The Remake Of The End Of The Greatest RPG Of All Time, or TROTEOTGRPGOAT for, uh, short, is a game that exists. I normally wouldn’t let such an opaque stub of a description survive outside of a quick Trello reminder to write something better later, but I’m currently finding it fulfilling enough just to gaze upon that title and consider the fully formed art object that may soon emerge from its tantalising promises. Ok, so the visual component helps too. Orientate yourself by means of the trailer below, and let’s dig into this brazen nose-hooker of a head turner of a game that does exist, about another game that doesn’t.
TROTEOTGRPGOAT comes from Coin Drop Games, and despite the title, it actually sounds closer to a puzzle game. The idea is that you’ll navigate the final hour of an RPG that never existed and – with help from an in-game manual, developer commentary, and a fictional unreleased documentary – learn how to solve its many challenges. It also sounds like there’s a Beginner’s Guide-esque throughline of meta-commentary around the ways we communicate about games.
Usually, when a project’s operating on this many layers of pomo, you might expect the actual beauty of the original object to take a hit. Dissection rarely leaves a pretty cadaver, after all. But there’s a detail and lushness to the visuals here that reminds me a little of Octopath Traveller, an art style which I believe terms like ‘HD-2D’ and ‘rotoscopic’ were thrown around, although I’m not sure if they actually mean anything. Still: game look nice! It may not surprise you to learn I am officially a Big Fan of the pirate skelly, writing about undead pirates being one of my most treasured pastimes.
Coin Drop Games themselves are three University of California students, who originally started work on the game as part of a class, and they’ve also enlisted some collaborators to help. The Remake Of The End Of The Greatest RPG Of All Time doesn’t yet have a release date, but it’ll drop on both PC and Mac when it does. You can find the Steam page here.