I’ve always been a fan of when YouTubers and streamers find old memory cards from retro consoles, and pick up saved games where the previous owner left off. It’s a fun bit of nostalgia to see both the previous player’s mindset and what they prioritized. A sort of digital time capsule that makes the past feel more present. Remake of the End of the Greatest RPG of All Time is based around the concept of coming into someone else’s save file at the end of the game and adds a whole bunch of meta wrapping that makes it an extremely intriguing puzzle game that requires gathering clues to both progress and to understand the meta story that ties it all together.
Remake of the End of the Greatest RPG of All Time–which I’ll refer to as Remake of the End for brevity–leans into a lot of concepts that can only exist inside of a video game. And that’s something I absolutely love. Not that I hate when games try to be movies with extensively long cinematics (I’m looking at you Kojima) but when video games embrace the whole, well, video game-ness of it all they tend to become something very special (again, I’m looking at you Kojima). But Remake of the End really swings for the fences in this regard. Not only do you play across multiple fake saves, but you also uncover developer commentary (a la Valve Software), video footage from a fake unreleased documentary, and even utilize intentional glitches.
While Remake of the End bills itself as a role-playing game right in the title, it’s more of a puzzle game than a proper RPG. While combat encounters look like the typical JRPG turn-based setup, each fight is actually a puzzle that requires a very specific combination of moves to solve. You can find clues in your manual on how to beat enemies, with pages full of information about enemies either supplied by in-universe developer Circle Games, or by handwritten notes as you might find in a real retro game manuals. Remake of the End is obviously inspired by retro games, and other retro-likes, especially Tunic–with one of the in-universe developers wearing a Tunic shirt in the faux documentary.
Since you’re playing someone else's save file, you have to learn how to play Remake of the End differently than you would a normal game. A bit of backwards engineering is required as you figure out things you should already know for someone who is about to beat the game. You’re max level and have max gold, but that doesn’t matter because you already bought all of the items from every shop. But revisiting a shop might give you clues that the items in your inventory don’t–like that Lime Pies open Magic Red Chests, and you discover that you were walking past locked gates you had keys for all along. But your inventory is so crammed with items, unless you’re checking everything in your inventory like you’re playing an old school SCUMM point and click adventure, you wouldn’t know. It’s a clever extension of what Tunic introduced with its own meta manual collecting, but dialed up to 11.
There are a lot of heady ideas that make Remake of the End seem, at first, an impenetrable onion with layers and layers of secrets to uncover. I don’t want to spoil too much in this review, because that’s true–but it’s also not true. I think there was a potential that Remake of the End had that never quite gets realized in a satisfying way. While developer Coin Drop Games does technically stick the landing–and I’d love to see what they can come up with in the future–Remake of the End never quite lived up to the expectations I had for it after my first hour or so of gameplay. It fulfills its meta narrative promise, but the execution ends up feeling underbaked.
If you’re into games that use meta puzzle elements with an intriguing mystery to uncover, Remake of the End scratches that itch. But it feels a bit unrefined, even as it accomplishes what it sets out to do. It feels like a 4-6 hour digital escape room with some good ideas that seem like they’re still in the chrysalis phase. But those ideas are so good I’m going to keep an eye on what Coin Drop Games does next.
