Game review: Healer’s Quest

I don’t think I’ve ever reviewed a videogame on here before. Mostly I figure that so many other people talk about videogames on youtube and such, they don’t need me adding to the pile.

But Healer’s Quest is a little indie game, and it made me laugh so much, so I figured I’d talk about it.

First, some background. From the time my hubby and I started dating, he always played the warrior and I played the priest who healed him and kept him alive. We did this in World of Warcraft, Guild Wars 2, Final Fantasy 11 and 14, anywhere we played RPG classes. I was always healer, he was always the ‘tank’, or the super armored one who fights the bad guys.

Anyway, we played World of Warcraft the longest, and experienced the playerbase’s slow slide into toxic gamerbros. I finally burned out and quit because I couldn’t get gear, and other players treated me like complete and total dirt because my stats weren’t high enough. I went and played easy things like Minecraft.

Anyway, a month or so ago, I saw this random ad for some game called Healer’s Quest. It was on sale. I’ve had this increasingly futile search for healers in fiction, so I went, why not? And grabbed this little game where you play a healer.

The whole game has these soft-looking pastel graphics and it’s very easy on the eyes.

So I started playing this game, and it’s a total spoof of all RPGs. You pick up this random wand and cast healing spells on a random warrior named Tanky. Soon Tanky joins up with Murky the wizard, Grumpy the lumberjack dwarf, and Beauty the archer who totally isn’t an elf. The party treat you like dirt. They constantly tell you how useless you are, offer to sacrifice you to dragons or trade you to vampires, and just in general throw you under the bus.

And this is *hilarious* because this is what real players have done to me for *years*.

They don’t even give you any gold because “you didn’t fight anything”. More WoW flashbacks, haha! Star Wars: The Old Republic used to not even give healers experience points unless they damaged the monsters in the dungeons. Healers are indeed the most despised class.

Plus the dialogue is funny in general.

Or some other ones, like they ask the dwarf why he quit the Baddies Guild:

Then the tank says “Or being a lumberjack” and Grumpy hits him with his axe.

The game itself is actually pretty fun to play. You can only have four spells on your hotbar at a time, but you have a big library of spells to swap in and out as the need arises. I wound up swapping in custom spells depending on whether we were fighting enemies that poison vs enemies that just deal a lot of damage, for instance. There winds up being a bit of strategy to it. Also each spell has a tech tree to level up. The main one to get is Remedy, because otherwise you’ll be locked out of the game at the 1/3rd mark by stuff killing you with status effects.

The game kept me laughing all the way through. There’s a tiny dungeon that is a spoof of a cellphone game, with its own currency and cosmetic items you buy to decorate the dungeon. I tried it and it really worked. I was howling.

Also, there are three kinds of “healer karma” you can play: Good, Evil, or Victim.

Good: you are sunshine and wholesome and nothing gets you down. Think most anime healers.

Evil: The vampire healer who powers up when people die. I haven’t yet played this one but I want to.

Victim: You are still wholesome but you are scared and mousy and the group runs roughshod over you.

I’ve mentally gone through every healer storyline I’ve ever seen in a game or book, and these three are literally the only personalities. ROFL!

Anyway, I had so much fun playing this game. Even though it looks like a kids game, it’s not a kids game. There’s nothing bad in it, per se, but there’s some adult humor around the mage always wanting to get with any girl the party runs across. Kind of like Brock in the Pokemon show. And I admit it, I laughed until I hurt myself. I’d put it about a PG-13.