A further problem occurs at the end of each week; you need to regain your hit points. To do this, you can buy a health potion, which will cost money; or you can sleep at the Inn, which will cost money; or you can sleep at the church, which is free. But after a few nights at the church, the nun there subtly pressures you into attending services, and you must spend time in meditation, or you'll probably be asked to go elsewhere. Fortunately, meditating for a week does increase one of your magic skill stats, so it's not a total loss, but the game does present quite a few little moral choices like this along the way.

One of the less-obvious game elements you'll have to manage is the balance between "Dreams" and "Sin". If you let your character's dreams level fall too low, she'll give up on her quest and simply settle for some low-level job, and you'll be treated to the eventual concluding "cut scene", where you learn of her fate. Cute Knight Deluxe touts about 50 such endings, so if you're a completist, you'll probably want to spend the time to see them all. Sin has more to do with doing morally ambiguous things, like the aforementioned picking pockets.

Speaking of that, the game will suddenly drop a new character into your life at odd times. For instance, once I started working at the Inn, I discovered that my culinary skills needed improvement. So I went to the college to plunk down change to raise my stats. 'Round about my third or fourth week there, a fellow student decided she'd come up and denigrate my cooking skills, claiming that she was so good she'd put me out of a job. Unfortunately, there was no in-game option to slap her right across the face with a glove to initiate a cook-off challenge, so I just went back to work.

It can get to be a chore, all this going back and forth from job to church and back again, just to earn enough money to buy some gear to go fight monsters in the dungeon (the city guards won't even let you into the slums unarmed), but that might open up enough gameplay for you to consider this demo worth the download. I don't mean to imply that this game has no value, because apparently enough people liked the first one to warrant a sequel; it's more that with so many other more polished games out there vying for my attention, I didn't feel like putting in the time to see if it was worth sticking with. Your mileage, as always, may vary. You can pick it up right here at Big Download for both Mac and PC.