LISA The Painful — The RPG Where People WILL Die
The game that everyone compared to Undertale back in 2015… Does it hold up on its own?
LISA the Painful is an RPG that takes place in a post-apocalyptic world where all of the women disappeared. You play as Brad, a drug-addicted middle-aged man who encounters a baby girl, which he sees as a “second chance.” After a few years pass with you secretly raising your new daughter with some of your friends, the secret is out, and one day she turns up missing…
The game has very simple turn-based RPG combat, where you command actions for your party (maximum 4 people), and attack order is determined by speed stat. Where the real fun comes in are the 30 potential party members you can encounter during your journey, which all have their own unique attributes and skills. You meet all sorts of different characters such as… A man who tells super long stories, a wrestler who only uses his head, The Pink Power Ranger, a man who spends his life with animals, a magician, an alcoholic, and many many more. While it may be easy to recruit characters, it’s also very easy to lose them. Throughout the game you’ll encounter choices that’ll directly affect gameplay, losing party members on a whim, losing a body part, or even potential ambushes.
One of my favorite parts about the game is that it knows when to be funny, and when it needs to dial to a serious moment, and have it all feel natural! You can go from needing to make the choice of killing a friend or losing an arm, to finding a guy trying to poop and he freaks out over a spider, back to nearly macing someone to death. The way I described it doesn’t do it justice, but they somehow flow into each other in a way where it doesn’t feel awkward. Every encounter throughout the game is interesting, regardless of how weird they may seem out of context.
The most impressive part is that everything was made by one person. Austin Jorgensen composed all of the music, drew all the sprites, wrote the story, and somehow made RPGMaker work as a side-scroller. It’s really impressive how he was able to do so much on his own with little outside influence after the initial Kickstarter project.
I highly recommend LISA if you’re looking for a simple RPG that has a great setting and story. It’s able to blend serious themes with humor extremely well, creating an amazing story paired with great gameplay, and high replayability due to its ~12 hour run time. One of my favorite games of all time.
