[h3] Combat [/h3]
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Thorne - Death Merchants is a fun little RPGMaker game buried under bad combat. It is difficult, but not in a git gud kind of way. Combat just feels unrewarding. Enemies swarm you from all sides. They respawn when you return to an area, or sometimes just infinitely spawn in certain locations.
You can die pretty quickly, from bleeding damage, poison, or being molotov'd to death from a good distance away. A possible glitch(?) means even after using antidote or a tourniquet you can still lose HP to poison/bleeding damage. All this stuff isn't fun and detracts from the game. If you like a challenge, there are better games out there that will really test your mettle and reward your efforts. Thorne - Death Merchants isn't one of them.
If you want to find where your saves live so you edit them: [spoiler] you can search 'Thorne' and you'll find where the are, as they're not in the immediate local file where the game is installed. The rvdata2 files are your saves. There's also a backup Thorne folder so just check you're in the right one.
On Steam Deck the path for me was:
/home/deck/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/compatdata/451920/pfx/drive_c/users/steamuser/Application Data/Thorne/Death Merchants/ [/spoiler]
But once you balance the combat, you'll have a decent time here. Some people will balk at this, but occasionally a bad game needs a little stat boosting from... external sources. Google is your friend and RPGMaker save editors exist is all I'll say. Whether you want to or not for a game that often costs $1 is up to you. But my beefed up Mr 'The Crow' demolished everything in his path and I had a great time doing it.
[h3] Controls [/h3]
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Thorne runs... ok? on Steam Deck via Proton. The game looks fine on the Steam Deck and isn't super squished out like it can be in full screen on regular desktop. The controls are a bit weird, controller will work but a mouse cursor will hang around. You can move it out the way with the right joystick, but the menu mainly uses mouse controls instead of controller. It made saving and loading a bit annoying but nothing unmanageable.
The Steam Deck's right track pad tends to click automatically in the main menu instead of scrolling properly too. This hasn't happened with any other games I've played on my Steam Deck recently or in the past, so I'm putting this issue down to weird Thorne tomfoolery.
If you want to mainly use a controller you may want to remap the healing and rage actions to a specific button. This is pretty easy to do on Steam Deck, but on regular pc press F1 to view and change controls. At one point I mapped the molotov attack to left trigger, but Thorne would only face right when attacking. It made the [spoiler] Goblin Cave [/spoiler] annoying because you have to [spoiler] destroy the circle spawn points by facing them directly then molotoving. [/spoiler] Remapping the button to X fixed this weird quirk and I'm not sure why.
[h3] Story [/h3]
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The game starts by asking if you want to play in English or Portuguese, I played in English. From this, I'm assuming English may not be the dev's first language and it does show. There are grammatical errors, typos and weird syntax abound. It isn't so bad that you have to sit there deciphering what the heck a sentence even means, but if you're precious about perfect grammar it will annoy you.
Once you beef up your merc the unofficial way, exploration becomes enjoyable because you're not getting ambushed constantly. Have a look around and see what you can find. If you get lost, there is an in game map item that I got from a chest near some bandits somewhere off to the right (or check the screenshots page here, I've added one of the map.)
The story in this game is actually decent, if short. A village needs your help and you're the mercenary in need of coin, give or take some other stuff in between of course. If you stray from the beaten path there are side quests here and there. Don't go to the McArthur Estate straight away, have a look around first. Maybe check the helpful achievements guides if you really don't want to miss anything. Check the cute little Encyclopedia in the menu to see a sentence or two on enemies or NPCs.
If you're stuck in the Estate section [spoiler] interact with the angel statues and the gargoyle. Pick up wiggling items in the rooms and pull a curtain lever thing. After you've found some gems and put them in the marble statues, you'll need 3 key fragments to open the mansion doors to get to McArthur. I think you'll find them in the garden, the curtain lever and a bookcase lever from the room that opens up from the marble statue. [/spoiler]
When I finished the game (killing everything in my wake and somewhat rushing) it took me about 2.5 hours and I ended up missing half the achievements. I'd guess it would take maybe 3-6 hours depending on how thorough you are and whether or not you fudge your stats.
[h3] Final Thoughts [/h3]
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This might seem like a lot of effort for a random RPGMaker game, but there's something to this one. It feels like a 2D proto baby discount Witcher almost, it just needs balancing to get there. If you can be bothered to do that, give it a shot.
If you like the RPGMaker style, check out these games with some of the aspects I liked from Thorne:
Ara Fell - turn based RPG with good exploration.
The Deed series - dark storytelling where you need to execute the perfect murder.
The Last Sovereign - 18+ very NSFW! turn based, amazing story about politics and war (no seriously). In early access but free with hours and hours of content.
