It's by Zeboyd Games [official suitably retro/minimalist website]. They're a two-man team from...somewhere. They're also responsible for Cthulu Saves the World, the Penny Arcade games (episodes 3 & 4), and most recently something called Cosmic Star Heroine. Breath of Death VII was originally released on Xbox Live Arcade in 2010.

When/Where/Why: I think a friend talked me into grabbing Cthulu Saves the World back in a 2011 Steam sale, for reasons now very much lost to data erasure, memory and time. It came in a double pack with Breath of Death VII for $3.

Duration/Completion: 70 minutes. By the time I pulled the plug, I'd picked up two more party members, and there are still two more to get after that apparently, but I don't know how far through it I was otherwise. No achievements on offer.

A Short Plus/Minus Scales Weighing Exercise: What's there is reasonable. It's a pretty jokey game, sending up RPG tropes and taking itself not at all seriously. It earns smirks if not laughs. (It isn't actually the 7th game in a series - that too is a joke). The random encounters are theoretically limited by area, and the battles themselves can often be clicked through quickly and thoughtlessly. I also liked the nostalgic, melancholic chiptuney soundtrack, some of which is still very much stuck in my head.

On the whole though it's a bit too bare-bones (pun not at all initially intended, but I'll take it anyway) to be my kinda thing, even with the consideration of the style it aims to emulate. While the maps are spacious, there's little reward for exploring, and not much in the way of off-the-path lore, environment or world-building. The game systems kind of transparently lean toward getting more play-time out of less production effort, I think, with little attention given to finer details. The dungeons seem pretty labyrinthine and proc-gen (without, I think, actually being proc-gen) and, owing to the repeating doodads and lack of a minimap, it's pretty easy to find yourself erroneously going back the way you came. I think in theory the text-based combat system is okay, but ultimately I didn't find it particularly engaging, mainly due to a general lack of meaningful decisions needed within the combat, while the random encounters themselves were still too frequent and unavoidable, despite being supposedly limited by area (these got especially annoying in combination with all doubling back I was having to do to find my way around). It fell well into the boring + frustrating quadrant of the imaginary graph.

Still, Breath of Death VII was the first game these guys released (I think?). I just hope their later efforts have a bit more to them. Perhaps we shall find out someday.