I played through Cataphract OI, a perfect little 3-hour RPG by a designer I started following after they posted interesting blogposts on the NES Dragon Quests.
Like those DQs, a big part of the aesthetic it’s going for is iconic JRPG purity. It’s made using a specific old version of RPG Maker (2000), and it makes use of the classic tiles and enemies (especially skellingtons of course). What makes it feel modern is the dungeon crawler DNA it has as well: in particular, the movement is room-by-room and the enemy parties are mobile on the map, not random encounters.
The largely wordless plot is that you’re a team of mercenaries escorting a “Supplicant” to stop the wheel of time. It’s never explained why it’s a good idea to stop it and I perceived an undertone of tragic environmentalism there, especially in the beautiful game over screen that shows the world turn to desert, and then regenerate back into a thriving forest, mountain range, and castle, and then back to the ruins that your party enters once again on the next cycle.
Mechanically, the premise is used to set up opposing incentives for the player. On the one hand, the wheel of time resets at midnight, so there is a gamelong timer which ticks forward with almost any action you take, which left me impatient and on edge. On the other hand, the Supplicant dies in two hits and it’s an instant game over the moment they do: pushing a bit too far in an innocuous normal battle can and did game-over me. A lot of the specific tools and abilities basically calibrate your level of recklessness or caution, and the better I got at the game, the more precise I got in assessing how much I could get away with.
Anyway I recommend it! Love to see a design involving a gamelong time limit succeed again finally, as I hadn’t seen it particularly do so since the original Prince of Persia back in the 80s.