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This game has me right on the edge of recommendation. It's a solid exploration-focused RPG with good dungeon crawling, but there's one aspect that makes me almost want to not recommend it. Ultimately I still decided on a positive review because it's a solid game overall and free to boot.
As an RPG, it's pretty simple, although there's a lot of skills to pick from at character creation. You can only create a male character (a female option was added in the sequels), but get a lot of freedom in customizing his abilities. Apart from the classic attributes of strength, dexterity, intelligence etc you can pick his origin and axiom (you could be religious, which makes blessings more effective but also makes you more easily affected by curses, or atheist which gives you a lot of magic resistance but also makes blessings useless) and choose from a large list of different skills. The first level of every skill costs 3 points to buy, after which raising a skill costs 1 point per point invested.
Apart from the different weapon and armor skills, there are two magic and several utility skills. The most interesting of these is cartography, which determines how detailed the minimap at the top right of the screen is. If you have no cartography skill, the map remains blank. At the first level of cartography, you only draw the outlines of walls and treelines. The more points you invest, the more detailed the map becomes. It's an interesting feature but in practice you want to raise it high enough to at least properly display different ground types, as at low levels, everything including water is colored the same grass-green, which is even less useful than having no map at all.
Among other skills, you want at least one weapon skill, a defensive skill, and one magic skill. I focused on building a melee fighter with some buffing spells, choosing swords as my weapon skill and Divination as my magic skill. It was a decent enough build, and the magic became very useful in the later stages of the game when you face large groups of powerful enemies.
The game's focus is clearly on exploration and dungeon crawling. Quests are simple and straightforward: fetch, kill, deliver. The story has you waking up without memory. A mysterious person left you a bunch of letters instructing you on what to do, and you have to follow the breadcrumbs until you figure out what's going on. There's just one or two quests that have any degree of choice, but the writing itself is very competent and it's refreshing to read dialogues that are completely sincere without any "millennial" irony. It's simply a classic fantasy story that instills a sense of adventure and establishes a couple of mysteries for you to unravel.
Combat is a simple affair and works very similar to traditional roguelikes. The world stands still until you move. When you move, everything else moves too. If you've ever played a classic roguelike you know how it goes, except here all the content is hand-made (which I vastly prefer over proc gen). There isn't much in the way of tactics beyond which spells or potions to use, most of the time you'll just exchange blows in melee until the enemy drops dead. Simple, but gets the job done.
The world has a decent size, with several wilderness screens, a handful of towns where you can trade and accept quests, and a bunch of dungeons to delve into. The dungeons in particular are a highlight here, as they're filled with traps and force you to use a torch or a light spell as you can barely see anything in the darkness. Torches on the wall can be picked up and added to your inventory, which is a nice touch. Pretty much every dungeon has a puzzle or two, usually involving switches, and some even have little secrets to find. It's an open world game so you can attempt its locations in any order, but of course you're going to get slaughtered if you enter high level areas at a low level. So you have to explore, test the waters, and go elsewhere when you find yourself in over your head.
So far I've only talked about the positive things. So what's negative? My first complaint is just a nitpick, not a big deal: weapons are way too mundane and most chests contain random loot, so looting isn't particularly exciting. While there's enchanted armor that increases your stats and skills, the only enchantments I've found on weapons is +1 or +2 to damage. No fire damage, no hit bonus... just a bonus to damage. That makes gear progression a little unexciting. The game could have done a lot more with its weapons.
My second complaint is the big one: walking speed. You'll do a lot of walking in this game: exploring, backtracking, fetch questing. I don't mind that, all of my favorite RPGs have you travel back and forth a lot. But here it becomes a chore due to how slowly your character walks. And the biggest problem: you can't do anything about it. I tried changing the refresh rate in the ini file. Nothing. I tried using CheatEngine's speedhack. It doesn't work. It works for most games, but there are a few where it doesn't. This is among them. So, whatever you try, you're stuck with a walking speed that's fast enough for towns and dungeons, but becomes a real downer whenever you have to travel a longer distance. Wanna go back to the forest to hand in a quest there? 5 minute walk at the least. This really drags the game down, and a walking speed slider would improve it tenfold. Or just reprogramming it to be compatible with CheatEngine's speedhack! I have no idea how this was coded to be entirely unaffected by that. The speedhack seems to attach to the process properly, but it doesn't do anything to how quickly animations are rendered.
At least the game has a handful of fast travel points you can move between with one click. When you discover a town with a fast travel point and click on the town's sign, it will be added to your fast travel menu. Whenever you are in an outdoor location and not in combat, you can instantly travel between these points with one click. However, there are a few locations you'll return to frequently that are a good distance away from any fast travel points, so you'll still spend a lot of time slowly walking through the wilderness. There is one spell in the game that should fix this, but...
The portal spell is a high level spell of the Elemental school. You need to have at least 11 points in elemental magic to learn that spell. I had no points in that school at all, so when I found the spell and couldn't use it, I was quite frustrated, so I used CheatEngine to give myself the necessary skill points. Now, every spell in this game can be cast at different tiers, each tier increasing its effect. There are six tiers in total, and casting higher tiers requires a higher magic skill (I think you can see where this is going). Once I had cheated myself a high enough skill to use this spell, I placed one portal and kept exploring. Then, I wanted to cast another portal elsewhere - as each tier of the spell gives you another portal. Only to find out that I need an elemental magic skill of 14 to cast a second portal!
Making this spell one of the highest level spells in the game completely defeats its purpose. It would be most useful in the mid-game, when you explore the wilderness and go back and forth on fetch quests. Requiring 11 points in elemental magic means only high level mages can learn it at all. By the time you can cast two or three portals, you're almost finished with the game and there's no more need for teleporting around. Had this been a low or mid level spell, it would fix the walking speed problem. Alas, it comes in way too late to be useful, so you just have to bear with long minutes of travel time.
Overall I can still recommend this, but the walking speed is such a big issue it almost ruined the game for me. Almost.
