A solo dev worked 12 years on this retro JRPG - and it’s out next month

The only thing I’ve stuck to regularly over the last twelve years is breathing, and I often forget to do even that. So it’s with all the awe and appreciation in the world that I dove into the demo for retro RPG Whispers In The Moss. It's been in development for twelve years, from solo dev Uncultured Games. It's set in a vaguely ancient Rome-inspired fantasy world brought to life through intricate and inventive ASCII, and scored with homages to the classics. Ah, but how does it play? You exclaim with evident interest, I assume.

Pretty smoothly, honestly! I’ve got basically no experience navigating something quite this Commodore-ified, to the point where I’m sure I’ve already alienated a few of you by wrongly calling the coding language ‘Commodore-ified’. But it’s all instantly intuitive with on-screen key commands for the various menus. Intuitive enough, in fact, that I’m immediately able to both hold a conversation and collect some garlic. Chat and a bulb! What else can you want? Fancy popping over for a chat and a bulb? You could say to someone, and they’d be a fool to decline.

I’m impressed by the detail on display in the starting village. I’m not quite nostalgic enough for this era to make the staring faces of my party from the menu read as anything else than deeply surreal, but it’s still a cosy place to be. I visit some random houses I’m not invited to, as is traditional, and one dweller steals a single gold piece from me every time I talk to him. I natter with some pirates, one bloke threatens me for stepping on his tomato patch, and I figure it’s time to find something to fight.

The party and I take a raft to an island I’m told is filled with pirates. I go up to the first sprite, which turns out not to be a pirate, but instead some sort of gigantic monkey holding a terrifyingly massive club. Luckily, one of my mates has the ability to cast ‘gun’ on this thing. We pop off a few shots, then burn it to death with fire magic. Throughout this, the runaway synth bass does a great job convincing me that, yes, I am truly burning a giant monkey to death.

I’d like to play more! The lovely thing about this kind of homage to a bygone era is that Whispers In The Moss retains a tantalising sense of inscrutability. That’s despite it being, as I’ve said, pretty easy to wrap your head around. Still, even if there’s not more than meets the eye here, it’s still a very perky and worthwhile bit of JRPG. You can find the demo on Itch here.