Frayed Knights: The Skull of S'makh-Daon

I bought the game from the dev's site when it first came out in 2011. I played through the entire game in one marathon session, which took me 20ish hours. If you like old school dungeon crawlers, you will love this game. You have a premade party, which seems like it was done to make the story work, but it's pretty open to how you develop each character's abilities. The game is very tongue-in-cheek, and the characters sometimes break the 4th wall. The dungeons are very well designed and many contain secrets, hidden areas, and puzzles(The Tower of Almost Certain Death is the best IMHO). The game is balanced around attrition, so if you never use consumbables or make poor decisions you will be going back to town to rest or reloading a lot. Most of the mainstream reviewers complained about this, but I didn't really have a problem with it. Judicious use of "liquid nap" potions and drama stars will keep you from going back to town constantly. It's obvious that the designer has a deep love and understanding about what makes old school RPGs work, which many devs who try to make new games with older styles don't understand. The only thing I have bad to say about it is that the UI isn't great. It's not horrible, I never had any problems figuring out how to do what I needed to do, but it could have definitely been more streamlined. Still, that is a minor quibble for what was overall a great experience. I'm looking forward to FK2. edit: spelling

I bought this game a little while back direct from the creator, I had a great time playing it. (and look forward to future sequels!) This is one of my favourite games, due to it's mix of old school RPG goodness with great party banter, genuinely funny. It has various innovative features that I liked, the Drama Stars feature giving various bonuses and encouraging you to live with mistakes over reloading being one of my faves. The characters are very customisable, you can specilise or diversify as you like, if you want your Fighter to be a Paladin go for it. So highly recommended, go for it! Watch out for the Rats of NOM!!!:D Daniel.

This is a game by Jay Barnson, aka The Rampant Coyote, who does a great blog on CRPG game development. Essentially what you're getting here is a fun, humorous CRPG. The combat system is fairly complex, so you'll find much to enjoy if you like stats. You won't mistake this for Skyrim, but the graphics are pleasant enough and evoke a Might and Magic 6 vibe for me (one of my favorite CRPGs). Movement is first-person and combat is turn-based. Considering that all of this is the work of Jay and a few friends, it's really amazing what he's accomplished. I posted a review of this game on my YouTube channel - just look for "Matt Chat 203: Frayed Knights."

If you can get past the UI and occasional lack of polish you'll find one of my favorite RPGs in a long time. While the storytelling is lighthearted and fun, the core game is deep and challenging. The combat is heavy into resource management and tactics often revolve around limiting the energy you spend while still overcoming the threats. The drama star system does a great job of helping you turn things around even when crap is hitting the fan and is far more satisfying than the average Save scum victories old-school RPGs are known for. If this isn't enough to satisfy you, there is quite a bit of customization that you can do to make the pre-made heroes your own. I love this game and highly recommend it to anyone who still enjoys old-school RPGs.

Genuinely funny dialogue and an interesting combat system let down by: - occasional (apparently) random encounters - Drama star system designed to prevent save scumming also misses the point of saving for reasons *other* than save scumming. In fixing one problem, they created another. - Seems to be deliberately designed to push you back to town on a regular basis - The town is... basically pretty boring. Takes too long to wander around it compared to the amount of stuff to do. - NPCs that are nowhere near as interesting as the protagonist PCs - The effects of many of the perks & upgrades are not well explained. - The graphics are about on par with Might & Magic 6-8, which is to say mediocre by late 90s standards. I don't actually mind this much, but if you want eye candy look elsewhere.

This game gives me the 3-D explore feeling of Bard's Tale, the repetitive combat of Final Fantasy, and the spells, traps, and combat engines of Elder Scroll games. Oh, and then it's got the character personality of Three's Company. Frayed Knights is clearly a labor of love done by gamer enthusiasts in their spare time. It's the genuine indie article, and the developers did a great job bringing it to life. This review is mostly about game play. You play this game for an RPG dungeon crawler. You don't play it for graphics and looks. The graphics do their job, but the beauty is in the mechanics, the characters, the humor, and the story. This is a dungeon exploring game, with heavy emphasis on combat encounters. You will fight, gain xp and loot, level up, customize your character abilities, solve some light puzzles, and fight some more. Along the way you will also fight things. After that, you'll wander through a few zones fulfilling quests while fighting things. It will be a rare 60 seconds of wandering that doesn't have an encounter... and by that I mean more fighting. You play a party of four adventurer-wanna-bes with a loser reputation. Each character is already pre-classed, and the balance is good: A fighter, a rogue, a sorcerer, and a priest. As you level up, you can customize them in any way possible, making the rogue a magic user, for instance, but the party you're given will save you some time and calculating. Many events in the game trigger entertaining dialog among the characters. It's the kind of tabletop style banter that is snarky, while still providing exposition, and makes you feel like you know the inside jokes they're tossing around. I never laughed out loud, but I smiled a lot and I liked the characters. I think the programmers had fun with this. There are about 4 or 5 major zones in the game, one of them being a town. Each zone has a couple of "dungeons". Some quick, many are optional, but there's a lot of variation. The dungeons usually aren't starkly linear either, which is refreshing. The town is really boring, though. It's Elder Scrolls Morrowind boring. I wish it had all the same characters and one-third the size, with no superfluous buildings. I'm sure it was built for immersion, but you don't run very fast in this game so it became tiresome. Combat fatigue is the main mechanic in the game. It controls everything. As you adventure about, you will experience random encounters, ambushes, and monsters walking about. Combat is turn-based, and each action your characters take uses up endurance. At any time you can rest to recover endurance, but you never fully rest up. The more that you cycle through your endurance meter, the more fatigued your character gets, until finally, the character cannot recover any more endurance by resting until he/she sleeps at an inn. The trick of the game is maximizing your character abilities and balancing combat choices to be endurance efficient so you can stay away from town longer. Rather than cast the giant overkill of a maximized sorcerer fireball, you can cast the efficient but slow-killing disease over time while your fighters whiddle down the baddies. The combat system throws you a few bones though. One of them is a novel game mechanic called drama stars. Your stars fill as you win battles and stuff, then you can redeem them any time for stat buffs, resurrections, healing, or my favorite, a full endurance meter top-off. These are a neat perk, keep you adventuring longer, and they're meant to be used as you get 'em. If you load a savegame, you lose the stars. If you continue a game after quit (not the same as loading), then your stars stay intact. It's an incentive to not reload save games every time something bad happens. An RPG first! Combat takes time and deliberate thoughtfulness. You will never get so strong that you have a one-shot "I-Win" button. Even very powerful AE spells never really take out a whole group. It's pretty much the essence of the game, and it's not meant to be a cakewalk. It can be hard. There are an ample amount of potions and consumables that you can loot and buy. USE THESE. Use them all day long and do not hoard them! They let you win more battles with minimal endurance spend. Your inventory is unlimited and this is handy. You just don't have to worry about returning to town to sell things or playing inventory tetris to make room for things. The merchants never refresh their sellables anyway, and most equipment upgrades will come from loot, treasure, and quests. Your money will be used for potions mostly. A lot of time and energy was spent building a trap and lock mini-game. Well, it's not really a minigame, but there are endless ways to disarm traps and unlock chests. Do you want to disarm the trigger? or neutralize the trap payload? or perhaps some mechanics in the middle? It's cool that so much thought went into such a small part of the game, and it is far better than some of the lockpicking dexterity checks I remember from Elder Scrolls games. The spell system is probably also overkill. I felt throughout the first 5 or 6 levels that I only had small percentage of useful spells. Then suddenly after a few more levels I had too many spells to choose from, and boosters for my oldest ones so they never became obsolete. There are just a lot of spells. I played the whole game and never cast all the spells that I had. I enjoyed the spell effects for what they were, and the witty descriptions, but it became tiresome to search through spell books all the time. A better spell interface may have helped here. There are spell casting hotkeys, but only for 3 spells. As the game needs a keyboard and mouse anyway, three hotkeys was too few. Ten would have been better. As you level up, the game opens up in terms of character class customization. Just as with the spells and disarm options, there are a LOT of feats, skills, and abilities. Maybe too many feats. It doesn't matter. Pick fun things to do with your characters and do those things. I spent a little time microgaming and trying to optimize it, then I just said screw it and picked stuff that looked fun. I'm glad I did. Maybe all the options add to replayability, or to the RPG factor, but there's just no way you'll even get most the skills and feats available on any one character. Definitely get the feat that allows you to detect random encounters. If combat gets too repetitive, that feat will possibly save your interest in the game. The graphic user interface itself is clunky and needs polish, but it is manageable. There are buttons in weird places, and it takes too many clicks to get to spells or inventory. It's also heavily dependent on keyboard/mouse. Luckily, the most common combat functions have keyboard hotkeys. A suggestion for next time would be tiny interface buttons for each character that you can drop in consumables or spells, a la Diablo. So try the game out. Get past the graphics and the UI, and enjoy the billions of combat options. A final note, there's humor in this game at every turn. It's subtle, it's smart, it's the kind of humor I would use with my own gamer friends. You're supposed to have a good time with this. Thanks for reading.

Frayed Knights is a dungeon crawler in the vein of certain old school games like Might and Magic. You control a group of 4 adventurers in search of fame and fortune. The combat is turn-based, allowing you to take your time with each move. Movement is accomplished through the keyboard, while you can also mouse-look and click on items to open or read descriptions. The majority of gameplay consists of combat and exploring dungeons, searching to solve puzzles and find loot. The graphics in this game are also as old school as the games it harkens back to. While it may work for those games, since they are a product of their times, certainly a newer game can update the graphics. There is no voice work, which might be a plus because by looking at the graphics I feel it may have been sub par. No voice work is better than terrible voice work all the time. The party banter may be a big selling point of the game, since it differentiates it from other games of the genre, but I found myself not particularly enjoying it. It just wasn't my type of humor. If it works for you, then this game will become infinitely more enjoyable for you. For me, I found the humor a little bland, and the gameplay a little tired. I would not recommend Frayed Knights. I feel there are better dungeon crawlers to play at this time. It just feels a little too old school, missing some things you'd like to see in more modern games. The humor fell flat for me, which is what is supposed to set this game apart in the genre. Grade: C-

[h1]“[i]Well, if there's one thing I've learned, it's this: never pay more than 20 dollars for a computer game.[/i]” ~Guybrush Threepwood[/h1] So, here's a question for you, guys. Did you like games like [b]Might & Magic VI[/b], [b]Wizardry 8[/b] and [b]Wizards & Warriors[/b]? Well, this game is nothing like those. Only it is. In a way. See, [b]Frayed Knights[/b] is a parody game. But it looks so old school that it's really hard not to love it. Well, at least for the old farts like yours truly. Because modern kids? They'll probably feel like the game is plain ugly. But for those who remember the games above? It'll be a nice little surprise. Don't expect any depth here, though. What we have here is a pretty small and limited experience that ends with a cliffhanger (it's really, [i]really[/i] sad that sequel never happened). We have four pre-made characters who'll often say cheesy jokes, we have dungeons to explore, chests to loot and bosses to kill. Also, a lot of traps to kill you. You know... all the fun and adventurous... stuff. After all, the good adventurer is a dea... wait, that's from my evil manifesto. Forget you've read that. Anyway, that's pretty much it. Like I've said, it's a parody game without any depth. No big world (we only have one village full of filthy peas... I mean, good and kind villagers), no advanced casting mechanics (“I wanna cast [i]Magic Missile![/i]”), no complicated dialogues (“Swords, not words!”), nothing like that. The lock picking is probably the most complicated thing here. So, if you're one of those sneaky little hobbitses, you'll be right at home here. There's still something fresh about this game, though. I'm talking about so-called drama points (Ah, [i]the drama![/i]), which will help you to survive now and then. Long story short, the game will reward your for your performance in battle and you'll be able to use the reward points for stuff like replenish your stamina points. Simple. Cute. Useful. The best thing about [b]Frayed Knights[/b], though, is just the fact that it feels good. Again, mostly for those who remember a certain time period, but still. The dungeons are fine, the battles are basic, but fun, puzzles are limited, but nice, etc. [b]Frayed Knights[/b] is like [b]Dink Smallwood[/b] for those who liked [b]Might & Magic[/b] and [b]Wizardry[/b]. It's one of those cute parody games done right. And even though I don't think I'll want to return to it any time soon, I totally enjoyed my stay here. The price is also pretty low. So... yeah. [i]Worth it![/i]

Let me start off by saying that this game isn't terrible. During dungeons, its graphics can pass for "dated," and it /does/ have many of the qualities that I've come to love about the CRPG genre. However, it has downsides. Granted some of these are personal dislikes and may not be the case for everyone. In fact, if you -disagree- with this review, that's cool. I think I'm going to go ahead and be the bad guy if that means pointing out the flaws in this game that so many people are intentionally blind to. If you want the cliffnotes version of this review: take the positive reviews of this game with a grain of salt, and maybe go play something else. So... first off, I felt I had a few miscommunications going into this game. The game claims character customization, and for some reason I was thinking that meant character creation. Not so: you play the game with the same party of four characters. To be fair, there's dialogue and banter and character development with these four characters, maybe even a bit with the npcs in the game. Even so, I consider this one one of the game's downsides. Why? Well, my all-time favorite games in the CRPG genre allow for actual character creation where you can pick race, class, and skillsets. To me, that makes each of the characters feel more relevant to -me-. I've seen games pull it off without char creation (Aarklash Legacy did that very well), but I really just kind of failed to care about the main characters in Frayed Knights. If you don't have that issue, good for you. The graphics were probably the real deal-breaker for me. I try to be open-minded with graphics, considering some of my favorite CRPGs have dated graphics. That being said, Frayed Knights was simply unplayable at times. The models, textures, and animations of monsters weren't great, with some standing out as being particularly yuck. My real sticking point here is the towns, though. You are free to walk around in towns the same as a dungeon, yet that makes my next point glaringly obvious for players who make it this far: there really was a bare minimum of effort put into the towns. The house layouts are uninspiring, sure. But the real problem is the character models. Out of the few that don't have really terrible anatomy, they probably aren't even animated. It's honestly an embarassment of a town. So, yes. There are a lot of things this game did. There might even be a few things this game did well. I -don't- think it poured life back into the CRPG genre, I -don't- think it's what CRPG fans have been waiting for, and I hate to say it but I don't think it's worth the ten dollars you could be spending on a better CRPG. Putting zany character sprites with goofy dialogue and fantasy names like "smakh daon" are really kind of misplaced effort--no matter how much you polish a clod, it's still a clod. In essence, this is an unfinished game that really can't stand up to the legacy of its genre. You could probably put the ten dollars needed for this game toward something good like Aarklash Legacy or Wizardry 8.

Overall a good tactical party-based RPG. Funny without being corny. It not only takes itself lightly, it mocks some of the common tropes of the genre. Graphics are mediocre, dialogue is hilarious and riveting, and quests are often surprising. Combat is not simply about killing the enemy, it is also about resource management. The more spells or attacks you use, the more tired your characters become. Characters start with defined roles (thief, fighter, priest, sorcerer), but with open customization you can make them whatever you want. If you want a good RPG but aren't afraid of a little sillyness, give Frayed Knights a shot.