Galaxy of Pen & Paper +1
Developer: Behold Studios
Publisher: Refer to Above
Released on Jul 27, 2017
Galaxy of Pen & Paper is an RPG set in the year 1999 with extraterrestrial aliens to fight and intergalactic missions to keep you busy. It often breaks the fourth wall, featuring a group of friends that enjoy bouncing classic memes off each other. This Dnd-inspired game boasts new characters, skills, classes, and planets for the brave space explorer, with their dice ready to roll.
Genre: A Sci-Fi Indie RPG
If you’ve been following this blog for a long time, you’d know I’m a huge tabletop role-play fanatic. My favorite settings are easily high fantasy and science fiction. The fun fact is, at the time of writing this, I was the Dungeon Master of a Star Wars RPG with Wenxi being one of my players. She plays a no-nonsense Mandalorian soldier who annihilates everything on sight with her blaster.
Because I’m a fan of these games, I was really pumped when I learned the newest game in the Pen and Paper Series was heading for space. Not only that, but this latest Galaxy of Pen and Paper game did a major overhaul on the old system, giving it a bunch of upgrades over the previous installments as well as an authentic feel for tabletop campaigns of the past.
The Main Plotline
From the looks of it, GoPaP is a pretty ordinary space fantasy: You are a couple of broke losers on a deserted planet who stumble upon a mysterious ship that you get to name. Mine will always be the Ivory Pidgeon since it sounds classy. And quite frankly, the story spirals into these “episodes of the week”-like wacky adventures that I won’t be covering here. But instead, I’ll be talking about the more positive and notable things they’ve done.
If you are a fan of Memes, of Sci-Fi, or of tabletop RPGs, then the humor in this game will surely tickle your fancy. The guys at Behold really know how to play into tropes and cliches about tabletops without ever making fun of the people who play them. I genuinely laughed at almost every joke they threw my way, but I’m well aware that their humor isn’t for everyone, that is if you aren’t truly into one-liners.
Like I mentioned before, this game takes something most people agree is a problem in RPGs and gives it an interesting twist. You have the choice of picking the type of mission you’ll be going on, the quest giver, and the location you’ll be heading towards. You get to decide how you will grind exp and credits in this game, and while it doesn’t eliminate the sidequests, it does let you avoid the ones you don’t want to do.
The Gameplay Mechanics
Now the actual gameplay in this one is what you’d normally expect for a turn-based RPG: You have two rows for both sides, the frontline, and the backline. So your job is to take turns for hitting, healing, buffing, and debuffing. Luckily, the Pen and Paper staple of picking your battle difficulty is still present as to not overwhelm you. I believe the games start to become interesting when you create your own characters.
Similar to previous games in the series, you build your team of 4 heroes by combining three elements: The race of the character, their specific class, and uniquely, the type of player who will control them. These three elements give the character their attributes and abilities that are used in combat, along with their typical method of resolving events in the game. (Ex: Mechan = Robit, Heavy = Tank, etc.)
These random events will pop up every now and again as you travel to new worlds. They allow you to show the diverse nature of your team, more so than just through combat alone. While you’re traveling between planets, you also have the chance to unlock new classes to make your characters gain perks and experiment with new team compositions to keep the combat from getting stale.
To unlock a new class, you must create a quest first and follow a custom-built questline before the class will be made available in all your subsequent playthroughs of the game. If you like the turn-based RPG genre, then you’ll find this game to be rather entertaining. And yet, there are some things I’ll address in my conclusion that I didn’t really like about this game.
The Conclusion
There are two major gripes I have with GoPaP, but only one of them is caused by the game itself. The first problem is more so because of me.–I leveled up way too fast by playing this game like a typical RPG, doing side quests aplenty, and exploring all over the galaxy, so I became too overpowered at the end.
The result was me being so strong that no fights ever really posed a challenge anymore, and even if I maxed out the enemy numbers, I was still cut off from the high-difficulty loot drops. While that problem was somewhat annoying, I accept that I am partially to blame. But the other problem I had, was the layout of the galaxy map. I thought the overhead map was too convoluted and confusing to navigate.
There isn’t much consistency between the many sectors of the galaxy I’ve traveled to and when I made a quest to a planet that seemed perfect, I had no idea where to go and just blindly followed the quest marker hoping that it would hop-scotch me straight to the planet.
Those are my only complaints, but honestly, the game is still a lot of fun if that is what you are into.–Adventures in space and a continuous stream of Sci-Fi wackiness you can easily fit into an escape pod.
View Gallery