The Black Grimoire: Cursebreaker

I really wanted to like this game, and I did for roughly 10 hours. I felt the game was just right for me. The progression was nice and steady. I listened to OSRS music, mined some copper, crafted some copper armor, slayed some creatures. Good stuff. But then the bad started setting in for me. Progression of the game became very slow and I even went so far as to mod the game myself to reduce the tedium of simply just getting mining and smithing to level 25/100 to craft some slightly better armor, but even the drop rates of crafting necessarily items were so low that I just simply gave up on the game. Now don't get me wrong. I played Runescape back in the day (2005-2007 or so), so I expected some grinding, but I did not expect that this game, which is not being monetized by a subscription model, or has any other monetary incentives to keep you playing after purchasing the game, to be *this* grindy. I already paid for the game, so why pad out the game this much? For the first 10 hours I did enjoy the game, and I don't regret supporting a small developer, but I wished it continued to respect my time so that I could actually recommend it.

*160hours now and 222/262 achievements. Only continuing because I want to 100% the game, but I'll add a few details + clean up some of the review* I bought this game to grind and 45 hours in the experience feels pretty empty. This is due to new breakpoints in Skills, where you unlock a new craft or equipment, has very small benefits compared to what you were already using. The game is very heavily inspired by Old School Runescape. The tedium of grinding however cannot be lessened with trading for resources like many Skiller accounts do, so it's more like playing an Iron Man account. HOWEVER, if you are someone who feels that mods are integral to modern PC gaming, you can very easily edit any numbers in this game with Notepad. I'm judging the game as a base experience, not one where I fine tune the whole game exactly to my liking. So what about having the game on in the background as you grind these long tasks? The game suffers from memory leaks, so you can't keep it open for too long, especially if you want another game open alongside it. Because of how much clicking you must do to restart mining, fishing, fighting when combat breaks and you suddenly stop attacking, or just picking up the drops you have to farm to level crafting skills, it's hard to have in the background. Not to mention the game has an anti-afk mechanic built in where your screen will just go black and stop whatever you were doing. Imagine my surprise when I started attacking a training dummy, left to make lunch, and came back to my monitor being a black screen. I had this happen while waiting for 5 minute respawns before, but sometimes it just spams me with a red warning message in the chat log about how the game isn't auto saving anymore because I'm standing around too much. The worse part of the grinding leads to why I'm left feeling empty. Many skills, especially combat related ones, give me a sense that my hours of grinding do not equal to an appropriate level of gain. Spending 2 hours smacking bandits to gain +1 attack on your new sword doesn't feel great. Or even worse, tanking 15 bandits for 4 hours to get new armor with vague "Protection" stats. Armor and Shields mainly give Health and Protection. Mana and Mana Regen too for robes. This "Protection" stat doesn't seem to be the same as Defense in other games. Instead of reducing the damage numbers you see, you instead increase your chance at the enemy missing. Because you are increasing an Evasion stat instead of reducing damage, your new gear don't always give a proper sense of an upgrade. The huge damage ranges enemies can have, sometimes as big as 1-50, and then adding the fact some of them can crit or do True Damage, can lead to very spiky combat. I rarely feel safe if there's more than one enemy, unless I know I'm overgeared enough to barely get hit. I know I'm technically stronger because my stats are higher, but it doesn't always feel like you actually got much stronger. Btw, Wands don't have any Spell Damage, no matter what tier they are other than a single wand at lvl53. You're just gaining Accuracy. This minor increase in benefits extends to other skills too since you are mainly crafting those minor upgrades yourself. Cooking ended up with item bloat due to food having minor differences like, "lvl45 food: 70HP over 20s VS lvl60 food: 80HP over 20s" as another example. I also have no idea what the difference is between each tier of Pickaxe, Fishing Rod, or Axe too since they have no gathering stats on them despite Woodcutting Speed being a stat in the game. Oh, Mining and Fishing Speed doesn't exist at all though... Before I get to some annoyances, I will say that there is a "Respawn Enemy" button, which does help slightly when trying to farm resources to craft with. You'll still have to farm for multiple 10-30% drop rate items just to craft a single item, but at least you aren't standing around as much. Some other annoyances: A major bug I found, the support campanion you get for end-game, Loras the Nimble, heals certain enemies instead of you during battles. Despite the graphics, the game stutters constantly, probably due to it saving literally every 5 seconds. It even tells you how many seconds have past since your last save when you go close the game, and it always shows between 1-3 seconds. The pathfinding for your character is garbage, so clicking on your map and trying to auto walk a far distance will run you into the nearest wall instead, or sometimes the complete opposite cardinal direction. There is a Bestiary to show item drops from monsters, but it doesn't tell you where the monsters are located. There are Quests and Tasks. Quests appear in your Quest Log, Tasks do not. So if you find a task, you better memorize what items you were asked to collect. As I mentioned, the stat screen doesn't actually explain what the stats do, which is why so many people are confused to what Melee/Range/Magic Protection actually does, since the damage you take doesn't really change. The stat screen shows Woodcutting Speed, but there no Mining or Fishing speed to help those skills out. This is VERY noticeable for mining, which is a massive chore to grind due to Mini-game, no exp boosting gear, and huge gaps in between each new ore unlock. Accuracy and damage ranges are horrendous. I've had enemies hit for anywhere between 1-50, not counting if they crit for double damage, and the low accuracy on all attacks makes casting the bigger spells feel pointless unless I'm already overgeared for the content. Side note, you are expected to level all three combat types, Melee Range and Magic, as enemy resists will often have 2 high and 1 low, which means a lot of semi-AFKing at the training dummy, or in a group of 10 enemies all hitting you while you eat soup every 8 minutes to avoid dying to level Defense. Finally I'll add that the active 'community' for the game is incredibly small. No one wants to make a wiki, there are barely any videos or guides on the game, and reddit posts will often have no one commenting on them. Not to blame the game or developer for this, but it should be mentioned to let you know that outside help if you do get the game will be limited.

Here's a list of my grievances with this game (kept brief due to character limits in reviews) -Low drop rates in single-player RPG. Prepare to kill an enemy or boss 100 times for an item, 500 times. -Low Exceptional craft rate at 7% max. Imagine spending hours farming materials to fail the craft 49 times in a row, 500 times. -Leveling skill is very slow and grindy, you will mine the same ore and cut the same tree thousands of times. -Combat is boring and tedious. Most players AFK grind it overnight, hence why so many play hours. -Killed a boss? Prepare to kill him 50 more times for his 2% drop rate spellbook. -Vapid story, no substance. Dialogue is very uninspired and modern, many references to things like Skyrim, Pirates of the Caribbean, etc. One NPC used the infamous "I meaaan..." sentence opener. All cutscenes are unskippable. -Character creation lets you pick special traits that may unlock useless dialogue options. You can pick a trait for Archery where you won a tournament, and when you bring it up to the Thornhill Archery instructor, he laughs and calls you a liar. Nothing else comes of it. -Exhausting inventory management. Constantly looting items from enemies, moving them between bags and storage with clumsy UI. -"Respawn" button mitigates grinds by making enemies respawn instantly, but I did not find this feature until many hours of play. Feels like a debug feature the dev gave players to mitigate the grind. -Late game crafts require thousands of drops from enemies. Going from 60-80 for example will require thousands of Simple Tribal Fittings (which drop maybe from maybe 1/5 enemies if that) and you don't unlock any new recipes really between 60-80. Those levels are a desert just there to pad the grind. 80+ gets even worse. -UI is awful. Sometimes equip an item with left-click, sometimes move it into or out of container by left-click, contextual and confusing. Item dragging sometimes won't put the item where you drag it. Items forcibly stack. Can't have Inventory and worn equipment window open simultaneously. Many other problems. -Can only sell up to 20 items at once, in a game where you will definitely be selling thousands and thousands of items. -Grinding requires crafting thousands of items, you will want to salvage them for scraps. Inventory is very limited so you will be making hundreds of trips from the bank to the salvage workbench and back. Salvage workbench is also buggy for me, requires me to spam click but causes FPS hitches and clickthroughs, game is click-to-move so my character runs from the workbench, closing it. -Portable salvage kit is awkward to use. Click it, then click the item to salvage. Problem is you also click items to wear them, so once I accidentally equipped the item I was salvaging then salvaged the item I was previously wearing. Took hours to grind a replacement to the item as there's no refund/buyback for salvaging. -Achievements are a central feature but many of them are "kill 170 squirrels." -Barbarian ambush minigame is hard to complete not because it's challenging but because it glitches out so often. -Recently-added dragon slayer quest was terrible. Involved tedious fetch quests and frustrating puzzles. The dragon boss fight is possibly the worst boss fight I've ever suffered through in a video game. It's gimmicky, it ignores all of your progression (which you've grinded hours and hours to attain) and it utilizes unintuitive mechanics that contradict how the game previously worked. -Fast travel is needlessly convoluted. There's stablehands and guides to take you to specific places, unlockable wagons, you can fast travel to houses or teleport to houses which are different menus with the same button icon but one requires scrolls, there's teleport spells you can learn and specific travel points you can use, beacons that only work within certain distance, portal network and you can put portals in your house but they don't use the same network and there's two different ones and the buttons are ordered differently and teleports don't work in certain areas but fast travel does and you can make canoes but you need wood and tools and distance varies by wood quality and location and what traits you have blah blah blah, it's so needlessly complicated. -Weird bugs, glitches, and UI quirks. Some enemies in the swamp unattackable, sometimes enemies double-spawn, sometimes I get FPS stutter when enemies die, Horsy's return timer bugs out, can't stop my character from casting spells even when I tell him to, etc. Restarting the game fixes about half of these temporarily. -The game feels like you're meant to look things up or know where things are BEFORE you play, rather than finding things out through organic discovery and exploration. Only one wiki for the game and it's slow and not comprehensive. Most guides and people in the Discord are early game since nobody has the patience to get to later parts of the game. -Game is made for click-to-move, WASD support has been added recently but has some problems. Click-to-move annoys me, sometimes I click through an enemy I am trying to shoot with my bow, running up to them and aggroing all their friends. Sometimes I click my house's door and the game thinks I clicked the doorframe above it and makes me run behind the house. -World is designed in such a way that some areas look like you can move through them but you can't, such as hills in Sliderstone or brush in Silvermirror Fen. -Housing mainly exists for fast travel. Furnishing system is an afterthought. Items don't align properly with the house's grid. Can't put headboard of bed against wall, paintings levitate away from walls they're mounted on, rugs clip through the bricks on the floor, etc. -Long tutorial with side quests but skill ranks capped at 6, so lots of wasted XP. Don't use the XP books you find in the tutorial. -The game is weirdly loud. I have all audio sliders at 1% and it set to 35% in my Windows volume mixer. There's no "master volume" slider. -Game might improve since the dev sent out a survey asking players for their thoughts on how grindy it is, but don't get your hopes up--the Discord community has a strong "yes-men" vibe. -Enemies have some dumb and annoying mechanics. Long stuns leaving you twiddling your thumbs, barbarians who drink potions faster than you attack and heal through your damage, loggers/poachers who run from you but also for some reason their level increases each time you kill them (but not their stats.) -Who is the strongest entity in The Black Grimoire: Cursebreaker? Not Blackshield, not the mad wizard, not Gabrius, not the dragon... nope, it's Thornhill Elite Guard. NPC that runs out and kills you in a side quest as a joke, is much, much stronger than any enemy in the game, undermining the worldbuilding. -"Disengage" skill is so clumsy to use and useless that I don't even put it on my bar. -Many, many skills and spells to find in this game and almost none of them are useful. -Enemies love to spawn on top of me in Amarien Foothills, specifically the skirmishers accompanying the loggers/poachers/etc. They don't seem to be on a normal spawn timer but rather on an unconventional rotational spawn, so it's annoying when they spawn on me midfight, feels unfair at times. -In Amarien foothills I've had enemies basically spawn on top of me mid-combat causing me to get outnumbered. Some of these enemies aren't even on a normal spawn timer but seem to be on some strange rotational spawn related to the bandit loggers/poachers/miners. It's pretty annoying, feels unfair at times. -Takes too long to get out of combat after killing an enemy, annoying since you can't fast travel or respawn enemies in combat. Their loot often takes time to render and become highlightable as well, causing me to miss items or have to wait to get to pick them up. I have many, many more grievances with this game but I'm actually at the character limit for this review.

Amazing grindy game that scratches the MMO itch without membership fees, FOMO, or other predatory "features". Hoping for additional content down the line, as there is a really good foundation here. However, with all this game has to offer in its current state, it will be a couple hundred hours before the fun starts to wain.

Most people seem to compare this to Runescape. I personally never got into playing Runescape, so I cannot comment on whether that is accurate. But I can tell you that the game definitely has an old-school feel to the game. Similar to spending hours grinding up skills and doing quests in classic mmorpg's. There were times when playing this game where you would be like ok I am going to stop playing for now after I do this last thing, then 3 hours later, you finally stop after doing 30 things. This game keeps you engaged for quite a while, even at its full price its well worth it, and when it's on sale, it is a steal. I have spent more money doing things that gave me only a few hours of enjoyment. Now the grind is real, but some mods help increase the XP modifiers to make it less grindy. I personally did not notice the grind till about 30 hours in, when it started to affect me. So even if you do not want to change the XP rate, you are still looking at quite a bit of content for the price. As of writing this review, the dev has mentioned a free DLC is getting close, so despite some reviews saying the game is abandoned are just lies. At least do yourself a favour and give the demo a shot, it should give you an idea if this game is for you.

Single Player RS3/RS2 hybrid. Feels exactly like what it was designed to. if you ever tried to make a custom server for RS to play by yourself back in the day, but realized it was too much work, This game is for you. 11.5/10

While the game itself, including the story is great, the skill grind is massive, early on it seems pretty great once you get your skills up to maybe 10 or 15, but it just takes forever to be able to harvest the next best ressource, and then you have to do it again and again. Combat as Mage is great, however the difference between spells and wands is so small that you don't even need to cast them. There are a few instances, where you won't be able to fight an enemy because it has spell resistance, which means you need to grind either melee or ranged again. I stopped playing early late game because i couldn't stand the grind no more.

I've put 108 hours into The Black Grimoire: Cursebreaker, and I've enjoyed every minute of it. If you're a fan of old-school RPGs with skill progression, questing, exploration, and a sense of adventure, this game is definitely worth checking out. It has a nostalgic feel that reminds me of classic RPGs while still offering its own unique world and gameplay systems. What kept me playing for over 100 hours was the steady progression. Training skills, unlocking new gear, completing quests, and exploring new areas always felt rewarding. The developers have also continued to support the game with updates and new content, which shows they genuinely care about improving the experience. The game isn't perfect, and there are still things that could be expanded in the future, but the amount of content already available easily justified the time I've spent with it. For an indie RPG, there's a surprising amount to do, and it's easy to lose track of time once you get invested in your character's progression. After 108 hours, I'm still looking forward to future updates and content. If you enjoy progression-focused RPGs and don't mind a bit of grinding, I highly recommend giving The Black Grimoire: Cursebreaker a try.

Memory leak causes game to crash after a few minutes. Currently unplayable. May try again if this gets patched, but until then, pass on this one.

The Black Grimoire: Cursebreaker – A Miserable Failure That Pretends to Be RuneScape I've been playing RuneScape since shortly after the Grand Exchange update. I know exactly what a rewarding skilling, combat, and questing loop feels like. This game is not that. Not even close. I expected something playable. What I got was a janky, half-baked single-player Unity mess that has the audacity to market itself as a RuneScape-like experience. Developers, stop it. It's not a clone - it's a disrespectful cash-grab that borrows the aesthetics and a few mechanics while completely butchering the fundamentals. Pathfinding is straight-up abysmal. The so-called "open world" is nothing but linear roads and narrow corridors pretending to be exploration. You'll get stuck on geometry, clip through objects, or waste minutes watching your character path around like a drunk idiot to reach a node right in front of you. Fast travel is tacked-on garbage, and don't get me started on the loading screens when using Homecoming - something RuneScape deliberately avoids. Questing and storytelling are lazy trash. The journaling system is horrible: vague, unhelpful, and impossible to keep track of. Dialogue is phoned-in, pacing is awkward, and the "joke items" are cringe more often than funny. #1 pet peeve? Can't skip cutscenes that appear seemingly randomly. Skilling, combat, and progression feel completely off. Combat is clunky as hell with a heavy WoW-style emphasis that clashes with the old-school fantasy vibe. Balance is questionable at best (especially later), the grind has zero satisfying rhythm compared to actual RuneScape, inventory management is a constant nightmare, the UI is dated and cumbersome, and death penalties are punishing in the most frustrating ways possible. In TBG I feel like I’m dragging around a brain-dead puppet with no agency or progression - whereas RuneScape lets you actually grow and feel powerful as your character develops with you. Even worse, the content creators for this game are some of the laziest, most disrespectful players I've ever seen. Every single one of them shills glowing reviews while completely ignoring the massive shortcomings. Guides for skilling, money-making, or questing are virtually nonexistent. Try the wiki? Good luck - pages either don't load or are missing basic info like the Lucky Miner's Charm. Look, I get it - this is an indie title. But when you heavily invoke one of the greatest MMOs ever made in your marketing, you have a responsibility to deliver something that at least respects the core appeal. This doesn't. It feels like a rough early-access project that launched before it was anywhere near ready. The choppiness, stuttering, hitching, and other poor optimizations are a key indicator here. I bought this while deep in the final quarter of an OSRS withdrawal (trying to break the cycle of binging hard for months then quitting). Jagex's decision to inject transgenderism into the game had already soured me on supporting them, and I was desperate for a solo RuneScape fantasy alternative. This game kicked me while I was down. Now I'm just itching to go back to OSRS even more. I'm left frustrated, disappointed, and completely devoid of any satisfaction. Pass hard on this one. Even at 50% off it feels like a ripoff. Save your money and your time. *EDIT* I have purchased over 100 games for over a decade on Steam. This is one of three games I genuinely regret buying.