Games I Finished: Atline, Town of Gears
Jun. 4th, 2026 01:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cosmicspearSo, turns out getting really into MGQ: Paradox, a game designed from the ground up to take months to go through, has had a negative effect on my ability to actually complete anything. Who knew?
So here's a different game, of a much more manageable length.
Atline is another of hakika's old freeware games, and it's...unpolished is the word I'd use. Not bad by any stretch of the imagination, but there's clearly a lot of places where it could've been improved.
Jack, our protagonist, is the sort of person who tends to wake up in the middle of the night and sleep in well past dawn. Which is odd, because people just don't do that in Atline, the city as precise as a gear. People wake up when the Sunlamp, which controls time, is illuminated, and they sleep when it isn't, and that is that. Except not in Jack's case for reasons nobody can explain. A chance encounter with Sandler, another person not affected by the Sunlamp, leads him into a journey to the ends of the earth in search of answers, along with an inevitable encounter with the world's secrets.
The story is reasonably well-told, all things considered. The twist is nothing you won't see coming if you have any understanding of how these sorts of tales tend to go, but it's effective and gets taken in an interesting direction. The highlight, though, is the character interactions. The dynamic within the party is fun, with plenty of amusing banter and a genuine sense that these people care about each other.
The mechanical side of things, meanwhile, is very basic. Combat is via a mostly unmodified version of the RPG Maker VX battle system, with generally good balance. Characters are locked into their specific roles, and skill acquisition is entirely level-based. As mentioned, though, the balance is pretty good, and every character is usable.
While the combat is balanced, there's a lot of mechanical flaws. The biggest one is that characters who aren't in your active party don't get any XP. Not regularly cycling your party members around? Then you'd better get used to whoever you decided to stick with because you're never gonna catch anyone else up. And if you do cycle your party members it just leaves Jack massively overleveled because he can't be removed from the active lineup. Encounter rate could also use work, at times being high enough to frustrate when at other times it might be so low that you don't reach the minimum viable level for a boss fight.
There's also the small issue of your good multi-target heal skill using the physical attack formula, and thus being able to miss...
The complete lack of any formalized sidequest documenting system is also an issue, because sometimes the event flags you need to track down can be frustratingly easy to miss and not having any way to keep track of what you've done is...a problem. In fact, that's why I ended up just giving up and writing this review without going through the whole postgame, since I just plain ran out of stuff I could both figure out how to get to and actually complete without grinding.
On the whole, Atline is a game I probably wouldn't be as hard on if I didn't know the creator would ultimately move on to much more impressive things. There's plenty it does right, though, and it's an obvious blueprint for better stuff in the future.
So here's a different game, of a much more manageable length.
Atline is another of hakika's old freeware games, and it's...unpolished is the word I'd use. Not bad by any stretch of the imagination, but there's clearly a lot of places where it could've been improved.
Jack, our protagonist, is the sort of person who tends to wake up in the middle of the night and sleep in well past dawn. Which is odd, because people just don't do that in Atline, the city as precise as a gear. People wake up when the Sunlamp, which controls time, is illuminated, and they sleep when it isn't, and that is that. Except not in Jack's case for reasons nobody can explain. A chance encounter with Sandler, another person not affected by the Sunlamp, leads him into a journey to the ends of the earth in search of answers, along with an inevitable encounter with the world's secrets.
The story is reasonably well-told, all things considered. The twist is nothing you won't see coming if you have any understanding of how these sorts of tales tend to go, but it's effective and gets taken in an interesting direction. The highlight, though, is the character interactions. The dynamic within the party is fun, with plenty of amusing banter and a genuine sense that these people care about each other.
The mechanical side of things, meanwhile, is very basic. Combat is via a mostly unmodified version of the RPG Maker VX battle system, with generally good balance. Characters are locked into their specific roles, and skill acquisition is entirely level-based. As mentioned, though, the balance is pretty good, and every character is usable.
While the combat is balanced, there's a lot of mechanical flaws. The biggest one is that characters who aren't in your active party don't get any XP. Not regularly cycling your party members around? Then you'd better get used to whoever you decided to stick with because you're never gonna catch anyone else up. And if you do cycle your party members it just leaves Jack massively overleveled because he can't be removed from the active lineup. Encounter rate could also use work, at times being high enough to frustrate when at other times it might be so low that you don't reach the minimum viable level for a boss fight.
There's also the small issue of your good multi-target heal skill using the physical attack formula, and thus being able to miss...
The complete lack of any formalized sidequest documenting system is also an issue, because sometimes the event flags you need to track down can be frustratingly easy to miss and not having any way to keep track of what you've done is...a problem. In fact, that's why I ended up just giving up and writing this review without going through the whole postgame, since I just plain ran out of stuff I could both figure out how to get to and actually complete without grinding.
On the whole, Atline is a game I probably wouldn't be as hard on if I didn't know the creator would ultimately move on to much more impressive things. There's plenty it does right, though, and it's an obvious blueprint for better stuff in the future.
