I actually find those inclusions very appropriate, as they add to the overall challenge and encourage putting yourself as a disadvantage, even without struggling to meet the weekly quotas for gold. Additionally, the game utilizes a weapon mastery mechanic, that unlocks powerful bonuses after any character fights with a specific item equipped for a certain number of fights, which means that switching it for anything else will often be a significant, even if temporary downgrade.

There are also risk-reward mechanics that reward you for summoning as few companions as possible, as the fewer you take with you, the bigger will be your reward for the fights (while every loss or retreat will cost you significant amounts of gold). The main barrier for switching between team compositions and tactics freely is the cist of stat upgrades, which cost gold and are separate for every character – this not only limits you by having to put away funds for weekly payments and other events, but punishes you heavily for splitting the investment beyond the characters you use the most. There’s also a limited gear system, with the characters being able to equip a single weapon, armour and amulet at any given time, but most items offer unique bonuses and skills, along with significant stat trade-offs, giving a lot of space for meaningful changes to characters’ effectiveness and their roles within the team. There are six teammates that you can recruit throughout the game (with up to three characters actively taking part in combat), all with their own specialisations and unique perks, which along with the significantly-varied player classes allows for many fully-viable playstyles.

When it goes to RPG mechanics, Serment is a good compromise between simplicity and customisation. Their love interests are the ones that fit their characters the most, rather than ones of the player’s choosing. This structure leaves pretty much no place for the player agency in directing the game’s core story, but is consistent with the notion that every player class (the warrior, mage, ninja and freelancer) is not just a set of skills, but a proper character with unique personality and backstory. Apart from these side activities, which are identical in every playthrough, the game has a short main story for every one of the four playable characters, which progresses automatically after every payment to Lucifer and includes a pre-determined romance subplot. When every wasted hour threatens you with a game-over, casual exploration is not something you can do effectively. This was especially important for some side-events and quests, which can pretty much only be uncovered by trial-and-error, visiting various locations and dungeon floors at certain points of the story or with the right team composition. That was, at least, the initial setup, as reacting to players' complaints, developers quickly relaxed the pressure from recurrent payments, increasing gold earned in the dungeon and reducing the time required for various activities, as the highly-limited resources got in the way of exploring the game’s world and story.

To fulfil the contract, our lead is forced to use her skills by exploring the local dungeon and doing quests for demon world’s surprisingly non-threatening inhabitants – all within a time limit, with payments at the end of every week and every action, be it travelling, interacting with other characters or fighting monsters, consuming precious time. Serment starts with a simpler plot and mechanics, with the protagonist being an adventurer who died during one of her quests and was resurrected in the demon world by Lucifer – a particularly cute and friendly “devil”, who requests a repayment in gold for her services, paid in six, progressively bigger instalments. It’s a very tense game, in which you will most likely fail repeatedly until you get a very good grasp on the mechanics and truly optimize your playstyle. Recettear is a fantasy item shop manager combined with a dungeon crawler, in which the protagonist is forced to run a business in order to pay off her inherited debt, in progressively bigger and harder-to-match quotas. Serment in its base premise seems to be rather openly inspired by Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale, another anime-style indie game that received a lot of praise from both players and reviewers a few years ago (it's even directly referenced in Serment’s story).

Sakura dungeon voice patch