Koudelka…so sad, so sad…she showed so much promise, too…
Ah, hello there, I didn’t realize I had visitors. I suppose you are wondering who this Koudelka is, and why I am lamenting her so. I’ll explain, then. Koudelka was a bright young video game, with many good aspects about her…
When I first met Koudelka, the first thing I noticed was that she looked and sounded quite pretty. She is a gothic horror RPG, which isn’t all that common a genre, but she did a good of representing it. Of course, I have met more beautiful games in my day, but she certainly held her own. During the cutscenes, she was even more beautiful, especially in the visuals department. It wasn’t until a little later in our relationship did I notice her tragic flaw.
Although she was easy to manage, and didn’t throw any really tricky rules or button combinations at me, the battle system was slightly more complicated than other, similar games, and I am not a big fan of the buttons outside of battle, either. You can assign buttons to run, confirm, cancel, and such just like in other games, but for some reason it just seemed to be so awkwardly set up that no matter how much I changed around the button configurations, it never became “natural” to just be able to hold down the run button and investigate shiny objects and such along my quest. In other words, I always had to be consciously aware of what buttons I was pressing, unlike with other games.
Despite this one—in my opinion, minor—flaw, I still found myself quite taken by Koudelka. That is, of course, until the day I found out about here little…secret. The secret that would ultimately ruin our relationship.
This secret is…*sniff* I’m sorry, please give me a moment. I get a little emotional thinking back on this, but I will try to press through. It’s just…Koudelka, she… she has…BREAKABLE WEAPONS! Why anyone thought that would be a good idea is beyond me, but there it is. You find weapons on the ground, attack an enemy with them, and before than you know it, *SNAP* they are gone. Forever. Don’t even think about repairing them, cause it ain’t happening. Maybe this doesn’t bother anyone else, but it disgusts me. In fact, I had to put down this game for a while and play something else in order to dull the pain. This game would have gotten at LEAST a few points higher in the fun category if it didn’t include this ridiculous feature, but, unfortunately, it did.
The replay value also suffered from this, as I would have had much more fun and thus have been inclined to play it more and more if they didn’t have this in the game. In any case, if you do not care about such things as much as I do, go ahead and read my score a couple points higher. In any case, I won’t say that Koudelka is a completely lost cause; it’s just another case of a video game that could have been a lot better if just one little thing were different about it. Still, if you are at all interested in gothic horror games, or even RPGs in general, I would recommend at least a rental of Koudelka.
