Rift Wizard

I really wanted to recommend this game. It is very tight and well crafted. And I know this is probably spiteful, but after 100 hours in the game, I still haven't cleared it and it is extremely frustrating. I couldn't recommend this to my friends because it's just too inacessible. I'd actually like to try Rift Wizard 2 and 3, but I won't until I complete a run on this one. It's simply too difficult to feel like you are learning and growing.

Idea-wise and gameplay-wise this is a good game, make no mistake. If you got hyped up reading the premice and enjoy endless overthinking (I for sure do), this is almost what you are looking for. This is a "not reccomended" as in "not reccomended compared to RW3 for being a lot, A LOT more flawed QOL-wise". Since other options exist and RW1 holds no monopoly on it's style of gameplay there is no need to compromise with it's flaws. You come into RW1 game expecting to overthink ~150 spells it offers and plan your build options in advance, evaluating different spells against each other using the information provided to you, expecting being rewarded for foresight. And then the game just. Not gives you a satisfying amount of information about how spells work. Not allowing you properly strategize in the game about strategizing. Conjurgation spells, a good third of the library, do not show you the sheet of the creature they summon. They usually explain like a half of their stats through spell description, and sometimes it's enough, but sometimes descriptions just says some junk like "this upgrade allows you to summon a reaper". Litteraly who? Am I supposed to know him? Or "this creature has a breath attack" what attack? How does it looks like? Or sometimes spells don't show you how long their effect lasts. "Enemies in the area will be frozen". Okay, thanks. For a turn, since there is no duration number? Apprently for three, actually. Gamble your current prefectly fine run and build to learn the exact number for the subsequent run. Two or three times I recall seeing straight up incorrent numbers, thankfully not on creature sheets. What is a "group of creatures"? What is an "arch"? There are a lot of questions and the only answer is to gamble and see in practice, and it's never satisfying to do that. This stuff is extremely bad for games which advertize themselfes as strategic and build-makey. This series is practically one of a kind, but so much joy and magic dissapears when you need to waste runs to learn things that could've been just written in the description of the spell, and when you cannot make informed descisions without a wiki. Oh, also community wiki is not finished as far as I looked it up. Maybe you can nag people on discord about some of this stuff if you really want to. Do you? Even the dev themself say in one of their responses to steam reviews that "our goal is not to obfuscate", so this is not a part of the design philosophy or anything, this is a legitemate confirmed faliure of the compendium, and thankfully some of those problems are adressed in later installments. Judging by the demo it's a LOT less egregious in RW3, there is a way to see the creatures you will summon and spell's key attributes, but even in the last installment you still can find minor stuff like "this creature attacks in the shape of a smile" with zero insight about the form of the said smile. RW3 also appears a lot more polished, clean and balanced overall. if the idea behind RW looks good to you, wait until RW3 is out from early access, start there, and then maybe, a lot later, buy RW1 as a gameplay modifier to spice things up.