Campaign Ends: August 20th
Platform: Windows
Today’s installment of Catfunding…er…Crowdfunding Chronicles takes you to a Wild West wonderland populated by a colorful array of cute animals with guns, hats, and world-changing wishes. Introducing The Twelve Slot Saloon, an Undertale-inspired pixel RPG filled with bullet-hell action, time travel puzzles, and many sandy paws.
It was a strange and wonderful time when the enigmatic Reaper of Death met a soul so pure, it inspired them to create a blissful new world where wishes could come true; admittance by invitation only, of course! Alas, corruption eventually befell the happy realm, and people’s wishes started turning against them. Madness and chaos now reign in the newly-renamed “Land Without Happy Endings,” but all hope is not lost! At least one small hero is en route; a white-eared, cape-wearing cat named “Fast-Food.” Not “Ronald,” not “Wendy,” but the all-encompassing “Fast-Food.” Big things are in store, if only our savior could remember what they wished for…it may be exactly what’s needed to restore this former paradise!
Run, jump, and ponder your way through an obstacle-filled desert environment, where reloading save points will be your key to getting past tricky puzzles. For example, some environmental roadblocks will look “glitchy,” and save files won’t affect them. If you activate a glitchy lever or gate and then need it to revert to its original position, you can simply reload your last save while maintaining the rest of your progress up to that point. Environmental puzzles won’t be the only way you’ll manipulate save files either; rewinding time is a useful skill to have!
The Twelve Slot Saloon is chock full of animals with unfortunate problems, and where there are problems, there are sidequests. Character quests have happy and tragic endings, and you’ll sometimes have to suffer through a tragic ending before you can achieve victory. In a neato feature inspired by The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask and Undertale, once you’ve completed a quest (to disappointing results), you can reload your save and travel back in time to find a happy solution using the knowledge gained through your first run. Meanwhile, both your sidequest results and combat choices (more on this later) will affect the game’s overall ending and which final bosses you’ll encounter!
Do you enjoy the manic whooshing sounds of airborne projectiles? If so, The Twelve Slot Saloon’s battle system will be exactly what you’d wish for. Known as “Silhouette Showdowns,” battles begin turn-based. Choose your main action that launches one of several minigames, including shooting, conversation, and platforming. Then, during your opponent’s turn, get ready to avoid a frenzy of projectiles with various painful or annoying qualities. Once you deplete your enemy’s HP (or you successfully pacify them), you can choose to kill or spare them; make this choice wisely, as you’ll face a trade-off between exciting rewards and a better ending!
While The Twelve Slot Saloon has yet to hit its funding target, stretch goals will bring additional stories, an extra ending, and improvements to the game’s multiplayer mode. On that note, the game will allow you to invite three other friends to become cats in action-packed couch co-op fun. Many meows await! If you want to try the game out, the developers have a four-hour-long demo available on Steam, Itch.io, and GameJolt.
All in all, I can’t walk away from a game featuring cats, much less cats with big dreams and mystical powers. The Twelve Slot Saloon will soon be open for business, and our exclusive invitations are on the way. Will you accept?
Disclaimer: While it’s possible some of us at RPGFan may be backers of the games mentioned in these articles, this does not influence our coverage or our featured game choices. We make our selections simply based on the active campaigns we feel our readers might find interesting, and we are not given special access or perks by the developers.
tl;dr: We think these games show potential and want to share them with you.
