Picdun 2: Witch’s Curse – Full Review

Solving Puzzles while fighting monsters with your anime sidekick

This game from the developers INTENSE CO has a mixture of dungeon crawling and puzzling in which walking through all the tiles will reveal a picture of various objects on each floor, similar to the Picross series.

Our protagonist who is faceless, is cursed with a spell which prevents him from being able to attack and can only defend with his shield, but with the three female anime sidekicks who happen to be very busty enable different forms of attack (archery, magic and whipping)

The mission of this game seems to be just to get to all 60 floors in the dungeon and on the side walk on all the tiles and solve the puzzles. In some of the floors there are hidden passages which can be accessed either by walking through certain walls or activating floor switches to fill in gaps between passages. When you start a floor, you have no idea at first how many tiles you must walk on, so you need to find a pedometer somewhere on the floor which gives you the remaining numbers of tiles to complete the maze and show the picture. Unlike most RPGs and Dungeon Crawlers, you only have the HP and Level stats visible.

The controls while easy to get a hang of, are flawed in that for starters that is no circle pad support so you have to use the D-pad to move around the mazes and the controls to attack (A and X for horizonal and B and Y for vertical) takes some use getting to as in most games, the lower right buttons (A/B) are for weak yet quick attacks while upper left buttons (X/Y) are for stronger yet slow attacks.

The three different attacks (archery, whipping and magic) have their different strengths, seem in the end similar to each other as do the three female anime sidekicks’ personalities. Also in battle if you time using your shield just before the monster attack, you activate a special attack which you press the buttons on screen which for the most part kills the monsters in 1 hit, which can be useful for battles with multiple monsters.

To revisit the floors you have completed or even passed through, there are elevators (lifts) on every 5th floor, if you need to complete the puzzles. A level select in the menu would have been better as on the later levels it isn’t simple to just get to the exit.

The game has a 3D format with the battle monsters being in 2D, though using the 3D  effect springs up the background and the attacks. While simple they do the job of presenting the game and the dungeons have a nice look especially in 3D. The completed puzzle pictures are simple 2D pictures of objects, which are good enough for the game.

CONCLUSION/VERDICT:
A decent, if flawed dungeon crawler/RPG which is a good start before moving on to more difficult games like Etrian Odyssey and its graphics are decent for the 3DS eShop though the reliance on anime fanservice can be off putting to some.

PROS:
* Decent Length (60 floors)
* Nice Background level graphics
CONS:
* Puzzles can been frustating especially in later levels
* Controls somewhat flawed (No circle pad support)

GAME SCORE – 6/10

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Tags: 3ds, cyburn, eshop, Etrian Odyssey, intense co, picdun 2, picross, review, rpg

This post was written by Cyburn, posted on May 21, 2013 Tuesday at 6:16 pm