Wartales Review

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Wartales
Platforms: PC (Windows)
Developer: Shiro Games
Publisher: Shiro Unlimited
Release Date: 4/12/2023 (1.0)
MSRP: 34.99

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Wartales is a tactical strategy RPG in a subgenre known as “medieval warband simulators.” In these games, you control a band of mercenaries off on a journey for coin and glory. As you adventure through Wartales’ low-fantasy realms, you delve into tombs, get involved in local trade and politics, hunt bounties, and even change the course of nations all to keep purses full of coin and bellies full of food. Beyond that, there’s not one definitive story, but rather a bunch of different starts and possible locations. It all begins with you and your band of rough-and-ready types embarking on a journey to the nearest town, fighting bandits along the way. From there, you solve refugee conflicts, explore ancient tombs, assault bandit hideouts, and generally carve your own path through the world. There might be events, but it’s your story, and you tell it however you like.

What sets Wartales apart is its accessibility. The fights are sometimes difficult and tense, but the information is transparent and it’s rare you’ll fall to random chance or circumstance. You also have a wide range of options at the start, everything from locking difficulty to a specific region to picking a start that works best for you. The open-endedness common to the genre even helps with this— you’re telling your story your own way, and whatever play style works best for you, it’s easy enough to learn. Most systems are taught gradually, with your upgrades and jobs usually tied to quests or interactions in the environment. You even get pop-ups about concepts you haven’t seen before. Unlike many other games in the medieval warband sim genre, in that it’s brutal but unlike many of those games, it’s fair. It’s still brutal, but at least it feels like you made a bad decision as opposed to the game tripping you up.

Yes, even this is a result of my very impulsive actions

Which is fantastic, because the game is vast and open-ended. There’s tons to do in every overworld map of Wartales and tons of ways to do it, whether that’s trying to become a merchant and build up your fortune that way, or living the lives of ruthless bandits and employing all your cunning and skullduggery. Just about anything you do grants you experience points, and some problems have multiple solutions. The game doesn’t even push you in one direction or the other morally— while some decisions can be honorable or dishonorable, it’s more about who you side with and why than any greater system of morals. It’s entirely about what story you want to create. Wartales is as much a story generation system as it is a strategy game, and it offers you all the tools you’d need to create that story.

This even extends to the research system. While there are the usual upgrades one can get, there’s a specific upgrade tree for each available craftsperson and even trees related to the achievements screen. If you delve into the mysteries of the surrounding ruins, let your defeated enemies run away after battle, or even turn prisoners in to be jailed. There’s a ridiculous amount of things to do and see even in the starting area (where I spent roughly four days of play time), and that’s before you start crossing borders and opening up everything else. It’s incredibly satisfying to unlock upgrades and then put things like a crafting station in your camp where you can watch your companions hang out and go about their business.

All of this makes Wartales an excellent narrative experience. You can watch your warband become a terrifying force complete with its own pack of wolves or a group of tomb raiders and artisans slowly growing in legend. Every encounter, every death, every battle grows the story you’ve decided to tell and the way you decide to tell it. It’s intricate, just technical enough to grasp, and genuinely fun in a way few strategy RPGs reach for but fail to grasp. While it does have the odd technical glitch, if this sounds at all like your kind of game, saddle up your homicidal pony and head for the nearest Emissary.

The Good:
- Intricate strategy with transparent mechanics
- Open-ended narrative structure that allows you to tell the story you want
- An overwhelming number of options for crafting, narrative direction, and questing

The Bad:
- Lack of a definitive goal might be off-putting
- Occasional technical glitches

Final Score:

Destiny's Sword - Early Access Look

Destiny’s Sword
Release Date: Early Access as of 9/28/2022
Developer: 2Dogs Games
Publisher: Bonus Stage
Platforms: PC
MSRP: TBD

THE FOLLOWING REVIEW IS FOR AN EARLY ACCESS GAME. IT DOES NOT REFLECT THE FINISHED PRODUCT, BUT REFLECTS THE PRODUCT AS IT WAS GIVEN TO US TO REVIEW.

I shouldn’t have to do this. In a perfect world, I wouldn’t have to. But we don’t live in a perfect world, and sometimes things like this happen:

Do not under any circumstances pick up Destiny’s Sword. Having received a free copy of the game, I feel like I was overcharged for the privilege. While there are some moments where the ambition of the premise shines through, it’s a severely broken game, so broken that I couldn’t even get an hour into it without the game soft-locking me within its opaque, typo-ridden purgatory. I’m sorry that I have to write this— I hate writing bad reviews, especially for games that seem relatively ambitious— but I need to remain true to my experiences.

Destiny’s Sword puts you in the commander’s chair of the Stellara, a vessel full of cadets thrust into the center of a three-way conflict on the planet Cypris. On one side, the Protectorate, a galactic government tasked with keeping the populace safe and mining the mineral known as Lucidium. On the other, the Consortium, a group of megacorporations who want Cypris and the Lucidium mining for their own purposes, brutally putting down any opposition from the local populace. In the midst of all this, a group of rebels tries to take back their planet from the Consortium and the Protectorate by any means necessary. You and your team will have to bring peace to Cypris and discover a solution to the complex political situation, whether that means violent “pacification,” or more gentle means. But the situation is more complicated than it seems, and good and evil are rarely as clear-cut as they first look.

Destiny’s Sword itself plays out as kind of a traditional visual novel. You navigate through the Stellara, click on text where appropriate, and make decisions when it comes to a branching choice. In between the main “episodes,” you can talk to your crew, tend to wounded in the medbay, check equipment, and do a variety of other tasks. The game claims an advanced personality and background system, where different facets of your squad members’ personalities offer them different kinds of interactions during combat and different ways you have to manage their emotional state, as well as a multilayered branching narrative.

Not much of this is true.

For one thing, the choices the game gives you are somewhat limited and opaque at that. There’s no way to tell if someone has an ability or who’s even making an ability check, so you just have to make a few random choices and hope the right thing happens. There’s not really a lot of direction or transparency, so the whole thing feels weightless, like the game is going to do whatever it wants and you just sit there and click choices to make it advance. While occasionally a skill bar will pop up, or a progress bar for specific tasks, it just seems like they’re there more to provide the idea of any risk than actual risk itself. After all, you have very little connection to what’s going on onscreen, even with the ability to occasionally make a choice to do something. At the end, a commander (and do not get me started on the fact that your character is referred to as “commander” and there’s also a guy who’s your commander and referred to as “Commander” and how confusing that is) or the ship’s AI tells you how you did, or gives you further mission objectives.

That disconnectedness also extends to the crew, those people you’re supposed to be managing the emotional states of. While the game is in early access and some bugs can be expected, there were times where they repeated conversations from the previous chapter, or just didn’t have much to say at all. I was astonished to find out five chapters into the game’s first episode that the guy I’d thought was squad leader was actually the team’s medic, that my team had medical capabilities that weren’t even listed, and that at least one of them hated me, despite no conversational indication we’d ever had anything but a neutral reaction. It also didn’t help that the game doesn’t even teach you half the dialogue system until the end of the first chapter, which means that you essentially don’t even know half the options you have. While the dialogue system does open up, it once again forces you into a series of weightless choices as various values like “TRUST +3” and “DISGUST -6” flash across the screen, seemingly meaning something while not really explaining anything.

Which connects into the larger opacity. When you have a game where choices matter, those choices have to feel like they matter to the player. They have to have weight, consideration, and be something other than a weighted coinflip between several choices you don’t even really know you’re making. When you’re supposed to care about the characters and story, it helps if those characters and that story are understandable quantities you can care about. Unfortunately, Destiny’s Sword doesn’t appear to be quite there yet. There’s too little information, the narrative tries to get you involved in the larger conflict but just feels disjointed, and while you can learn a little about your squad, there’s not a lot of information easily accessible to make you feel like you’re learning anything at all.

Speaking of things that aren’t easily accessible, for a game that’s supposedly “feature complete,” it’s upsettingly easy to get soft-locked. The first time it happened, I was stuck on the medbay screen waiting for an event to fire while it never did. The second time was a little more obvious, with the next chapter’s cinematic being played twice and then the story refusing to progress whatsoever despite having completed all the chapter tasks. This wouldn’t be so bad if the game didn’t autosave constantly, meaning that any soft-locked game has to be started over from the beginning. This also means (much like with the dialogue sections) that you see a lot of repeated content over and over again, hoping that this time, things will actually allow you to progress the story. This is only compounded by a large number of typos throughout the text, things that should be fixed by the time your steam page is boasting that it’s “feature complete” and has text by a New York Times bestselling author. “It’s Early Access” is an excuse that only gets one so far, and when you are claiming a game is “mostly done” on your Early Access page, that confers a certain responsibility. Destiny’s Sword shirks that responsibility.

It’s a shame, because the game’s fairly flashy and the art is excellent, using painted backgrounds and portraits that do tend to change as you talk to people. It’s kind of cool the first time you see the skill bars or progress bars, even if they tend to mean less and less the further you get into the game. Even if a game is sparse, that doesn’t mean it has to be shallow, and I wish a game with this much flash had much more substance and transparency and much less bugs and typos.

But I have to play the game I get, not the game I wanted. Maybe in the future Destiny’s Sword will be worth more of a look. But in the already impressive field of narrative games, and with early access titles that had much less of a pedigree and staff but came out much more finished, this one’s an unfortunate swing and a miss.

The Good:
- Intriguing systems where you manage the crew of your starship and take on away missions
- Fantastic artwork

The Bad
- Bugs mean you end up caught in loops of conversations
- The game can soft-lock you at random, forcing you to start from scratch due to autosaves
- Opaque systems mean choices might as well be random or a coin toss
- A lot of flash, but seemingly little substance

Final Score:

It’s so raw. It’s just so raw. Please make this game better.

Foretales Review

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Foretales
Release Date: September 15, 2022
Developer: Alkemi
Publisher: Dear Villagers
Platform: PC, Nintendo Switch
MSRP: TBD

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Sometimes, the right things come together in the right way, and it can be an utter delight.

Foretales is a careful balancing act— it’s a dark fantasy story about an apocalyptic disaster, but it handles itself with humor and some genuine love of its characters and setting. It’s got an action economy, but things never feel rushed or weirdly paced (well, most of the time, we’ll get to that). It has a morality system, but one that never feels like it’s leaning too far on one side or the other, or punishing you for whatever choice you take. And, most notably for a card battler, it has a ton of diplomatic options for most situations, allowing you to preserve the cards in your hand while spending a number of resources to circumvent the fights and usually gaining a decent reward out of it all.

It’s light and fun without being shallow, deep without being dense or obtuse, and with a story and characters that add a ton of personality to the whole thing (as well as the snarky all-seeing narrator), it blends dark fantasy and lighthearted adventure, and overall, apart from some annoying quality of life issues, it’s a fantastic take on both deckbuilders and adventure games alike.

Volepain the Shoebill and Leo the Tiger are hired by a mysterious leper to steal a musical instrument from a noblewoman. The heist goes cleanly enough, but upon touching the lyre, Volepain is struck with horrifying visions of things yet to come, all leading towards some kind of apocalypse. It falls to Volepain and Leo to save the world, all while staying one step ahead of the strange calamities, dangerous cultists, and a variety of murderous ne’er do wells, pirates, and nobles all out for their blood. But maybe, with Volepain’s visions, the duo and the numerous thieves and lunatics they tend to drag along in their wake have a fighting chance at saving the day. If not, well, at least it’s an adventure, right?

Foretales plays out as a kind of narrative card game. Each chapter, you pick a team of one to three heroes to build your deck, based on the strengths and weaknesses you think you’ll need. turn, you play cards at one of the locations on the board. Based on the card and the location, a number of things happen, such as gaining temporary allies, advancing story events, gaining items, or simply just gaining one of the resources you can also spend (money, fame, grim, and food) to play further down the line. Battles are also decided by cards, as you can either spend resources and items to get rid of the enemies you encounter, or simply use your cards to buff each character before the fight. Sometimes, battles can even be stopped completely by using the right item or the right card, convincing the enemy to end the encounter. As you go further on, you choose each chapter of the story from a map, trying to stay one step ahead of each calamity in your path, growing ever closer to the impending end of existence…

Those looking for a deckbuilding card game will be somewhat disappointed. Foretales is more an RPG and adventure game with cards. That isn’t to say there isn’t an intense level of strategy involved, with cards needing to be played at the right circumstances and different decks working with different abilities. One character might have a deck better themed around navigating the oceans, and one might be better if you’re trying to get criminals on your side. The decks can even grow depending on whether or not you complete certain story events, adding to the card pool and number of options. It’s a wonderful way of underscoring each character, as well, with the decks mirroring aspects of their personality and the way they approach a problem.

While from its setup it looks simple, figuring out the interactions between your characters and the world around them, or figuring out what resources best solve a problem, opens up a wealth of depth and complexity. Bandits, for example, will respect you more if you intimidate them than if you try to push on your fame. Some cultists can’t be talked to and simply have to be attacked. All of this gives the gameplay loop real weight behind its decisions. The combat system has a “morale” mechanic built in that means (well, in most cases, since zombies don’t stop for morale) if you can end a fight the right way (take out high value opponents, bribe the right guard, toss rum at the pirates) then you get fame for leaving your enemies alive. Some cards can end story events immediately, others can gain you a lot of goods when played in the right area, and overall, it’s a careful balancing act.

Balancing is the name of the game, too. For a game that has a lot of dark moments— there’s an apocalypse, slavery, a cult, massacres, and a rampaging pestilent horde— it balances this with a lot of humor. Volepain and his companions fire lines back and forth in a way that never feels quippy, the narrator begs and pleads with the player to pick the nonviolent options in combat, and saving one of your friends from certain execution involves a rather hilarious series of punchlines. It does a lot to make things feel like Foretales is an adventure with friends, one with humor and horror in equal measure. Most encounters can be won, the lightheartedness doesn’t overwhelm the grim portions and vice versa, and it is genuinely (and I know people hate me using this word, but they’re all jerks anyway) fun to spend time in this world. Even when I found myself getting frustrated at a specific point, I would always go back and try a new way, or play a little more conservatively so I wasn’t getting rid of resources, or maybe burn less cards. Foretales made me think, and I love it when a game takes a more thoughtful approach, rather than just flinging cards and numbers at a wall.

Atmosphere is also a big part of that. The lighting, music, and even the background in Foretales change based on where you are, from the hushed chants and darkened lighting of the library, to the almost Monkey Island-esque riff and sunlight reflecting on water of the nautical portions, everything is a delight for the senses. The art’s well-drawn, the music gets stuck in your head after a while, and the narrator’s occasional asides only help underscore it all. The hand-drawn sketches in between each major act similarly help with the theme, making you feel like you’re taking part in some grand animated movie or premium series. It’s a deeply impressive game overall.

But there is one thing that brings it down a little. Foretales is an adventure game, and inherited one of its sins: Logic. Puzzles can be hard to figure out, and sometimes what the story wants to advance can be a little obtuse. While there’s extensive help in the form of hints and being able to talk your way through problems, it doesn’t help that if you don’t have the right card at the right time, you can spend an entire scene wandering around and playing cards until you either run out of cards, resources, or chances to rest, which means a game over in short order. It can get exhausting, as beautiful as the game is, when there’s just that one thing you can’t seem to do.

This shouldn’t dissuade you, though. While the moon-logic puzzles can get annoying and sometimes the game will get pulled into an unwinnable state, it just incentivizes you to play a little closer and a little more conservatively. It’s a gorgeous, fun, and unique take on card battlers that promises hours of play and replay, and a world you’ll want to revisit even after your first journey.

The Good:
- Beautiful art
- An interesting take on card-based gameplay and adventure games
- Excellent economy and game balance
- A wonderful sense of humor
- Top-notch writing

The Bad:
- Sometimes random chance and resource management means getting stuck
- Moon-logic puzzles are out in force in this one

Final Score:

Annoying puzzles and some randomness might be a cloud, but the game is otherwise sunny

Roadwarden Review

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Roadwarden
Platform: PC
Developer: Moral Anxiety Studios
Publisher: Assemble Entertainment
Release Date: Sept. 8, 2022
MSRP: Pending Release

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Chances are, you already know whether or not you want to play Roadwarden just based on the screenshots alone. It belongs to a very unique family of games with its pixelated sepia visuals and deep text-based gameplay. With games like these, it’s important to meet them on their own terms— yes, they can be frustrating and complex, but the audience they’re aiming for appreciates that complexity, frustration, and density. It’s a game where the mechanics and the story are so intertwined that one requires learning the other, and rewards careful study of both. But that being said, does Roadwarden thrive on its own merits and work as the kind of game it strives to be?

Well, sort of.

Roadwarden casts you as the titular Warden, a kind of free-roaming agent of the Ten Cities sent to the Peninsula to patrol and keep lines of trade open with your homeland. You pick from three classes: a Fighter, a Mage, or a Scholar, something between a diplomat and an alchemist. Over the course of the game’s opening moments, you choose a class, a reason you decided to become a Roadwarden, and a religion. Then, you’re let loose into the map with the barest of direction, sent to interact with and clear up the wilderness as you wish. The more you visit towns and solve the inhabitants’ problems or reconnect the roads, the more people trust you and the more you can uncover secrets and alternate routes around the map. But be warned— you only have forty days to complete your mission and uncover the secrets of the Peninsula before you’re recalled to the Ten Cities for good, and before you know it, that time will be up.

The mechanics of Roadwarden are blissfully simple in practice— It’s all text, so you just click on the onscreen options, follow the prompts, and keep a close watch on your health, armor, hunger, and appearance. While the stats aren’t the meat of the game, they definitely help with things, as you can only perform certain actions as long as you’ve managed your health, hunger, and sometimes even appearance. The joy of playing Roadwarden, however, is the sheer amount of detail within those mechanics. As you click around and explore, the map fills in, giving you a larger picture of the area. Doing certain activities or answering questions changes your general stats, as the game tracks everything from lies you tell to how faithful you are to your specific religions.

It’s a wonderful exercise in minimalism overall. The writing is incredibly strong, with one scene in particular offering up terse, tense inputs for a village where everything is secretive, and the looping, ambient music cutting out or changing to the noises of insects or animals in the distance depending on the scene and how appropriate it is. It’s easy to be lulled by the music, only to be jarred suddenly by its absence or by the sudden sound of animals, and it works excellently with the minimalist interface. It also leaves large portions of the world up to the imagination, with such bizarre details as the prevalence of howler monkeys, gigantic birds, dinosaur riders, and even stranger things up to the reader.

The text also contributes to the density. Roadwarden is not a fast-paced game, nor is it a game that you can beeline through even if you know how to solve certain puzzles. In your quest to explore the Peninsula, you have to exhaust every dialogue option, figure out every relationship, and possibly even make deals with some unsavory characters to advance your own agenda. This also makes the time limit that much more important— you will not be able to do everything or solve every problem, so the ones you can solve count all that much more and it’s important to figure out what impact you’ll have. You’ll find yourself weighing decisions, roleplaying based on your strengths and weaknesses, and trying to figure out how best to use your abilities to fix up the fractured lands of the Peninsula.

But like many games of its type, progress can be frustratingly obtuse at times. The player has to know the right dialogue options to unlock abilities at each settlement, from trade to a place to sleep to other services, and will sometimes find themselves going through the same dialogue tree over and over again trying to find just the right sentence. There’s also a number of “guess the word” puzzles throughout. While some of these can be defeated by looking through your journal, there’s not really an easy way to organize that journal. If there was a way to sort beyond category, that would definitely be more helpful. Also, for a game that kind of showcases its replayability and ability to find multiple solutions to each problem, Roadwarden’s slow pace and dense thickets of words tend to slow it down and make replaying each scenario something of a slog.

The sum total of the experience is that Roadwarden is an excellent work for those seeking an old-school adventure full of textual density and a unique world, but is very much a specific work for a specific audience. While its gorgeous pixel art, sepia tones, and unusual world are willing to give up their delights with patience, it requires significant effort and exertion to get to that point. Worth it for some, certainly, but overall an experience meant for the most devoted.

The Good:
- Dense world
- Interesting spin on a text-adventure format
- Old-school nostalgia and charm
- Unusual fantasy world
- A delight to those who enjoy this kind of old-school experience

The Bad
- Very slow-paced to the point of becoming a slog at certain points
- Not very welcoming to newcomers
- The pace and density make the multiple playthroughs the game encourages somewhat difficult

Final Score:

Gamedec Review

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Publisher: Anshar Publishing
Developer: Anshar Studios
Platform: PC, Nintendo Switch
Release Date: Sept. 16, 2021
Price: $29.99 USD

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Gamedec is frustrating. It’s always difficult to write a review like this, a game I clearly had some fun with, a game I really want to like, but that I also have to criticize. It’s a cyberpunk noir RPG-adventure game with actual investigation and deduction mechanics. The world is so deep you could spend hours lost in the various codexes and character bios alone. The graphics are a little basic in places, but the world has a genuine aesthetic that it’s a lot of fun to look at and wander through. But every time I find myself charmed by its world, I get stuck in the level and forced to load a save. A decision tree might say one thing but possibly mean another.

In short? This could be a really good game, a solid entry in the genre pioneered by Disco Elysium that’s just starting to take off (see also Murder Mystery Machine and to a more failed extent, The Sunken City) but dear God is it in a rough state.

Sometimes, a car is an effective solution

Gamedec drops you into the trenchcoat of the titular gamedec, a kind of private investigator who handles cases in virtual reality MMOs. As you hunt down cheaters, scammers, cultists, and the odd child labor ring, you make enough to get by and hopefully try to make a little light in the dark world of futuristic Warsaw. But as you investigate, slowly another, more sinister thread emerges— one involving a mysterious tree, twin cultists, and possibly even your own memories and thoughts themselves. It will take all your cunning and instinct to get out of this one, especially in a world where everyone’s wearing a false identity.

So first, the good. Gamedec’s investigation system is unrivaled and I wish more games would do something like it. As you solve sidequests and gather clues, you slowly fill up a group of deductions. At any time, you can use the clues you have to make a conclusion and move on to the next phase of the case, as long as you’ve collected enough evidence for it. This can be a godsend if you’ve gotten tired of a certain scene or movement in the game. It also allows something most games don’t, which is the ability to draw the wrong conclusion and possibly send the case in a different direction.

This ties directly into the branching narrative. Choices you make don’t just last within your current investigation, but can have far-reaching consequences down the line, depending on how you interact with others and what clues you can figure out. Each case has a variety of outcomes, and depending on your skills, background, approach to each situation, and how you interpret the clues, you can get a wildly branching story with a number of start and endpoints based on that. In theory, it’s liberating— a huge (if linear) world where all your choices matter and each playthrough can be completely different based on how you work the case.

Aiding in this, there are a number of “professions” related to skills you can pick up, everything from electronic intrusion to programming to even cheating in games. Each one’s related to different methods of responding, so you can level up your skills based on how you play, as you’ll be earning points from that. It’s incredibly adaptive, and while the skill tree might not be as vast as some adventure/RPGs, it’s a lot more expressive in places, with clear, concise descriptions telling you what everything is supposed to do.

The most essential starting skill. Never leave home without it

But here would be where things start to fall apart a little. While it’s clear how things might help, the actual in-game benefits range from “marginally useful” to “can solve entire stages of the case in one section and then do very little the rest of the game.” It’s not clear how helpful a profession can be until you use it, at which point you might be rather deep into a case. Similarly, while the skill points you earn are based on the personality of your gamedec, apart from a few adjectives and a group of bars on the side, it’s unclear exactly how the points you need to earn relate to each approach. Overall, this just makes it feel obtuse and confusing more than anything.

Adding to that obtuse feeling, sometimes puzzling through the plot feels like stumbling blindly. While it’s to be expected that you won’t see or do everything during one playthrough (and Gamedec makes this very clear as you play), the lack of direction, existence of wrong choices, and the idea that some things can be permanently locked off just make it feel obstructive rather than open-ended. Sure, it’s refreshing to have a game that allows you to miss content and doesn’t hand-hold at all, but Gamedec’s lack of signposting feels downright malicious at times. Especially when compared to the game’s own demo, which walked you through an early case without completely solving everything for you. It’s especially annoying when combined with the difficulty, where sometimes making the wrong deduction and getting the wrong people angry with you can feel like the game hits a dead end.

Gamedec could also benefit from a better quest log. While I understand the need for the player to puzzle through everything on their own, the lack of a detailed log apart from the information on the right-hand side of the screen makes it difficult to know what direction you need to travel in at all. Even the slightest bit of info could help, as it’s difficult to tell what “investigate the anomaly” means apart from wandering around and looking at the street, hoping the right hotspot suddenly reveals itself.

Getting stuck in VR Farmville is a special kind of Hell

Which brings us to the bugs. Even with the fixes and patching done to the initial prerelease build, the game’s in rough shape. While I can’t speak to every player’s experience, I personally ended up getting stuck in place in some areas, clicking frantically in an effort to move around the screen. There were also moments where NPCs reacted to dialogue from later in the scene, or simply closed conversations quickly using dialogue from earlier parts. One scene stopped completely dead, making it impossible to continue. In a rather odd gesture, controller support is automatically enabled when the game detects a controller, and no option in the menu exists to turn it off. It’s upsetting that a game with this much promise is this rough, but it’s also a sad reality that sometimes ambitious projects just need a little more love

So should you play Gamedec? Unequivocally, yes. But not right now. Wait a little longer, let the game get a little more polish, and you’ll be rewarded with an unusual and fun adventure/RPG with a wide degree of replayability. But until it sheds that layer of frustration and smooths out some of the rough edges, you’re going to want to be a little more patient.

The Good
- Deep, branching mystery with unusual characters and a twisting plot
- Excellent character interactions and some truly messed-up noir scenes
- Intriguing mechanics for both character creation and investigation
- Deduction mechanic rewards players for finding evidence and replaying scenes
- Immersive cyberpunk world

The Bad
- Obtuse narrative design means it’s difficult to find out where to go next
- Loads of bugs can make getting through the game painful
- Large range of deductions can make getting the essence of the story a little difficult

Final Score:

Final note: This game was procured as a review code in exchange for an honest review. The review is based on a release build as of 9/11/2021. It may not reflect the final build of the game

Overfall Early Access Review

              Overfall is a game with a lot of good things going for it. There is the distinct art style, an excellent modular story engine, some interesting tactical combat, and a very dynamic setting. It's a game that promises a staggering amount of depth, especially when one gets into it. It's a big, expansive game with a big expansive map and big expansive ideas. 

                Unfortunately, this is where things fall a little flat. For a big, expansive game world with an easy to use storyline editor and a lot of cool stuff going for it, the game doesn't exactly deliver on the bountiful promises that it set out to make. It's that failure to deliver that makes everything that much more difficult. What should be an awesome game is only an okay one. 

And this is the issue with Overfall.  But as always, more below. 

                 Overfall is a tactical roleplaying game with procedurally generated elements. In it, you guide a team of adventurers around a series of islands, stopping off at each one for a different story fragment or adventure. The object is to build enough of a reputation to find the lost king who can reunite the world against a group of terrifying barbarian invaders streaming out through a portal. Your heroes solve various problems through a mixture of diplomacy and turn-based hex-based tactical combat, gaining reputation points that slowly build a rapport with various races. This in turn means the races are more likely to help you against the barbarians, and so on and so forth. 

                  Time is also kept by way of a clock in the corner of the screen, as the invaders set up bases and begin to siege the various islands throughout the vast archipelago. The game becomes more difficult as you go, with new challenges and different ships. Overfall makes an effort to make sure the player feels like there's a world, with various factions, ships, fights, and various other factors. You can actually watch wars going on as you sail from village to village and the Vorn become a bigger threat, and that's really cool. 

                When you die (and your characters will die), the game plops you back at the portal with more options unlocked: different party members, new trinkets, various abilities, and other things like that. Thus, the game becomes easier and also gains depth as you go on, with new abilities unlocking and old ones shifting, as the player goes along. The player also gains new classes and characters to unlock as the game goes along, and as your ship becomes more renowned, you can hire new characters for your party to make battles a little easier. You also unlock new weapons, relics, and a ton of other things.

                  Unfortunately, while there is a lot of depth and the game is fun enough, it's very slow. All your unlocks are tied to in-game progress, which is based on the quests you get. As the quests are completely random, it's difficult to make much headway in the plot. You can get completely screwed over just as easily as you can run through a series of all-important reputation missions that allow you access to a faction's homeland. One run may see you getting inconsequential quest after inconsequential quest, others may see you racking up rewards faster than you can spit, and that luck kind of causes the game to bounce off it's players. 

                 Which is a shame, because if you can set up a rhythm, the game is really good. When it's firing on all cylinders and lets you see its depth, it's something amazing. As a shallow time-killer, it can also be pretty cool. But when all you're doing is finding the quests that mean you get minimal rewards and there's no sense of progression, it's really annoying. The game becomes an exercise in gambling and tedium, neither of which really make for a good roleplaying game, as anyone who's played Chinese MMOs can tell you. 

                 And then there's the story editor. The crown jewel of Overfall's engine, the story editor is a crown jewel in the game. A Twine-like interface, it allows you to craft your own miniature narrative and add it to the possible random generation in the game. Furthermore, it allows you to download community adventures, play them, and rate them as you see fit. It's the kind of democratized storytelling that more games should have. It's simple to use, has a lot of applications, and can be used to tell any number of awesome mini-stories. 

                 But between the luck-based content, the tactical battle system that takes a lot to get used to (seriously, some kind of manual would be a godsend), and the just weird nature of the game, Overfall just seems like kind of a mess. In the end, I'd wait for a sale or see how much it's going to be before going out and buying it. It's a good game, but it lacks the vital spark needed to make it a truly amazing one, and I can't fully recommend it based on that.

Final score: 3/5

Full disclosure: The reviewer received a pre-release early access copy for review.

Victor Vran Review

I previewed this game in my first article ever for the site. I played it, and it was full of promise and life and all kinds of exciting potential. In short, while it was definitely rough, at the same time, it was a lot of fun to play.

I don't know what the developers did, to take that game so full of potential, a game with a decent premise, and drop it off a cliff, but I intend to find out in great detail. Because this is not the game I previewed way back in the spring. This is a game that is significantly not that game, and it bothers me.

The plot, such as it is: Victor Vran, a renowned monster hunter, comes to the walled city of Zagoravia looking for a fellow hunter. Instead, he finds the entire city overrun by monsters and under attack from some kind of demonic force. Using the palace of Queen Katarina as his home base, Vran sets out to liberate the town and destroy the monsters bit by bit. 

All of this is kind of an excuse plot for a Diablo-like (or, since it's more Victorian gothic horror, a Van Helsing-like) where your demonically powered generic hunter, with the generic voice that sounds like he's been gargling two pounds of driveway gravel, battles his way through spiders, skeletons, and other baddies that one might find decorating a front door on Halloween. In addition to the usual isometric gameplay, Victor Vran adds another dimension to the mix: Height. 

Yes, in Victor Vran, you can actually leap on to high obstacles, wall jump, and in one area solve a maze by jumping over its walls. You can use these abilities to maneuver around the battlefield, keep from being overrun, or even gain the high ground over your opposition. In theory, anyway. In fact, I'll go one better, that is exactly what it was like in the preview and what made me like it so much.

Unfortunately, the released version of Victor Vran is somewhat hampered. Many of the areas I could previously jump to are now railed-- you can jump over the hedges in the maze in the first part of the game, but can no longer run along them shotgunning enemies to your heart's content. The weapon ranges are also changed-- no more shooting across gaps or nice area control situations any more. In fact, much of what has been changed is meant to get you into combat more, something which rubs against my play style. I never liked the "hordes of enemies" approach, and Vran lured me in with the premise of something fresh, only to show it kept it as a pretense, not the reality.

What's left is kind of bland. The environments are colorful, to be sure, but the gameplay is kind of samey. While challenges help mitigate the blandness a little and add some dimensions of play, your achievements shouldn't be doing all the heavy lifting, and what else there is of the game feels unsatisfying. Instead of a skill tree, you gain equippable cards that take the place of such things. Each level you gain unlocks new things: levels, abilities, extra weapon slots, and extra item slots. Instead of an overworld you can travel and explore, you get a map with level select and a rating of stars and secrets in terms of completion. 

I do like the streamlined level process out of all those things, but at times I wish it were more customizable. It's a game about hitting things, it makes that very obvious from the first step. It's not as interested in magic or area control or strategy, it's very much about combat. Head-to-head combat. It's also got a lot more rails than the pre-release version, forcing me to change my strategies but...not leaving me very much to change them to. 

Enough about what this version subtracts. What it adds are some very nice visuals and pieces of art, and full (unneeded) voice overs. This is especially egregious as the ultimate evil has some kind of taunting voice in the protagonist's head, but the writing staff didn't bother to make him particularly funny. There's also more of a story than previously, but the story isn't really the point here. 

So in the end, if you want a game that reaches for innovation with a ton of action, and some interesting choices in height, then this is definitely a game you should watch out for. But be warned, it doesn't really do anything out of the ordinary, and even the few charms it has aren't really worth the full price of admission. Wait for a sale. 

2/5

Full Disclosure: Reviewer received a review copy of the game.

Crypt of the NecroDancer Review

There are rare times in art when everything works exactly the way it's supposed to. Where everything clicks so perfectly into place that it's almost elegant the way everything is so finely-tuned. And that's what playing Crypt of the NecroDancer  from Brace Yourself Games feels like. Elegant. Refined. Like a well-oiled machine. In its unpolished state it was fun and interesting but heavily flawed, but now that it has reached its final polish, it is a beautiful thing to behold. 

The story isn't anything much to go by. It begins with a young woman named Cadence following her missing father's notes, where she unearths the crypt of a malevolent lich known as the Necro-dancer. Cadence must journey through the crypt, collecting an arsenal of weapons, armor, and items as she delves into level after level in search of the secrets the crypt holds. It lays out the path for a standard dungeon crawler, but there's a little extra wrinkle that builds in nicely.

When Cadence first encounters the Necro-dancer in the game's opening animation, he pulls her heart from her body and infuses it with magic, forcing her to follow a specific beat. As Cadence journeys, all of her movements and actions must be on an exact beat as well, otherwise she simply won't move. 

And that's the premise. A dungeon crawler where absolutely everything has to move to a specific beat. Everything syncs up with this premise. The enemies and even the people in the upgrades screen move to a specific beat. When you find a shop in the dungeons, the shopkeeper actually sings along with the background music. Do well enough, and the ground beneath your character lights up like a disco floor and strobes to the beat. The background music isn't just another part of the ambiance, it's integral to the game. I once made the mistake of loading the game up while listening to music in the background, and I failed utterly, because you need to be listening to the cues. It's not all periodic button presses.

Another wonderful feature of NecroDancer is that, unlike most roguelikes and dungeon crawlers, it doesn't just pit you against increasingly stronger enemies by butting your head against them over and over again. Each zone has a unique set of enemies (hey Weaponographist, you taking notes?) that move in specific ways. While it takes some getting used to, with a bit of planning and some pattern recognition, it's possible (and this is rare outside maybe Binding of Isaac and a few others) for someone to get through the entire dungeon without getting hit once. Incredibly difficult, and takes more luck than skill, but it's possible.

That's something I enjoy that I've been seeing more of in Rogue-likes these days: strategy. There's actually a lot of this in Crypt of the NecroDancer, because the range of movement given allows for a larger playing field. For instance, instead of travelling down a hallway normally and having to take damage from enemies, why not let them get a little closer to you by digging into the side of the hallway, then surprising them? Or, if you know a boss is going to chew you up up close, set a bomb and dance away from them, allowing the bomb to go off in a specific area. Combined with destructible terrain, this causes bosses to sometimes bust through the walls of the dungeon to attack, turning the stage into a desperate race for resources, all to a pounding techno beat. 

Additional characters such as Bard (doesn't have to move to the beat, making the game move at ludicrous speed) and Eli (no weapon, upgraded shovel, and infinite bombs) significantly change the game's topography, causing players to find new solutions and tailor things towards their play style. The game can further be changed by trading rare items for unlocks in the dungeons, unlocking upgrades. 

Normally, this would be where I put some of the things they didn't like. While I did have issues with the way the dragon bosses moved and attacked, making them incredibly difficult with anything but the small supply of ranged weapons, I can't really think of much I'd change in the game or improve. It's a classic all on its own. 

Play this game. It's a game that deserves to stand the test of time. If nothing else because it's executed so flawlessly.

Score: 5/5

Full Disclosure: The reviewer received a steam code to review the game

Victor Vran Preview

    Victor Vran , the new game from Tropico developer Haemimont Games, is an ARPG like Diablo or The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing. It's set in a crumbling castle somewhere in Europe, filled with all manner of creepy and crawly creatures.  While many people have noted similarities to other ARPGs out there, Victor Vran adds a new element to action-RPGs that most other games have ignored: Height. 

      What sets Victor Vran apart from the other games mentioned above is the ability to jump over walls, wall-bounce to hard-to-reach points, and otherwise navigate the battlefield in a wholly different way. It adds an element of platforming to the game, as well as a level of tactical control-- Why get swarmed by a horde of spiders when you can get to higher ground above them, or stand on a nearby hedge to avoid their attacks? Why not leap over your enemies and get the drop on them from another angle? 

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Victor faces down a horde of the undead.

        While the game is still in early access and so there's placeholder art and enemy variety is a little low, the game's combat system is completely functional at this point, and many of the levels are finished, so you can go tearing through castle gardens, crypts, and caves with a variety of swords, scythes, hammers, guns, and demonic powers. Adding some variety to things,  there are a series of challenges for each mission, urging players to consider exploring all of an area to hunt down secrets, chests, and bonus bosses to defeat. 

Two area of effect attacks clash

           I'm excited to see how Victor Vran develops into a full-fledged game, and while I know there's definitely some missing pieces right now, what they have already is reason enough to keep watching this.