under Colwyn’s orders. The army’s defeat was likely to happen sooner rather than later when something unexpected happened.
The witch decided to parley with Colwyn alone. She proposed for Colwyn to get married to her as a way out of this war. If he would marry her, she would stop the siege and their kingdoms would merge, making Olvium the most powerful kingdom of Celuria. Colwyn accepted the deal and in 42 days they would get married as that was tradition. All of Celuria’s royalty and nobility attended the wedding. While the witch was preparing for the occasion in the company of her faithful general Cirax, we see Lyssa and Colwyn meet up. The wedding is a hoax and they are planning on attacking the witch during the wedding. After we saw them as kids, their relationship had only grown, making it so Colwyn would never actually marry anyone besides Lyssa. It seems however while they were having this conversation, that the witch had overheard them. The witch screamed out a curse over Lyssa and Colwyn, they were cursed to run together forever but would never see each other, with one stuck in eternal night and the other stuck in eternal day.
After the backstory, you will keep seeing how Colwyn and Lyssa deal with the curse and where they go to try and find a way to get rid of it. It also seems that not only Colwyn and Lyssa were affected by the curse as they don’t encounter anyone on their path for a while besides enemies. The story sometimes jumps around a little bit, such as going from them being children to them suddenly being adults, without any explanation or “so many years later”. Sometimes the game seems to assume that you already know the story while other times it overexplains. There are also quite a lot of spelling mistakes in both the backstory and the conversations.
Graphics
RUNNER HEROES has two different styles, one that is used for cutscenes and another for the gameplay itself. The cutscenes have a really beautiful painted style that isn’t fully animated but has parts that change position or get added on. Conversations show the people in the same paint style while talking. They do not move while talking but they do however change expression or pose as the conversation goes on.
The gameplay itself is a simple 3D looking environment that is divided in day and night right down the middle. This divide is to represent the curse mentioned above. However, it might have looked nicer if the middle line was blended a little and not such a harsh line. It’s pretty cool to see the difference in the background on either side as you are running, however. The style of the gameplay does look a little bit outdated and stands out against the beautiful cutscenes. For some reason, the camera will move in different directions and twist around while you are running. This makes it incredibly hard to sometimes see where the obstacles are or to estimate the distance between you and the obstacle.
Sound
The music in RUNNER HEROES: The curse of night and day is very upbeat with a little dramatic touch to it. The latter is very fitting as you could have to restart after one wrong move. It is however not so over the top that it becomes bothersome. When you continue your journey and end up in another environment, the music will also change. The music does stay the same for every level in that environment. The sound effects in the game are logical and are logical for plenty of actions. You’ll hear boots running over different materials, bridges cracking, and much more. There is no voice acting present, which is a shame. The way that the story is brought just feels a bit odd when you don’t get voices along with the conversation.
Gameplay
RUNNER HEROES: The curse of night and day is an adventure, indie game that is like temple run but then on the computer. As you start a new game you can pick a difficulty, which you won’t be able to change afterward. So, if you want to change the difficulty, you’ll have to start a new game. Once you’ve picked a difficulty, you’ll begin with the tutorial which comes after a cutscene. After the cutscene you get a screen with the controls and then once you start, for some reason, they don’t mention those controls again. Usually, games put a “now press this” kind of pop up however in RUNNER HEROES they put what action you should do instead of the button. Luckily if you fail, you restart and see the screen again.
Once you get past the tutorial, you’ll go to the first level. The levels in this game are represented by days, so level one is day one. Every time you start a day, you’ll get a little cutscene and/or a conversation between Colwyn and Lyssa. The controls for RUNNER HEROES are fairly simple, one button to join together, one to jump, one to make Lyssa dash and one to make Colwyn dash. Even though the game only has four buttons, it is quite tricky. You must time your evasions right, so you don’t, for example, join together too early and bump into something like a pillar.
It seems that sometimes the timing for jumps seem a bit weird, which is mostly caused by the characters jumping up and not forward, making it so you must be way closer to the obstacle. Depending on the difficulty that you are playing on you’ll get checkpoints. For easy difficulty; you get two checkpoints, for the normal difficulty you get one checkpoint and lastly for the hardcore difficulty you get no checkpoints. It seems that there is a bug in the game that doesn’t turn on checkpoints even if you are playing on normal. Since normal difficulty already only has one checkpoint, your playthrough very quickly becomes like a hardcore one, if that one checkpoint doesn’t activate. The worst part about this is that you cannot change the difficulty for the level that has the bug, because you must start a new game to change the difficulty.
As you progress through the game, more and more obstacles will be added that must be avoided in new ways but still with the same buttons. At the start, you’ll usually be jumping over crates or firepits and joining together to avoid pillars that get in your ways. Obstacles that get added later on can go from enemies that you have to avoid or doors you need to burst through. It is not just one person you are keeping an eye on but two, which can get quite tricky. After a while, there will even be roads that make Colwyn go on a downwards path and Lyssa on an upwards path or the opposite, this makes it even harder to keep track of them. Added to that is the camera issue we mentioned above, which at certain times is in very annoying and unnecessary positions.
Conclusion
RUNNER HEROES is a very challenging game with beautiful art in the story parts. There is a bit of an annoying bug present at this moment still, but this might get fixed in the future. We also hope a professional party takes a look at the game’s dialogues to filter out the spelling mistakes. It can be frustrating to get stuck in one part of a level in the game but once you get past it, the satisfaction is amazing. If you’ve enjoyed one of those runner games on mobile or just generally like a challenge then you could check out RUNNER HEROES: Curse of the night and day.
RUNNER HEROES: The curse of night and day - Review,
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