The Mayor of Sanctuary Review: Lost Prologue

For my fourth game from Incube8 (thank you guys by the way), I feel it’s important to take into account something I haven’t been thinking about until now. The Mayor of Sanctuary was, soundtrack and testing aside, made by a single person, Anthony Wallace of Nara Makes Games. This was also the case for most of the other releases I covered from Incube8. It’s easy to bring the wrath of god down upon a game like Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League. In that cynically made product, making a satisfying story came second to trend-chasing and excessive monetization.

It’s harder to bring the thunder for something made by a single person, for reasons that should be obvious. Most games are made by dozens or even hundreds of people, so it’s easy for them all to shoulder the blame collectively. But for this game, the creator put their heart and soul into it. I got a message from the developer, going into the circumstances behind the game’s creation. I’m not sure I’m allowed to share any of it, but it was illuminating to read. It helped me get into his head and gave me a real connection with him.

But enough talk of live service garbage, we have the exact opposite to cover. That being a brand new Game Boy Color game released in the year of our lord 2024. Critiquing a deeply personal passion project may not be easy, but critique I must. Is The Mayor of Sanctuary a worthy adventure 

The Mayor of Sanctuary is available now as a backwards-compatible Game Boy Color cartridge for $59.99. There are multiple collectors editions available, or you can simply buy a digital ROM file for $12.99.

Story: Retirony

There’s a trope featured throughout a lot of media, wherein someone is just about to retire from their work only for something to go horribly wrong and they usually die in the process. Our protagonist, Yuu, manages to escape this fate, thankfully. Because something goes horribly wrong immediately after he retires. The town of Anzen has been infested with spirits, the sun hasn’t risen for three weeks, and the new mayor has locked herself inside the mansion and refuses to see anyone. It’s up to Yuu to get himself out of bed and find a solution to these supernatural happenings.

The game’s story is surprisingly low-key. In any other game, this scenario would be an apocalyptic threat treated with utter seriousness, but everyone in the village seems to treat it more as a minor inconvenience. Your goal is to stop it, yes, but there’s still plenty of time to go around and help everyone with their personal struggles. The casual tone isn’t necessarily a bad thing, just something I found to be rather strange.

Who cares about the sun not rising, Yuu still has to complete the cooking minigame.

The world of Sanctuary is certainly unique, a hodgepodge of modern conveniences mixed with old Japanese religious architecture. Yuu is a literal magician, but he makes company with angry chefs, bodacious gamers, and gravediggers. The game’s world is rather small, but every screen is packed with detail, though I do wish there was a tad more we learned about the town. I thought this was set in ancient times at first, but then I saw a girl whose profile picture has her in a regular hoodie and an NPC with a knock-off Game Boy, and I got confused for a bit. There are other things I’d like to see added too, but I think those would be better covered in…

Gameplay: Vote for the Wizard

There’s not a lot here to talk about. The Mayor of Sanctuary is a top-down adventure game with the lightest dressings of puzzles and combat. Yuu starts with a dinky little wand that hits a short distance, and he ends the game with… a dinky little wand that hits a short distance in front of him. Combat is wholly superfluous, but the game thinks it’s more important than it is. Every basic enemy type can be dealt with in the same way. Just walk up to them and mash A until they die. If there are differences between the enemies, I never noticed them. 

Spirits will hound you across your journey, but they can be easily dealt with. Too easily, in fact.

Much of your time with The Mayor of Sanctuary will involve fetch quests and simple minigames. Yuu has to gather nine keys from the rest of the villagers to get inside the mansion, and they all have their own little tasks for him to fulfill. One might want you to solve their maze, another might want you to help them gather all their baby chicks. None of these tasks are very deep, but there is at least a fair bit of variety. You’ll notice that a lack of depth has been a recurring issue, and it’s only about to get worse.

Where’s The Beef?

I spent a long time trying to figure out how I wanted to articulate this point, but at last, I have found it. Let’s go with Golden Sun as a random example for comparison, because it came out on Nintendo Switch Online last month and perhaps I can still squeeze a drop of algorithmic synergy out of it. Golden Sun begins with a village in the middle of a crisis in a world of magic and spirits. The world is interesting, if not the most original, combat and puzzles are simple but have lots of promise for later, and it does an acceptable job introducing you to its characters and setting up an adventure for you to go on. A properly done prologue can do a good job of making you want to play onward.

Every house is completely unique, really helping to make the game’s world feel lived in.

The Mayor of Sanctuary also begins with a village in the middle of a crisis in a world of magic and spirits. The world is compelling, the gameplay has lots of room to grow in the future, and it makes you excited to deal with this opening fetch quest so the actual game can start. But the game never really starts, the prologue is all there is. Where most games would properly begin, The Mayor of Sanctuary instead awkwardly ends. It’s evocative of Metal Gear Solid V. Not The Phantom Pain, the masterpiece of stealth action. It’s evocative of Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes, what should have been a free demo that was sold in stores as a standalone prologue for 40 bucks, a move only justifiable because Kojima’s name carries that much weight.

Easy Going

The game’s fatal flaw is that it never really escalates, and it ends about as anticlimactically as it could. Imagine if Breath of the Wild ended the moment you cleared the Great Plateau, and you see what I mean. The bizarre thing about the game is that it gives you lots of combat upgrades throughout. You can get heart containers to upgrade your maximum health, and even a few combat perks, like bonus critical hits or improved healing. There’s also a short sequence where Yuu’s wand gets broken, and he has to run through the mansion searching for a replacement. The game hypes this up as being an 11th-hour super mode upgrade, but I couldn’t even tell if it did anything.

This turtle king would make for an interesting boss in any other game, but he’s just a harmless NPC here.

These upgrades are literally pointless. The final dungeon is a short hallway with just four enemies that don’t even fight back, and the “final boss” is defeated in a cutscene. Everything led me to believe that the game would get more involved in the future, and it never did. I genuinely wonder why the developer even bothered having combat at all. I’m not dunking on the game because it’s short, nor am I dunking on it because it’s easy. It’s possible to have a short game and still have it be satisfying. 

Graphics and Sound: Withered Old Bones

The presentation is thankfully rather solid, hard to find complaints here. The town of Anzen is fully realized, with a lot of neat environmental details. The sprites are all rather charming, and the game as a whole looks really inviting. Incube8’s developers know how to get a lot out of this wonderful, yet ancient hardware.

There’s lots of detailed cinema sequences spread throughout the game.

One strange thing I’ve noticed with all of the past Incube8 GBC games I’ve received is that they tend to have a very restricted color palette. Dango Dash was all white, pink, and green, The Machine was largely tan, and The Mayor of Sanctuary is no different, the town being in a state of perpetual night is represented by almost everything being painted some shade of blue. It’s not that the game looks bad, and I know there are technical limitations to work with, but surely there was a way to squeeze more colors on screen at once.

The music is vaguely annoying, but serviceable, fitting the game’s atmosphere quite well. I don’t know if GB Studio just has sub-par sound tools, but none of the games I’ve played from them have had sound quality on par with the visuals. The game’s music reminds me a lot of Game Boy Mega Man II, the compositions themselves aren’t bad, but the soundfont is fairly grating. The underwhelming combat is only made more so by weak sound effects. Apparently, an earlier version of this game didn’t even have a sound for when you swung your wand, which I find amusing.

The Mayor of Sanctuary was played on a Game Boy Advance SP using a cartridge provided by Incube8 Games.