No Small Roles celebrates the RPG experiences being created by small teams in the indie space.
Weakness Deep Within is a demo made for Ludum Dare 57, a game jam project that gives developers 72 hours to create small games based on a theme. In this instance, the theme was ‘Depths,’ and developer Delphin Casado used it to send us down a horrifying hole.
In Weakness Deep Within, you embark on a journey down a deep, dark well to find a baron’s daughter in exchange for a pardon. Once in there, you encounter gruesome monsters and must fight your way through them. To do so, you must unveil their weak point. This can be done through various methods. Attacking, inspecting, and communicating are the key options in most cases.
When you first encounter a snail-like creature, the option to inspect tells you the shell could hold the key to victory. Attacking it does not cause physical damage, but it does start to crack it. You soon learn the fleshy mollusk’s power may indeed resonate from that shell, as its follow-up attack erodes your sanity in a deliciously descriptive manner. From there, you can reveal the weak spot and see this creature in a whole new, disgusting light.
I won’t spoil the surprise, but the reward for destroying the weak spot was somewhat unexpected and changed the dynamic going into the subsequent encounter.
Weakness Deep Within: A Superb Solo Effort
Casado does everything here. Development, art, writing, and music. That is something that can add to projects of this size. You get the full flavor of a singular vision in its most concentrated form. Given the truncated development window, it’s no surprise that Casado admits Weakness Deep Within’s story ends on a cliffhanger because they ran out of time. This doesn’t stop the game’s brief playtime from being memorable, though, and it certainly left me wanting more.
I was particularly impressed with the visual design of it. The monsters are striking, and Casado makes excellent use of a small color palette to put bold designs in the spotlight (pretty literally, too). Those monster designs essentially have secondary forms, which makes them a double delight to view.
The best entrants in these game jams tend to be the ones that either fit fully into the small space and excel as a miniature experience and/or ones that feel like they provide evidence that it could be a fully-fledged game. Weakness Deep Within leans towards the latter, but could just as easily have fit the former with a little more time.
Weakness Deep Within is available on itch.io now.
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