I went looking this week for retro-styled RPGs doing something clever with modern design sensibilities, and what I found instead was stranger and more interesting: a horror RPG built in RPG Maker — about as retro an engine as indie development has — that asks you to pay whatever you want, including nothing at all.
That's Paper Lily - Chapter 1, and it's worth talking about precisely because it complicates the usual "under $20" framing this newsletter runs on. The real question with retro-inspired RPGs isn't whether they're cheap. It's whether the old bones — the top-down movement, the pixel sprites, the dialogue boxes — still have room for ideas that a 1996 SNES cartridge never could have shipped.
The RPG Maker Pedigree Is the Point, Not a Limitation
RPG Maker has a reputation problem. It's the engine every tutorial uses, the one associated with a decade of forgettable fan projects. But Paper Lily leans into that aesthetic rather than apologizing for it — the itch.io page tags it explicitly as pixel art, anime-inflected, and RPG Maker-built, and treats that lineage as a feature. There's something honest about a horror game that looks like a Game Boy Color adventure wandering into the territory of psychological dread. The contrast between cute, blocky sprites and the game's premise — a girl who hasn't left her house in months, chasing a mysterious letter for answers about her condition — does a lot of the atmospheric work that a more "modern-looking" horror game would have to build with lighting and sound design instead.
The game is a continuation of an earlier prologue called Project Kat, and according to its own page, it's playable in roughly four hours, with a single ending that branches into variations depending on how you solve its puzzles. That's the detail I'd flag as the actual quality-of-life innovation here: multiple solution paths for the same puzzle, rather than one correct answer gatekeeping your progress. It's a small design choice, but it's the kind of thing that separates a retro RPG that merely looks old from one that's learned something from thirty years of player frustration with old-school adventure logic.
Four Hours, Name-Your-Own-Price, 1,131 Ratings at 4.9 Stars
Here's where the value proposition gets almost absurd for a publication built around "under $20." Paper Lily is pay-what-you-want. You could put in five dollars, you could put in zero, and either way you'd be playing a game that's currently sitting at a 4.9 out of 5 across more than 1,100 ratings on itch.io. That's not a hidden gem in the sense of being undiscovered — a rating pool that size means plenty of people have already found it. It's a hidden gem in the sense that it's still flying under the radar of most mainstream coverage, which tends to treat itch.io horror RPGs as a niche too small to bother with.
I'll be honest about the limits of what I can tell you here: the developers themselves note on the page that a few secrets and interactions are temporarily disabled in this build, with updates promised to restore them. That's worth knowing going in — you're playing a chapter still being finished around the edges, not a fully locked, polished release. For a four-hour pay-what-you-want horror RPG, that's a reasonable trade.
What to Watch For
The developers behind Paper Lily have said an update adding more endings is coming, which is the thing I'd actually keep an eye on if this one catches your interest — a single-ending horror RPG and a multi-ending one are different experiences, and the latter is still in progress. Beyond that, the broader lesson stands: retro engines like RPG Maker aren't a ceiling on ambition. They're a starting point that the right small team can still twist into something that doesn't look or feel like anything else on the shelf next to it.