1348 Ex Voto

I took a first look at this game when it came out in March, but like many others I was skeptical after reading more than a couple negative reviews and decided to wait a bit to see how things panned out. Since I didn't play the game prior to the recent patches (including a "massive" patch that just came out on 6/10/26), I have no way to compare the gameplay, but at present the combat is fun and engaging. It does feel a bit repetitive during the first few hours, but over time you learn heavy attacks, perfect parries, and other moves that help the situation, and overall I really am having fun with it. My main issue is that appx 90-95% of the items you find while exploring are just different food types that increase your available heals, as well as the occasional "paper" that gives your character skill points. Since you spend a fair amount of time exploring, I think the game would benefit from adding some different armor, weapons and other combat related items for the player to find. Given that the combat is specific to longswords, I realize that any new weapons would need to be of the same type, but adding some other useful stuff to find would definitely make exploration more interesting. There are pommels, grips, guards and blades that you find periodically, which can be used to improve your sword, but as above these items come along pretty rarely. I mention this issue mostly as a longer term goal, such as a possible addition along with a future DLC. I realize that adding this as part of a patch would create a ton of work for a small team, and is likely unrealistic. Other than that, the story is fun to follow and much to my surprise (particularly given the very low price tag), nearly all of the dialogue in game and during cutscenes is voice acted. Low priced games with voice acting are usually comically poor, but in this case I was pleasantly surprised at how well the actors performed, and it definitely adds to the overall ambiance of the game. Graphics-wise, the game looks very nice, but even with the patches it still suffers from some minor optimization issues. I'm playing on a rig w/a 7800 x3d processor, 32 GB RAM, and 4070 GEFORCE card, and had to tone the resolution down to 2K in order to get a reasonably smooth frame rate. It does have scaling of sorts where you can reduce the resolution percentage, but in my eyes that's just another way of modifying your resolution by whatever percentage you choose (50% of 4K equals 2K, etc.). All of that aside, the game runs well at 2K with all of the options on high (at least with my specs), so it's not a major issue. At this resolution/setting, the game does really look nice, as stated above, and I was actually amazed at how well the game looks overall. Although the game appears similar to Kingdom Come Deliverance/KCD 1&2, it's definitely not, mostly because the combat is much faster than KCD/KCD2 and the mechanics (both in and out of combat) are much less complex. I do think that the devs struck a nice compromise between speed and precision when it comes to the feel of combat in game, and I was pleasantly surprised at how well it works overall. If I had to nitpick, I think the game would benefit from adding flourishes or finisher type attacks, mainly to give some additional variety to combat and help it to feel a bit less repetitive. Your character does learn how to do perfect parries and ripostes, but I'm 3-4 hours in and still haven't learned either yet (they just became available and I'm in process of gathering enough skill points to get both of them). Anyway, that's it. I'm actually very glad I bought this game. I really like supporting devs that put in the hard work necessary to support their games, even after a rough start. I truly wish the devs the best of luck and want to say thanks for all of your hard work!! Cheers, H