It’s easy to forget nowadays, but there was a time where indie gaming wasn’t as beloved by the masses as it is now. Big budget blockbusters dominated the mind space of everyone, because smaller games didn’t just release on the shelves of the high street. As the glass ceiling was shattered and lots of sensational games developed by smaller teams trickled down into our hands, gaming became all the better and we got to play some damn good stuff. Some of these are legendary like Super Meat Boy and Braid, others lesser known. Despite loving so many games inspired by it I hadn’t even heard of Off, but a polished new remake has changed that.
Originally released in 2008 in French, Off became a cult hit over the years as it was translated and Tumblred all across the world. This bizarre RPG had everything I loved in gaming, turn-based combat, a completely baffling story and grotesque artwork, and had I played it back then I’d have been obsessed. Plenty of future stars of game development were taking note though, like Toby Fox who credits it as an important inspiration for Undertale. Knowing all this, it was important to brush up on my indie history and try it myself, and I wasn’t disappointed.
In Off you play as The Batter, or rather you play as yourself controlling The Batter (which is actually an important distinction). The Batter has been given the quest of going to the four zones of this world and purifying them of spectres, which sounds simple enough. This isn’t a normal video game world though, with core elements like smoke, plastic, and meat that its citizens need to survive. Even in the early hours you realise something is very wrong about this whole adventure, and that’s before you’re shown scenes that seem to be made of scraps of real world history books.
The combat helps add to this sense of unease too, mainly because of the enemies you’ll be fighting. At first it’s just very basic looking ghosts that you’ll be confronted with, which are fine and just look like a child drew them. Then all of a sudden the next random encounter will throw a slumped headless corpse at you, with a horrific blood smear leading to its missing piece. This is only the start of the grim visuals that Off likes to show off as if they’re just totally normal, so strap in.
Although the enemies in Off look unusual to say the least, fighting them is incredibly traditional. The combat has that sort of early Final Fantasy active time battle system going on where a meter fills for each character you gather, and you’ll use familiar RPG skills (called Competences) to succeed in battle once it’s full. There’s healing, status effects, and elements to worry about, but it’s nothing you won’t have seen from the genre before unless you’ve been living under a rock. It’s actually pretty tricky though, despite being so familiar, with boss fights regularly requiring the use of healing items alongside a hefty dose of strategy.
Perhaps more unusual for an RPG though are the amount of puzzles you’ll need to solve to progress in Off, and like so many other aspects of the game these are a bit odd. Even at the beginning of the game as you’re wandering around the tutorial area you will see random codes you should jot down for a blocked path later on. Other puzzles include having to work out how to piece books together, and having to revise for a quiz about this game’s religion by carefully checking nearby posters. The puzzles having the same unnerving theming of the rest of the game definitely makes them more compelling, and they’re way more involved than I would’ve ever expected them to be (leaving me with a notepad full of mad notes and doodles).
The special sauce that makes Off a game that has inspired so many others though is the overall story, which I couldn’t possibly spoil here but is as compelling as it is unusual. There are messages and themes in the game that are deeper than you’d expect from a RPG about a baseball man that’s for sure, and the ending is the stuff of legend that spurred a generation of sickos to make the messed up indies we love all these years later.
I must admit though it’s the fact that so many games were inspired by Off that make it a little less impactful in 2025. If you go into Off expecting something as cutting edge and wild as Undertale you’re going to be disappointed, and especially on the combat side it’s rather basic. The remaster has done very little to modernise anything either, it’s more of just a port to modern systems. That doesn’t mean it isn’t a game well worth experiencing, it just isn’t quite as powerful as it absolutely would’ve been when it first appeared on that early indie scene.
It’s also worth mentioning that Off is an early RPG Maker game that looks like an early RPG Maker game, with very basic environments and less than flashy animations and effects. It does make up for this with an incredibly unique soundtrack though, which has definitely stood the test of time.
Off was a ground-breaking indie title over a decade ago, and for those of us who weren’t aware of its existence back then this remaster is a great way to rectify that. I might not feel quite as unimaginably different by modern standards, but it’s still a hell of a trip that RPG fans owe it to themselves to check out.