I did not play this game for very long, ultimately quitting before finishing the first dungeon because RNG killed me and I didn't have a save. I didn't feel motivated to redo the party construction and starting sequence. I've played a ton of RPGs in my life, and this game simply lacks the polish necessary to be a good RPG and seems to have some pretty core design flaws that are repeated across many RPGs. I'd recommend not getting this game unless you are very patient.
PROS:
- Just from what I've seen, the art and music are both nice. They're partially what convinced me to purchase the game originally, because it seems like it has the right mix of nostalgia and ambience that fits a lot of RPGs well.
- You can fully customize your party of 4
CONS:
- The story is very lightweight and even in the first moments relies on a lot of tired concepts - your party are prisoners, there is a kingdom at peace until your village is attacked, there is a vague evil besetting the land, and so on. Maybe more would be revealed as the game progressed, but I simply wasn't motivated to play from the story. That's OK, as long as the gameplay is good...
- The gameplay just isn't very fun. You basically get to move a few squares and then make an attack or cast a spell. That would be fine if there was some strategy layered on top with positioning, or choosing weapons, or using abilities, but it seems like the game is content to just be a simplistic dungeon crawler. That's OK, as long as the UI and polish is nice enough that I can play it mindlessly and relax soaking in the art and music...
- The UI is super clunky and the game overall feels like it lacks polish. It's easy to get stuck on walls while moving. The encumbrance system seems totally unnecessary and it took me a few minutes to realize the shackles your characters wear at the start weight 45 pounds (!). The lighting is very dim during exploration, but during encounters suddenly rooms light up immediately. You cannot click and drag items, you have to first click to pick up an item, then click where you want to place it. If you drop an item, you have to click a confirmation dialogue for every item, even useless items like the shackles at the start. You cannot move the inventory window around. If you interact with objects on the map like doors to pick their lock, you do so using the currently selected character rather than the character with the highest lockpick skill (even though the party all travels in one big blob so there's no interesting reason for it as I can tell). The UI doesn't make which character is selected obvious enough, so I wasted one of my lock picks. There is no "auto-sort inventory" button. there is no quick equip button. Most of the interactions on the map are designed for keyboard rather than mouse. It is annoying to have to walk to each individual barrel and loot them using the clunky UI, just for some scraps of poor loot. The game doesn't have any autosave or "reload from save", so upon death I was just booted back to the main menu. There are no options available to set for the game such as resolution, windowing mode, music volume, or animation speed. Animations are limited in visual flair but they take forever, so simple combats against rats feel like a chore. You know, I could look over all of this if there was some interesting and thoughtful combat on the other side of this mountain of questionable choices and poor UI...
- The opening encounters of the dungeon are super dull. You spend several fights against rats in the opening dungeon, and there just isn't anything interesting about them. It didn't excite me to see what new encounters I might fight, it was just a slog where I line up my fighting characters against the rats while plinking away with arrows and sometimes casting the only spell the wizard characters have to start. OF course, we might expect early combat to be simplistic, since surely later combats will become more interesting...
- The game's character creation was kind of boring, with no clear indication that there would ever be anything more exciting for most characters other than making their numbers go up and getting powerful loot. Wizard characters start with one spell in their chosen area, and that's it. Everyone else just distributed their meager pool of points into one or maybe two skills and hops right in. RPGs can be so much more, with fun and interesting mechanics, strategic choices, playstyles, but this game is old school in all the worst ways. Your fighters will swing their weapons, your archers will shoot their bows, and your wizard will cast their spell and be mostly useless for the rest of the combat, just like old school D&D.
I ended up dying to rats through a streak of bad luck. Once I got booted back to the main menu, realizing I didn't create a save file and with no option to have continued from the start of the encounter, I realized there was simply nothing drawing me back into the game. It's dull in almost every way it can be, with no real tricks up its sleeve. If it wanted to get a full playthrough from me, it needed to be more interesting and hook me quickly. Long slow burns can work great, but I need to have the allure of a nice story, or awesome strategy and combat encounters, or fun character development, or, well...anything else. The game is just too bare bones to recommend to anyone but the absolute diehard RPG players who devour everything they can get their hands on. Especially at $15 as of the time of this review, it is simply too expensive. I paid much less during a sale, but I got about 30 minutes of diversion out of it, not even worth it for whatever I paid ultimately.
