Over Christmas and New Year’s Eve, I’ve had the pleasure to play through the beta of Mr. Tired Media’s cute and sexy VN/dungeon crawling RPG “Undead Darlings – No cure for love“.

Well, since I’ve enjoyed the game a whole lot, I decided to write a PC preview for “Undead Darlings” =) So, with that said, I’m going to start off my preview with a short introduction of the game’s story:

After being drugged by your father (yes, that’s how you´re introduced to the game), you come around to see that Pearl, your next-door neighbor, is now a zombie – on the outside only, although this state of affairs may not last long.

However, that’s just the half of it. Because while reading a letter that was also left by your father, Pearl, yourself and Buck (who was about to rob your house), you have just started to realize that you have to go out on a journey to find a cure for this zombie-like sickness.

So, what about the actual story of “Undead Darlings” then? Well, the game’s story is a comedy/drama and takes the mickey out of a lot of things, including visual novels and CSI.

Other than that, the game is designed to be very cute, despite the two female protagonists being zombies, which at times you can easily forget.

Furthermore, “Undead darlings” is an interactive novel to start with, with a fair few numbers of choices to be made. Aside from the options you get when examining a PC, it’s unknown whether other choices make any difference to the story or not.

However, once you have made your way through a lot of dialogue, the dungeon crawling section kicks in as you go about exploring various locations, with the occasional interruption by various weird baddies.

On a positive note though, movement in this section is very smooth and graphically pretty nice. Sure, it may not have all the detail of a fully-fledged 3D game, but there is still a lot of detail (especially regarding notes left of walls).

Gameplay-wise what is there works fine. However, what isn’t present is more of a problem…And hopefully, that’s something that will be fixed before the full version of the game gets launched.

First of all, there is only one place you can save the game until you get to the police station (looking for clues to where the anti-zombie formula is), and then only after a lengthy bit of dialogue.

As for the RPG aspects of the game. Well…A fairly standard RPG system is used as your characters take it in turns to attack all sorts of magically endowed zombies. It’s not badly done, although it would be nice to see your enemies health status.

I would also like to point out that “Undead Darlings” is a rather hard game since it’s bordering to being unfair towards its players. “And why is that?” So you might wonder, it’s because most fights taking quite a while and the enemies is doing a lot more damage than you can dish out…

So perhaps a bit of tweaking is needed here in-order to make things more balanced. Furthermore, the combat also slows down the story as a whole, especially during the annoying random encounters.

With that said, things are a whole lot more positive on the character front, as the game’s characters are nicely made. For example, both Pearl and her cousin are very cute, colorful, adorable and full of life (which is rather ironic since both of them are zombie girls).

Sure, Buck can be rather irritating at times, but you get used to him after a while. So whilst there is a lot of voiced dialogue during the novel section, there is also quite a bit that isn’t – hopefully, it’s just an omission from the beta version.

So, in overall, “Undead Darlings” is a funny and cute game that currently suffers from some pretty annoying dungeon crawling elements. So whether or not that’s a big deal for you, it’s still something that’s going to dictate how you view the game as a whole.

Nevertheless, at the end of the day, “Undead Darlings” is still a very impressive and promising VN/dungeon crawling RPG. So it’s most definitely worth looking into if you’re into games of that kind.

Pros:
+ The game’s story is very nice and cute.
+ The girls are very cute and adorable.
+ Voiced (mostly).
+ “Undead Darlings” sports some rather nice-looking visuals.
+ The dialogs are pretty well-written and entertaining.
+ The Dungeon crawling aspect is well done from a graphical aspect.
+ The game’s title music is pretty darn nice.

Cons:
– You can’t save the game when you want to.
– I’m not terribly sure if the RPG section works that well. I mean, it just feels out of place. Random encounters don’t help either and really slow things down.
– The fight sequences are a bit too long and a bit too tedious really.
– The random encounters are rather annoying.
– You can’t see your enemies’ health status.

Gameplay: 3/5
Graphics: 4/5
Sound and music: 4/5
Controls: 4/5
Replay value: 3/5
Story: 4/5

Verdict: 4/5
Undead Darlings visual novel section is a lot better than the dungeon roaming section. Now, don’t get me wrong. The latter isn’t bad, but with the high difficulty, random encounters and long fight sequences, it slows down the story a lot more than it should.

So if you want a straight story, then this game won’t be for you, otherwise, it might be worth getting with a bit of tweaking.

Title: Undead Darlings ~No cure for love~
Developer: Mr Tired Media
Format: PC Download
Genre: Visual novel/RPG
Resolution: Program default
Release date: 2016-10-25
Difficulty: Hard
Spent time:
Average grade internationally: N/A
PEGI age rating: N/A
Price: TBA

Credit:
Robin Ek – Editor

Nicholas Kingsley
The Gaming Ground
Twitter: @sku_te

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Tags: Dungeon crawling RPG, Lewd, Mr. Tired Media, No cure for love, PC preview, Steam, Undead Darlings, Visual novel

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