You have to hand it to developer We Heart Dragons. After releasing the original Glyph Quest [Free] as a free-to-play game with an unlock IAP, they listened to player feedback and acted on it. Thus, Glyph Quest's sequel, Super Glyph Quest [$3.99], launched as a fully paid game. The overall game was fleshed out with a lot of story content and quests, and the gameplay mechanics were built on and refined. In an unfortunate reflection of the market, Super Glyph Quest ended up making only a fraction of what the first did. On top of that, while a lot of fans were happy with the game, some felt that the game's simple core was drowned in all of the new additions.
The good news is that Glyph Quest lives on, but its new form may not please everyone. Glyph Quest Chronicles appears to be, like the previous title, a reply to the reception of the game before it. The bottom line is that it's not a paid game anymore. Instead, the developers are going with a free-to-play model that seems informed by popular social RPGs. That means the overall structure is built around shorter, discrete stages, there is a stamina meter in effect (called mana here), and a premium currency. It might sound bad, but the developer has a few ideas to make this as painless as possible for fans of the earlier games.
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First up, there's the Loyalty Card. As you clear stages, you'll get stamps on a card, and when it's filled, your mana will be topped off. One of the thi...