The Age of Decadence

An unkown gem for everyone who enjoys hardcore CRPGs. The game has replayability, you can choose many backgrounds to start with and end up with a lot of different endings. The setting is very interesting and keeps you hooked. The combat system is engaging and fun but if you want you can decide to create a non-combatant character and completely ignored it.

Эталонный пример того, какой должна быть ролевая игра.

I Have Decided to Play every game I own in Alphabetical order and Review them all (about 700 games).. will I give up? Probably - but lets See how Far I get GameNo:4 of (716) Game: The Age of Decadence Time Played: 15 Status: Finished First Impressions I Have played and Finished this game back in feb 2025, I don't remember a huge amount about the story but I do remember I thought the end was kinda out of nowhere. I played a Merc last time and fought my way through the game, I remember the main gameplay was great, I loved the combat. I'm going to play again and leave my thoughts from the start. First off going through the menus, the settings clicking and sound is good, but the borderless and even windows mode keeps the mouse locked inside, refresh rate is capped at 60/75. If I want to click on my second monitor I was having to minimise or alt tab every time. In the end, I had to change the setting in My documents my games Age of decadence - Prefs.cs :Input::ForcedMouseLock = -1; This fixed the mouse so it can go out the screen, but when I clicked on the second monitor the game would minimise so I needed to make it always on top. I put the app in borderless on a smaller res (because I want the UI bigger) and then full screened it using lossless scaling making sure Clip cursor is off in Lossless so I can still move the mouse around. It's now staying on top and working how I want it to, I'm now ready to try the game again. The warning at the start is great explaining the world is brutal, the fights are hard, and everyone will betray, lie, steal, be careful. Reading through and picking my char I found the background text description too small so had to back out, go back to the settings, and scale the UI text bigger. I turned the UI to the smallest it could be also that helped a lot, but the faction rep numbers didn't fit in the box now due to the scaling so had to go back and tweak the info again. Every time you change a UI/res setting you need to unscale in Lossless, so after much tweaking the only text scaling that didn't cut things off was the middle or lower. 7 background classes so far: Assassin, Grifter, Thief, Drifter, Praetor, Mercenary, Loremaster, Merchant. I normally play melee fighting classes, so this time I'm going to go for Merchant, and see if I can trade my way through the game. Your character comes in with preset stats to guide you, but you can change them as you see fit. I like this as it gives me an idea of the playstyle and I can tweak it to fit how I'll likely play. I've taken all persuasion and trading skills, this may be a bad idea, but we will see. We load in to a story with beautiful music feeling exotic and ancient. The story: an empire that lies in ruins, the knowledge of old forgotten, a time of change and discovery. My story is different because I picked Merchant. It tells me how Commercium guild has shaped my life. The writing is good so far, and I'm enjoying it, but needed to turn the music down because it was starting to blast my ears, it was automatically at max volume, now its not. Playing through with no combat abilities is hard but it's making me read and think and play differently. It's a nice way to play this game and it's full of ways to solve problems. The traits and ranks you gain that show off how you have changed/effected the world is really nice showing how your story is evolving. Forging documents, betraying the other clans, and persuading my way in as I trick them all I feel like Littlefinger from Game of Thrones, feel so evil and I've not killed a single NPC myself.. I caused a guard uprising by assassinating the guard leader, forging some documents so the guild master would ok killing his own people. The assassination caused the guards and assassins guild to all kill each other, then I convinced the remaining guards to join the guild I was backing, consolidating power. A very cool way to play finishing the first town's story and involved no fighting myself. Gameplay & Mechanics The core loop for the merchant is heavily driven by skill checks, dialogue choices, and text branches that genuinely shift the story and world. The difficulty is brutal if you spread your stat points too thin, but focusing purely on social skills like Persuasion, Streetwise, and Trading lets you handle situations in ways most RPGs would force a fight for. Build variety is brilliant because non-combat stats aren't just extra fluff—they completely change how you play and let you replace combat entirely. The best part is the problem solving, like watching an entire guard uprising and faction takeover happen purely because you forged a document and talked to the right people. The only frustrating part is fighting with the engine and UI scaling on modern monitors to read text comfortably without cutting off faction numbers. Standout Feature The game feels great in combat and also in pure non-combat faction manipulation. Being able to collapse factions, set up assassinations, and shift the balance of power across whole towns only using manipulation is a really interesting way to play. The dynamic traits and reputation system tracking your impact and giving you passives based on how you are playing makes your scheming feel like it actually changes the game's story and your character. Verdict This low-fantasy RPG with writing that actually respects the player's choices and player freedom. Even with the initial pain of tweaking settings and third-party tools to get it running nicely on modern screens, playing a Littlefinger style build this time makes it well worth the time and definitely a game worth replaying to see other backgrounds. I finished it once before in mercenary (and I think this could have had loads of different endings). I'm going to try finish it using Merchant. I'm sat wondering as I play what will assassination be like? I wonder what all the other backgrounds do. A £11.99 (currently) game with an insane amount of replay value.

Best CRPG since Fallout 2, Arcanum and Planescape.

I respect Iron Tower sticking to their ideas, I almost still recommend it but that would be weird considering the negative tone of my review. If I played this about 10 years ago when it released, my opinion might be different but right now, especially after playing their latest game, Colony Ship, it make this game's flaws more obvious. First of all, the engine is dated, (re)loading is slow even on a SSD and I doubt it's hardware related. It's a problem when in the 3 hours I played I probably reloaded at least 30 times if not more. There is a weird lighting glitch that turn the screen into a rave if you put it above low, constantly flashing quickly forever. Other settings are fine on high. Also as far as I could tell, saw no option for this, you always need to double click to run, one click mean walking slower. The game is hard, it's meant to be. The problem, something they fixed in Colony Ship, is that you can easily soft lock yourself into a situation you can't win. It's what happened on my first game, I went with a speech character but I somehow picked an option in the main quest that force you into combat later. I expected this option to end the quest safely but no, it was to make combat easier, still impossible on a character not build for combat, you still die in one turn or two. I did other quests before continuing this one so going back before that choice pretty much meant starting a new game. The main stats are also important and you can't upgrade them, at least using experience, maybe there are special methods later in the game. So even if you invest in, let's say the sword skills, your low strength and dexterity mean you'll always have a low ap and low damage. The game is balanced extremely hard. I tried putting some spare points in sword and dodge but it changed nothing at all, at best I could beat one enemy before dying. I spent a good 1 hour trying the different combat encounter to see if one could be possible and no, they don't go easy on you in the beginning. Maybe I'll start again with a combat character to see if the combat way can be fun and not infuriating hard. I was spoiled by Colony Ship, I was able to play that game completely with speech and some stealth, no combat at all in the main quest, very few optional combat encounters with no other solutions and I think I had 4 sidequests I skipped that would force combat.

Even after having played this years ago now I still think about this game on occasion its just that good.

This is one of my favorite traditional old school style TRPG.

For a game that tells you several times for combat being brutal and that there's almost always another way to avoid it, it's pretty frustrating to be forced into a combat you cannot possibly win through someone impersonating a merchant just because you failed a dexterity skill check. If the game got a remake or otherwise a change to where losing in a forced combat had some progression tied to it (e.g. Outward or Shadow of Mordor), especially combats you don't have a good hope of winning, this could be a pretty neat time, but I have long since lost patience for games that require a bunch of save scumming to succeed. 0/1, hard to recommend.