#oddventure

Oddventure is a Mother inspired JRPG set in a strange fantasy land based on the Grimm Brothers' fairy tales, where a teenage girl deals with her anger issues.

Unfortunately I haven’t played all 100 games in this challenge (due to a lack of funds in my part), it’s just 100 games that have released on Steam in 2025 that I think people should give a go if they can.

I’m also not currently going into detail of why I’ve chosen each game as I would like people to make up their own minds about each game.

Hopefully that’s okay?

Onto the drawings.

Oddventure

Hades 2

Flesh Psychosis

Mirrored Soul

Blue Prince

Haste

Seafrog

Kulebra and the Souls of Limbo

Geo Mythica

Undertale was one of the game industry’s biggest success stories of the last decade. “The Game Where You Don’t Have To Kill Anyone” captivated a generation of players as it twisted RPG conventions to their breaking point.

And now, following on from that game’s core Murder/Mercy mechanic, comes Oddventure, a game quite clearly cast in the mould of Undertale and Earthbound alike. With a demo currently available on Steam and on developer Infamous Rabbit’s itch.io page, I decided to check it out.

The story begins with Charlie (or Charlotte) chasing after her little brother Bonzo into the woods and ending up in the Kingdom of Luxia - a fantasy world cut from the cloth of the Grimm brothers, albeit with a few more men dressed like Dodos and a few more dwarfs that flash you.

While chasing after Mr Rabbit and Mr Dodo as they run deeper and deeper into the forest with Bonzo for their tea party, Charlie comes across a frog named Slippy who teaches you the basics of combat.

Conventional at first, with the compulsory death of an enemy, combat soon deepens to include Moods. Ranging from utterly downbeat to ecstatic, these fluctuate throughout fights for each side.

Complimenting your enemies or telling them a joke can cheer them up, while attacking or insulting them wears them down to a depressed state.

When they’re at their lowest, you get the choice to kill or spare them, so no accidental killings in this game. Too late for Toriel, though.

Soon enough, you have a party of three at your disposal (Messrs. Dodo and Rabbit count as one fighter) with a bunch of unique attacks that can boost or drop the Mood of your enemies and allies that even extends to the effect of items.

When characters get annoyed, they attack of their own accord. When they become depressed, they don’t do anything at all on their turn. If a party member dies in combat, the whole party’s mood drops in a way that’s difficult to come back from.

Although your Mood carries over across battles, there was not a way to use items to heal or improve your mood when in the over-world, which led to a lot of deaths over the course of the hour-long demo. Hopefully this won’t be the case in the final version, as it would really be detrimental to players otherwise.

Outside of combat, the player controls Charlie and her entourage as they traipse around the map, solving some light puzzles and fleeing from enemies shrouded in darkness as opposed to random encounters. Regretfully, the game doesn’t tell you how to make Charlie run as a part of the tutorial (yes, I know it was on the control screen, but no-one absorbs all of that), so she trudged as if through treacle for a lot of the demo.

The story is quite straightforward - Charlie chases her brother, catches up with him and sets off on a grand quest to get back home, but there are a couple of scenes that show her grappling with self-doubt and angst in a tumultuous segment set in a metaphorical black void filled with the personifications of her worst fears. Curious to see where that goes in the full game.

It will be interesting to see where most of the ideas present and choices offered in the demo go, as Slippy calling Charlie a “Moodmancer” feels too oblique to not be developed on when Oddventure releases.