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As such, it's the unspoken crux of a story concerned with averting the repetition of the same - a theme Cataphract OI pursues at the level of both writing and fighting. Forcing somebody inside it is like lifting the lid on Schrodinger's Cat. Rather than a specific location or the clash of blades, the Fray emblematises the possibility of change, for better and worse. The ideal scenario, in fact, is for all of your enemies to all be in the Fray while your party members somehow remain outside it. But it also, confusingly, functions like a status effect such as poison: you can 'engage' an enemy, driving them into the Fray, without, counter-intuitively, falling into the Fray yourself. Which makes the Fray sound like No Man's Land - one of the enemies has the ability to 'circle around', manoeuvring your party into the killzone. Party members and enemies are essentially invincible when they're not in the Fray, so you must use special actions to place your adversaries inside it, while keeping your own fighters and the Supplicant out of danger. It lies somewhere between a quality, an entity and a point in space. The Fray isn't just another word, here, for people fighting. But there is something powerfully bizarre at the heart of it all, and that is the Fray. Battle looks generic at first: a line of static sprites waiting to be bowled over like coconuts at a fairground old school class abilities ranging from mana transference to instakill banishments turn order determined by character initiative.

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And of course, you must fight: the fortress is full of undead. To make it to the centre you must scour each screenful of masonry for keys to coloured doors, always at the risk of discovering nothing and burning precious seconds. Pick a compass heading and your party scampers from room to room, fanning out automatically in a pleasing, understated kind of characterisation - the Satellite, your tank, is rarely far from the Supplicant's elbow. Every action, in or out of battle, advances the clock, so it's just as well that navigation is so brisk. Helpfully, they've has left this to the evening before the loop resets.

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The Red Star Cohort, a trio of crack mercenaries, must break the cycle by escorting a mage called the Supplicant to the heart of a strange fortress. Cataphract's setting is caught in yet another videogame timeloop fail, and the SNES-era world map melts and rebuilds itself like a sandcastle emerging from the sea. To illustrate that, here's a micro-review of Cataphract OI, sraëka-lillian's latest project and one of my games of last year. In presenting themselves as separate structures - martial dioramas, sealed off from exploration and the narrative behind loading breaks, with their own scenery and soundtracks - these skirmishes invite a reading of their games not as over-inflated sagas or scenic hikes spoiled by the presence of a million Giant Rat reskins, but as collections of combative, poetical devices that come alive in the repetition. In particular, they've gotten me thinking afresh about one of my great passions, the grandly staged and rulebound combat encounters of JRPGs from the PS1 era and before, and how these antique yet enduring fixtures suggest a different, healthier way of engaging with the games I identified in a recent article as morbid exercises in busywork and scale. In shrinking the playtime, they concentrate and reveal things about the games they riff on that are hard to visualise when you're trudging through the second act of a hundred hour adventure. Whatever their tone or focus, micro-RPGs show that miniaturisation in itself can be a kind of critique.

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Facets from Far Away Times, for example, is a series of boss dungeons that form a harrowing story about erasing somebody's personality.

Micro-JRPGs are often funny or parodic - there's a certain, baked-in whimsy to the thought of a role-playing game you can polish off in an evening - but they can also be earnest and melancholy. Others snip off and spotlight cherished pieces of those larger games, like slimes or fishing - I'd love to play one dedicated to the act of Getting The Airship, or a demo compilation of Sleepy Starting Villages. in Works, are full-scale distillations of classic role-playing narrative structures, trimming back all the grinding, exposition and angst to a limber playlength of 10 hours or less.Typically crafted in RPG Maker and published on Itch.io, these clever miniatures run a wide gamut, as I learned from a Twitter chat with sraëka-lillian, creator of the experimental OI series. I've been fascinated lately by micro-RPGs, and specifically micro-JRPGs.