Thanks Kemco for sending us this game to review!

The story begins in a remote village in "the Kingdom" where young Fort is being bullied by town residents for being a "genie." Don't think of a colorful, ghost-like, cosmic-power-wielding, lamp-dwelling mythic being. Fort looks human, and the only thing that is physically interesting about him is that he has red hair. Genies in this world are humans who can summon and control monsters. This ability causes others to either fear them, or exploit them.

Fort is living in the village orphanage, which is also a sanctuary for people with genie blood. His best friends Legna and Elicia protect and support him as best they can. All is relatively normal until one day "the Empire" attacks the village and razes it to the ground. In the midst of the burning town, Fort tries to rescue Elicia and awakens his genie powers, summoning monsters which kill everyone since Fort can't control them yet.

After this Fort is captured by the Empire and imprisoned until he either decides to join the Empire's genie military unit or, refusing, is executed. In prison, weighing his options, Fort is visited by a demon spirit calling itself "Wicca" who manifests herself in the image of Elicia. Wicca claims to be able to both free Fort from prison and train him in how to use his genie powers, and all Fort needs to do is pact himself to her. Fort reluctantly agrees to do so and thus begins the Covenant of Solitude.

If you’ve played a retro or retro-inspired RPG of this style, such as Phantasy Star III or Final Fantasy IV, Covenant of Solitude’s traditional gameplay will feel very familiar. Progression and exploration consist of a town-overworld-dungeon loop with random battles throughout. As is typical of games of this genre, town scale, overworld scale and dungeon (or interior) scale are vastly different. A building in town may be four steps across on the outside but 16 or 20 steps across on the inside. Dungeons feel big due to a high random encounter rate, which can be mitigated with a common item or a spell. There are also difficulty spikes which cause a need for level grinding.

Very few NPCs populate the towns, and those that do are named generically unless they are important to the story. For example, in the first village there are 2 houses, an inn, and a store. The population consists of a "Village Head," one "Male," one "Female," a "Peddler," and the named bully who interacted with Fort at the beginning whose name is "Bash." Bash also has a friend named "Bash's Follower" who can't be found in town after the introductory scene. The merchants in the shop and the innkeeper are unnamed and can only be used as a point of sale. This generic feel even extends to the two main political powers of "The Kingdom" and "The Empire." It made the world of the story feel empty of substance or significance to me. When Fort's town is razed by the Empire, I remember thinking, "Oh well, they just killed Female." It really didn't seem to matter.

Covenant of Solitude’s most interesting gameplay aspect is creating Fort’s monster companions. Normally in RPGs like this you meet people who follow the protagonist for various plot-related reasons. In this case, you create the other party members since they are an aspect of Fort's genie abilities. Monsters come in four classes (Dragons, Beasts, Fairies, and Vampires) and can take up one of four main jobs (Fighter, Healer, Thief, Wizard). The classes each come with one of two special abilities you can choose from, and each class has jobs that they will be naturally better at than others. You can create up to 20 monster companions, but you can only take three along with you at a time. Every new monster you create starts at level one. You can change a monster's job, but doing so resets the monster’s stats back to level one, and the job-change items are expensive. There is little motivation to make more than three companions at the very beginning to see you through to the end, unless you're a big fan of level-grinding.

Covenant of Solitude's graphics are very basic. Since it is trying to emulate old 16-bit RPGs, I'd say it does hit that target. In conversations, at least with main characters, a still portrait of the speaker appears above the text box at the bottom. There is only one portrait for each main character, those being Fort, Elicia, Legna, Wicca, and Evans. There is also a portrait for each Monster type Fort can recruit, and male and female Monsters look different. For some reason, a male Dragon looks like a menacing lizard-man, but a female Dragon looks like an armored anime girl fighter with leathery wings. A male beast looks like a man with a lion's head while a female beast looks like a cute girl with cat ears. I found this design choice to be somewhat inconsistent. I doubt Bash would've been such a bully if he'd only known that Fort was actually friends with a bunch of cute girls in cat outfits instead of evil monsters.

The music and sound effects in Covenant of Solitude are decent for 16-bit MIDI, but there are only about 6 distinct tunes. They are used in the course of dialogue to try to convey context, or evoke an emotional connection to what the characters are feeling. It largely failed to do this for me. Instead I found the tune transitioning abruptly between speakers to be jarring and off-putting. In general other sound effects are okay, though some get a little shrill.

Covenant of Solitude did not crash, freeze, or have any stability issues. The controls are okay with a gamepad, but not good with a keyboard (no mouse). It has somewhat unintuitive keyboard commands for modern keyboard gaming; the use of the arrow keys for movement, for example. Movement is strictly 2D orthographic with no diagonal movement which I found limiting and sometimes hard to control with a gamepad.

There is some PG-13 language used in the dialogue, but nothing too offensive. Near the beginning, Fort calls one of his fellow orphans a smarta**. Legna calls Fort and others b*stards.

Violence is definitely present but is not graphic, at least visually. No blood or gore is shown. When killing happens there is usually a black screen that will blink red a couple of times with sound effects, and then when the scene returns the character sprites will just be in a prone position. Fort is generally violence-averse unless it's in self defense or defense of others, which gets him criticism from almost everyone except Elicia.

Covenant of Solitude is premised on some people, the protagonist being one, having the power to control monsters. This power is presented as both innate due to the person's parentage and also granted or maybe enhanced or augmented through a covenant one makes with a demon. One is a choice, the other is not. The story blurs the distinction between the choice to enter a covenant and the fact of Fort's nature. The story presents the institutions and people that think such an ability is innately evil as repressive bigots. It also presents the institutions and people who want to use people with this power for their own benefit as tyrants and megalomaniacs.

Overall, Covenant of Solitude is fairly short for an RPG. It's entertaining, but not to the degree of an established IP of similar design like Final Fantasy or Phantasy Star, and it costs more. The music is sub-par and shifts jarringly multiple times throughout a single conversation. The presentation and development of the world is extremely lacking. Willingly entering contracts (or covenants) with demons is presented as morally neutral and blended with a person's nature by birth. The PC, PlayStation, Xbox and Switch releases of Covenant of Solitude are ports from a 2012 Android/iOS mobile release which cost $7.99 on Android and $7.00 on iOS. The 2025 ports on all of these platforms cost $20, with some optional DLC which seem to unlock what could easily have been free features like triple experience points.

-Mike Desmond