Guile & Glory: Firstborn

The world has a shortage of affordable grid based RPG games. It also has a shortage of games with the exact Rastan Saga aesthetic. It also has a shortage of games where environmental traps play a large role. It also has a shortage of RPGs where blocking is important and doing good means not getting hit. This project is abandoned with a few bugs remaining, such as glitches in the lore book, and a rogue's voice being too loud. The plot naturally plays into a second half which doesn't exist, at around 15 hours.

Pretty good hidden gem. As it says on the tin, it is a puzzle game wrapped in a well done "sword and sorcery" thematic, where you control heroes in a top-down perspective, each with their specific ability that affects the enemies and enviromental elements. Simple but engaging gameplay, interface and music. It draws inspiration from a lot of classic games for its presentation, it all works quite well togheter. I've been having a quite some fun learning new mechanics and interactions, and new interactions are being presented in a good pace. Better yet, some more advanced interactions between the character's abilities are left entirely for players to figure out so there's room for finesse as the maps become increasingly more difficult. I've been progressing through the fun campaing, but I can also see that there seems to be a ramdom roguelike side quest as well, so it apeases both the story element and the puzzle element after you solve the static main maps. All in all, I'm highly recommending this for fans of puzzle games or even tactics games. Just get it now. I only have a few minor nitpicks; the sound effects in general, but specially the voices of the heroes are of very low quality and amateurish (the whip guy is particularly bad, and you have to listen to this crappy "HUH?!?!" every time you select the mother-fricker, it sucks...), they were probably recorded with a mic from a headset LOL. And mostly lack of further options and quality of life stuff, simple things that would be nice to have: faster enemy movement on their turn, disable enemy voices (it gets annoying hearing them bark at the start of their turn over and over), more music variation in maps (the retro style music are well done, but few in number which leads to repetition saturation).

This is not a tactical rpg. Its a puzzle game. Its a pretty decent one, but its weird middle ground puzzle game nature made me not entirely sure what to expect. I wasn't really in the mood for a puzzle game, but if you are, its a pretty good one. As a puzzle game though, It suffers from three-star-itus, in that it gives you objectives (beat a level without losing hp, under a certain turn limit, etc), and it really feels like a waste of time to continue playing a level once you've lost a point of health, or have breached your time limit. This leads to a lot of restarting of the entire level (your only option), which was pretty ♥♥♥♥♥♥' annoying after a while. Considering the game is entirely deterministic, the devs could really just add an undo button that went back arbitrarily far and save us all some frustration.

An elegant and challenging strategy puzzle game, all wrapped up in a fantastical pixel-drawn nostalgic world.

Guile & Good

Nice little game. There's a story campaign that I finished over the course of several evenings, and there's also a roguelike mode that i didn't really want to explore afterwards. So I'd say that the replayability is not high, but overall the game is well-worth its modest price.

Nice tactical RPG/puzzle hybrid, leaning way more on the puzzle side than tactical RPG side. Story is ok, even if I'm not a fan of the direction it took on the last third. Had a lot of fun clearing out half a map in one turn by the late game. Bosses were a little less fun.