We recently got access to the Prologue preview of No Body, an inspired take on the existence of life and its meaning that has been seen through Earthbound, Undertale, Omori, and other great titles that are in this particular genre.
Game Name: No Body
Platform(s): PC
Publisher(s): Ghost Coast Games
Developer(s): Ghost Coast Games
Release Date: TBA
The game itself starts with your character moving through a back alley around an orphanage as he is looking for a wire to fix his laptop. Once finding it and fixing it, you get forwarded to a place where ClownFace, Witch, Marked, and Angel are at a dungeon just called The End. This is where the combat explanation comes into play.
The main crux of the combat in No Body is turn-based. You have four party members with attack, defend, sense, skill, stuff, or flee as your options. An attack is a basic physical attack. Defending reduces the damage that a character receives at the cost of not doing any actions. Sense allows you to make enemies more susceptible to damage or reduce their stats; it can even have the enemy run away or instantly get defeated.
You can utilize sight, smell, touch, taste, or listen as senses. Properly using a specific sense on a specific enemy is what decides what happens once a sense action is used. Skills are special actions that a particular character can take. Stuff is just the list of items you have accrued in your inventory. Fleeing is running away from fights with a percentile chance of working.
There are a lot of things happening under the surface as the real world gets some focus, and then we get placed back into the dream realm this world refers to. Once you get another view of the real world for a scene, the game takes you back for a longer stage in the dream world. There is now some action gameplay added alongside the turn-based. You can attack with the Clownface’s dagger of enemies and pumpkins you come across. There are more puzzles where you have to sort out blocks and figure out how to get to all the treasure chests.
We get a bit more strategy involved now, too, as typing starts to become more important in fights. There is Body type, Mind Type, and Soul Type. Clownface is Heart Type and not in the spectrum with the other three types. You also get introduced to the No Body stagger system. When you attack an enemy enough, you will stagger them and make them lose all resistances. They will be weak to every hit you do, increasing the damage every character can do to them. When they are in this mode, it is called No Body.
Overall this system is fun to play around with and has a lot of potential, especially in figuring out all the ways to use Senses correctly. I would recommend anyone who can to take give the demo a try by checking the Kickstarter page or joining the No Body Discord. If it is coming to console depends on the level of funding No Body gets from its Kickstarter. I hope it makes enough, at least, to be on the consoles.