[url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/31028489-Maddmike/]Maddmike Steam Curator[/url]
Look, I’m not here to tell you that Elaria: The Corrupted Throne is secretly excellent. This old school RPG has got problems, half of them you’ve probably spotted in the few seconds of clips you’ve seen. It uses hodge-podged together store-bought assets and ugly fonts. The minimap is just an overhead camera in a box so it gets obstructed by weather effects and clouds. It’s click to move pathfinding can be really awkward sometimes: just clicking on a chest or interactive object won’t walk you over to it, you need to click right next to it first THEN click the object itself.
You get the idea: I’ll save myself the trouble of making a list and caution that anyone looking to jump in themselves is best served by filtering the Steam reviews by negative and just looking at whatever is on top: I guarantee you whatever you’ll find there is correct.
Yet none of Elaria’s jankiness prevented me from spending a very enjoyable 15 hours with its preview build over the past week. Sure, it’s a playable warning of why individual developers shouldn’t make expansive open world roleplaying games—yet its also a title uncompromised in its vision, and I’m willing to forgive a lot of ancillary stuff if the game ‘does the thing’ well. In Elaria’s case, that ‘thing’ is being a single player version of a pre-World of Warcraft MMO. It’s click heavy and auto attack focused: with your four action bar slots giving you access to some long-cooldown and deliberately cast spells.
https://youtu.be/vFCXJhK17CU
I think part of the secret-genius in why it works as well as it does; is because that vision itself is inherently janky. Every time I fumbled through my inventory mid combat to click on my health potions I was reminded of all those clunky free-to-play MMOs I played back in 2004 before I got my parents to agree to a WoW sub. All of the weird little idiosyncrasies inherent to a solo dev whose reach exceeds their grasp, ends up just reinforcing the same themes as the ambitious MMO’s of around the turn of the millenium that were learning and discovering their own genre in real time.
One of the clearest signals Elaria sends you about the way it wants you to play comes from one of the first quests you’ll stumble across. After waking up as an amnesiac skeleton in a cave, a friendly spirit tells you to visit the nearby town to see if anyone can help you figure out your origins. Naturally, the guard at the gate has a quest for you to complete before he’ll let you in. Killing ten of the Sand Snakes on the nearby beach in itself wouldn’t be all that interesting of a task, but he specifically wants you to kill them on top of this sacrificial circle.
Much like every other enemy in the game, the snakes congregate in packs way too large to fight directly. The lesson you’ll need to learn is one that MMO players are all too familiar with: figure out the Aggro range of the mobs so you can isolate one and kite him back to where you need. It is a tactic you will use constantly: despite no other quest in the game demanding this location-specific death, the kiting strategies are essential for most encounters.
Once you get your attackspeed high enough, you can even weave some movements in between your auto attacks. Get a quick hit in then click away before your enemy can retaliate: it looks kind of ridiculous when you’re doing it but there’s a hypnotic rhythm to the whole thing, and it’s emblematic of how you ‘get good’ at Elaria.
With combat and systems so simple, conquering this game gets a little abstract and more than a little ‘gamey’, and that’s what I love about it. My most memorable moments were taking on bosses whose numbers were higher than mine, and beating them by completely abusing their limitations. Movespeed is pretty easy to come by thanks to the fact that it’s tied to your basic agility stat, so once it's high enough you can outrun the bosses. One of them I beat by just circling the room and only moving in for strikes when all of my cooldowns were available. And for another boss I had a companion helping me out, so I baited the boss back and forth through the dungeon while my partner slowly chipped away at him.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3051934401
It won’t be for everyone and that is the ironic beauty of it: its combat is so simple that it demands you get weirdly technical to master it, and in doing so it creates a system that revels in its nostalgic plainness.
Outside of the combat, Elaria relies on clear, repetitive tasks. You can screw off and ignore the main story if you want, but a loose following of the critical path will involve going to a town, grabbing a whole bunch of quests, then completing those quests out in the overworld or within one of the game's many dungeons; and of course that means mobs, loot, and all the experience points you’d expect.
Abilities are tied to the weapon your using and can be switched liberally. You’ve got two weapon loadouts you can swap between mid combat: I comfortably fell into a pattern of using one loadout for passive buffs like strength and movespeed boosts, and the other for actual damage and combat utility. Elaria uses a classless system primarily driven by your base stats, you get points to spend every level up but importantly, you also get permanent stat increase from killing dungeon bosses.
Each of these instances is home to mobs and dungeon-specific puzzles: they’re never all that deep but they’re also never reused, giving each of these lairs their own gameplay texture. Sometimes you’ll be flipping switches to open gates, and other times you’ll change the water level to create movable paths.
The dungeons are repeatable thanks to interactive torches outside of their entrance: pay a fee to respawn everything so you can go increase your numbers some more, that is half the point of the game after all.
And it wouldn’t be an old school RPG without a weirdly ubiquitous in universe card game that all the peasants want to play with you , so if you want to ignore the prophesied great conflict between worlds then… you can go play some “Adoh” if you want.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3051934504
But for me, I found contentment in the simple repetitiveness in its quests and dungeon delving.
In many ways, Elaria’s skeleton protagonist is an apt metaphor for the kind of experience it delivers: not necessarily ‘thin’, but devoid of a layer or two you’d expect to be there. But that skeleton is healthy and purposeful. The bones of this adventure are here: complete with simple progression loops, varied dungeons to explore, and throwback MMO combat. In many ways one of its advantages is that it’s self selecting. If your first impression is to wince when you look at it then Elaria probably isn’t for you, but underneath a presentation that can be generously defined as ‘practical’, there is a game with clarity in its purpose and efficiency in its design.
Its muse isn’t one particular title, but the aggregate feeling that a particular era of games can evoke.
As completely ridiculous as it sounds: when I stepped off the boat to a new continent, with the wind howling in my ears and my eyes feasting on an ugly horizon with crappy view distance and mobs copy pasted unceremoniously as far as the eye can see: I felt this weird nostalgic pang. There’s an intangible, wistful beauty here if you’re willing to squint for it. And though I’d never accuse Elaria of being a well produced game, I do think it’s a good one.
