One massive roguelike - Tales of Maj'Eyal

NOTICE: The version of the game reviewed is the paid version, including the Ashes of Urh'Rok DLC, your experience with the base game may vary.

Tales of Maj'Eyal, Which I'll be calling TOME from now on, is interesting in that it's both a very young game, and a very old one. It started life in the 90s as a variant of the game Angband called  Pernband, based of the Pern series of books. Now, the Pern series is know for having a somewhat strained relation with it's fans at times, so it's no surprise that Pernband got slapped with a cease and desist letter. In the face of this, the game was reborn as Tales of Middle Earth, throwing out Pern and replacing it with things form Tolkien's writings, and was developed as this for years.

This actually continued up until 2010, when the game was recreated again, this time as Tales of Maj'Eyal, which is what I'm reviewing here. The developer did this for two reasons: First, it removed any possibility of the game getting a second cease and desist letter thrown at it and second, it allowed for parts of the game that didn't quite mesh with the Middle Earth setting, such as time magic and Psionic powers to make a lot more sense.

TOME is a roguelike that takes place on the continent of Maj’Eyal, currently in a time of relative peace after hundreds of years of war. Surprisingly, for a genre that's usually pretty light on story, there's actually a lot of it here, mostly told in letters and scrolls you find on your travels. There's actually a lot if information with each area of the game having it's own lore snippets to find and Despite spending several hours with this game, I've barely seen what it has to offer story-wise, there's that much info to take in.

Each dungeon in the game has several lore snippets, like this one here.

At it's core, TOME is roguelike dungeon crawler, complete with permadeath, interesting, the game has a few departures from typical roguelikes. The first is that the game has no consumables, there's no potions or scrolls. Instead you have infusions which you an equip and use. They work a lot like potions in other roguelikes, doing things like restoring hit points or decreasing damage for several turns, except instead of being used up, they go on cooldown for several turns after use. It's actually a pretty nifty system, as you never have to worry being cheated on potions, but you can't just spam your infusions when in trouble. In fact, to further discourage that, using an infusion grants a temporary debuff that increases the cooldown of other infusions.

On top of that, there's also the dungeons, instead of a single dungeon to get to the bottom of, TOME has several dungeons, with an overworld to connect them all. The dungeons are quite varied, from woods to a giant labyrinth. Some even have unusual gimmicks, like an underwater dungeon where you have to watch your air levels, or a den of sandworms where you need to rely on the worms that live there to dig new paths for you and if you're not quick enough, they'll collapse behind you.

Dungeons are varied not only in appearance, but enemies and floor layout/

The game also has a lot of race and class options. Not only are there typical classes like berserk or rogues, but there's also a lot of unique ones. One of the classes I tried was called the cursed, a fighter who's surrounded by a cloud of gloom, powered by raw hate, that debuffs enemies who get too close to you. There's also alchemists, who have a golem to help protect them and can make powerful explosives out of gems found in dungeons.

While you start with a few options available, You also have to unlock races and classes by doing various things, which range from the simple, such as killing 1,000 humanoids across all of your games, to the very difficult, One race in the Ashes of Urh'Rok DLC requires killing three very tough optional bosses in the same game.

The game also comes with several difficulty settings, the most unique of which is the permadeath setting. Alongside traditional permadeath and an exploration mode that gives you unlimited lives, There's also an adventure mode. Adventure mode is a sort of compromise between exploration and roguelike modes, you are given extra lives as you level up, but once you run out, the next death is permanent so there's a lot of options available to either turn the difficulty down for newcomers, or crank it up if your looking for an extra challenge.

TOME has a lot of character options to chose form. Also shown: proper dwarven naming.

The games graphics are pretty good. The game is tile based and the tiles are nice and detailed, with plenty of tile sets for the game's varied areas, there's even some nice splash images for loading screens and the occasional background image. There is however a small problem in that nothing is animated, all the tiles are static. Though the game does make up for this with spell and ability effects, providing some nice particle effects to give some extra oomph to your spells and abilities.

The game also has a good soundtrack, leaning towards an epic orchestral score. Each area has it's own theme, and while I encountered some minor issues with songs not quite looping properly - there was a small pause when the track restarts - Everything fits the game and is nice to listen to. The sound design is also decent, with some areas having some atmospheric sounds and a decent number of effects for various spells and abilities, though in my experience the game focuses more on visual than audio cues, which is fine as this is a turn based game, so you have all the time you need to take note of things.

The overworld connects the various dungeons together.

The game is pretty solid and I didn't encounter any real bugs. The only major flaw I can think of is that the game is massive, and that's great that there's so much content but it's also perhaps a bit too big for it's own good. While the dungeons I entered were fairly short, usually only about three floors each, there's a lot of them and unless you're playing with exploration mode on, you have some form of permadeath to deal with. I know roguelikes are supposed to be difficult and that's fine, but trying to beat a game this big on one life, or even several in adventure mode, feels like it might be a bit too tall an order. For those used to games like Dungeons of Dredmor or Sword of the Stars: The Pit? You've got a long, hard trek ahead of you and it'll take a good bit of effort to start seeing mid and late game areas.

Also, I should take a moment to talk about payment, since the game's payment system is a little odd. The base game is actually free and open source, you can however, donate to the game to help development and keep the servers running. Paying also gets you some minor perks such as access to the exploration mode mentioned above, and the stone Warden class. Finally, you can buy DLC such as the Ashes of Urh'Rok DLC. You can find more information on this on the game's donate page here. Note that buying the game off Steam or GoG gives the same benefits as donating, as well as giving you access to the game through those platforms.

Overall this is a very big, complex roguelike that's a definite must play for fans of the genre. There is a lot of content here, so much that I actually feel a bit under prepared for reviewing it. Though I could likely spend a hundred hours on this and still feel the same way. Not only that, but the game is still in active development, so there's new content being released and/or old content being updated all the time. This is a game you could readily spend hundreds if not thousands of hours on. Lifetimes could be lost to this thing and with the base game being free, there's little excuse not to try it at least once.

Tales of Maj'Eyal developed and published by DarkGod. It is available on Steam, GoG, Desura and Gamersgate. It's homepage, which includes a direct purchasing option is available here.

A spanner in the works - Drox Operative

NOTICE: This review used a copy of the game that includes the Invasion of the Ancients expansion, your experience with the base game many vary.

Soldak Entertainment, who's previous games I've covered here and here has made something of a name for themselves over the years, by taking action RPGs along the lines of Diablo or Torchlight, and turning them on their head, Depths of Peril had you managing a covenant of barbarians to take control of a town through war and diplomacy against other covenants. Din's Curse pitted you against a living dungeon full of dangers that grew worse if left unchecked. Now, we have Drox Operative. Bringing it's own twist to the formula, starting with the fact that you're in space.

Drox Operative sees you as the captain of a starship flying under the banner of a Drox Operative Guild. Your job is to cruise a galaxy full of warring alien races as a sort of mercenary-for-hire, handling their problems and fighting their battles for a fee. Your ultimate goals are to make as much money as possible, expand the power of the Drox guild and perhaps most importantly, make sure that whatever happens between these warring empires, you're on the winning side.

In space, no one can hear you loot.

One of the first differences in Drox operative is when making a character. You're given a decently sized list of races to pick from. as well as a handful of options for extra challenges like hardcore mode. Unfortunately The only difference between races is some stat bonuses, as well as extra equipment slots for things like shields or missiles. Picking your race, while still important isn't as big a choice as picking a class in similar games.

Interestingly, Drox Operative does not have skill trees. Instead abilities are decided by your current equipment. This allows for a lot of flexibility since you can use whatever you like, assuming you can purchase it from a vendor or find it off a random enemy. There's a decent number of options to play with, including missiles, lasers and mine droppers. You can even install multiples of the same thing and their stats will add up. Want a lot of shields? Just install extra shield components. The only other restrictions you have are your power load, which you can get things like power plants to improve, and your component slots, which are divided into slight, medium and heavy components, and you can unlock more of these by raising your command stat.

Speaking of, while the game has no skills it does still have stats that you can increase on level up. since this isn't a typical RPG, the usual strength and dexterity has been replaced with more fitting things like helm and computers. Each one gives a bonus to something like attack damage or defense, but are mainly used for equipment requirements, such as higher tactical allowing for better weapons. Interestingly,  the way equipment and stat requirements work means that rather than focusing on one or two stats like in most RPGs, here you'll want to spread your points out somewhat to make sure none of your equipment lags too far behind everything else.

Equipment gives your ship a lot of flexibility. Want to use a certain ability? Just equip something that grants it.

Once you've picked a race you'll be put into the middle of a randomly generated sector of space, and this is where the game get's unusual. The basic idea behind this game is that each sector is home to several different alien races. These races will be researching technology, colonizing plants, and fighting amongst each other. You're job in all of this can best be summed up as "spanner in the works", the aliens in each sector will offer you quests that can range from fighting off neutral space monsters or delivering supplies, to helping attack other races. you can even engage in diplomacy with these races to give them things like technologies and information on planets you've found. Your can even spread rumors or propaganda to mess with the races relations between each other. While you don't have much of a personal stake in what's going on, you've got a lot of options on how to influence things.

This leads up to Your goal in the game which is kind of complicated. you basically have three options: Ally yourself with one or more races and help them take over the sector, raise a certain amount of money for the Drox guild, mostly gained by completing quests, or raise your fear rating enough to please the Drox, mostly through fighting. There's actually a good bit of strategy to the game as working towards those win conditions means having to consider who you work for and what information you trade off.

The diplomacy screen from Depths of Peril makes it's return.

The game also has lose conditions, it mostly boils down to not being allies with the winning side when a sector is taken over, or somehow managing to make everyone hate you. The most interesting though is economic loss, which will cost you a sector if you loose the guild too much money. Most of that money is lost by getting killed (Clones are expensive!) so there's a larger incentive than normal to avoid dying. Fortunately, if you do achieve(?) a losing condition, you are given a grace period of about 10 minuets to fix things. So if a race took over the sector when you were just one or two reputation points away from becoming allies with them, you've still got a chance to fix that and make it a win.

While the game uses a similar engine to Soldak's previous works. The graphics actually look a bit better this time. ships recognizably look like ships, planets like planets, and the background includes plenty of distant galaxies and nebulae  to keep things interesting. It's still not a visually impressive game, but but it's a step forward at least.

The game's music is also decent, it's energetic and helps to set the tone of fighting out in space, and helps keep the game from getting too quiet. It's also seems a little larger than in previous Soldak games, with each race having their own music theme. Sound meanwhile is pretty effective, everything sounds like you'd expect, with plenty of explosions and buzzing sounds for lasers, along with a simple engine sound for ships in flight. One major improvement over previous games is some new warning sounds to let you know when you've lost shields or are running low on health, add in the usual sounds for notices and successful or failed quests. Overall, the game does a good job of getting your attention and making sure you don't miss anything important.

Races like the hive here, populate each sector of space.

Oveall, this is a big, complex game, and to be honest that's a bit of a problem. There's a lot of information to track to the point of being a bit too much in places. the win and lose conditions I detailed above are complex enough that there's separate win and lose condition screens you can check to see how your doing. Your ship actually has three health bars: Shield, armor and hull. and they don't all use the same healing items. On top of that you have an energy bar, and even the most basic of attacks uses up some energy, add in a harsh galaxy where too many deaths will trigger an economic loss and you've got a game that can be somewhat hard to get into.

However, if you can come to grips with how the game works and get past those rough early stages, you've got what's easily Soldak's best game as of this writing. A highly replayable action RPG, set in a living, changing galaxy that's radically different from anything else on the market. Worth a look if you already played and liked Depths of Peril or Din's Curse. Though if you're new to Soldak's games I might suggest starting with one of those first, as they're a bit easier to get into while still showing off some unique ideas.

Drox Operative was developed and published by Soldak Entertainment. It is available on Steam, GoG, Desura and Gamersgate. It's homepage, which includes a demo and direct purchase option is available here.

Saving the world, one shard at a time - Heroes of a Broken Land

Here's a game that kind of slid under the radar. An RPG made almost entirely by one person, Andrew Ellem. Heroes of a Broken land wasn't crowdfunded or heavily hyped prior to release. It just showed up on Gamersgate as an early access title one day and was a game in one of their Indiefort bundles. It went on to be fully released, and eventual showed up on Steam after several months of being stuck in Steam's Greenlight system. It's actually kind of surprising how humble this game's origins are, as I'd expect a large RPG made by a single person to have more of a history to it.

Heroes of a Broken Land starts with a simple premise: you are one of a council of mages that used to rule the world, using the worlds crystal heart to bring in an age of peace and prosperity. Unfortunately while the council were good leaders, they weren't perfect. They're personal flaws corrupted the heart, causing the world to explode, reducing it to a series of floating shards. As the only surviving wizard on said council, your job is to restore the world one shard at a time, using the people living on each shard to raise an army of heroes to help you. It's a simple set up that works an an excuse for the game play.

The game starts with a long intro cutscene.

At it's core, Heroes of a broken Land is a RPG with some strategy elements. you start by picking your wizard, who gives a small bonus, such as extra attack strength or MP to all of your heroes, as well as making your first 4 heroes, rolling their stats and picking from one of 4 starting classes. From there, the game starts on the overworld, along with your starting town. You actually have to develop towns in this game, choosing structures to build like weapons and armor shops, stables which let your heroes travel further on the overworld, or an adventurers guild which sells basic skills. Each town however, only has room for so many buildings, and you'll need to convince others to join you to get more space to build. These towns also act as your center of operations, attracting heroes you can hire, allowing you to form parties to explore the world, and storing heroes you're not currently using. They also need to be defended, as monsters roam the overworld, and they will eventually attack your town if you don't send out a party of heroes to deal with them.

The overworld is also full of dungeons, which is where most of the action takes place. Dungeons take place in a first person perspective and actually work a lot like in many old DOS RPGs, with grid based movement and a fixed, forward perspective. The dungeons, like the overword are randomly generated, with the type of dungeon having some effect on it's layout. For example Labyrinths consist entirely of twisting passageways with no rooms, while towers are several stories tall, with each floor somewhat smaller than your typical dungeon. Some dungeons can even require two more more parties to complete, with each party having it's own section to explore, including switches to open the way in another parties section.

Enemies aren't randomly uncounted, but can be seen roaming the dungeon. You get a bonus in combat if you can flank or get behind them, though given the layout of most dungeons, it's unlikely you'll be able do this if a group isn't already facing away from you. Combat in the game is turn based and fairly straightforward, with each character able to chose wither to attack, use an ability or use an item. Interesting however, is that targeting in the game is automatic. you don't get to pick who each character attacks. Instead characters attack according ot what side their on, left attacks left, right attacks right and the the front row has to be defeated before you can strike at the back. Some abilities can mess with this, targeting the entire group or a random enemy. It has an interesting effect on party formation, as you'll want to make sure you haven't put all of your heavy hitters on one side. Interestingly, the AI seems to follow roughly the same rules, Though they can target any row they like.

Combat is turn based with enemy targeting handled for you.

One of the things the game does really well is making for interesting choices, with a lot of stuff bing randomly generated and by extension out of your control, you have to learn to work with what your given. Heroes not only have random stats, but random abilities as well such as being smart or clumsy or even Fae blooded, how good or bad this is depends on the hero's class. Wimpy isn't too big a deal on a spell caster, but the attack penalty is a problem for fighters. What kind of heroes you get also depend on what towns you have, if you want a lizard for example, you'll either need a lizard town, or hope you come across one in a random event.

There's also special structures that can appear on the overworld these structures can teach heroes new abilities for a price, including ones they can't access normally. In the game I played I had a colosseum near my main town, allowing me to spend gold to increase my heroes HP and defense I also had schools of fire and earth nearby, allowing me to promote mages into sorcorers, as well as teaching anyone I want fire or earth spells, This allowed me to not only teach my mages spells they might have missed in favor of picking different spells, but if I had the gold I could teach them spells before they'd normally learn them. Finally, you can eventually have up to six parties of six heroes each to manage, and you'll have to consider which parties should be exploring and which should tackle what dungeon or group of monsters.

Finally, the game comes with a good number of options, not only can you pick the size of the game world, from a tiny world you can complete in a few hours to massive worlds that would take weeks to handle, but there's separate difficulty sliders for various parts of the game, from how much gold you can find, to how many monsters wander the overworld at any given time, giving you a lot of flexibility in setting up the kind of challenge you'd like to face. Though for those who'd rather not tweak things that much, there's still several preset difficulty levels.

when not managing towns or exploring dungeons, you'll spend time exploring the overworld.

Graphically, the game is a weird mixed bag, The towns and intro are actually quite nice looking. Character portraits and enemy spites are also decent, looking a lot like something out of the old DOS RPGs that influenced this game, then even extends to the overword with all it's little icons an pixelated terrain, though sadly there's not a lot of variety here as the overworld only has a few different terrains to use, and there's only one icon for wandering monsters that I've seen. dungeons however, are a bit of a let down, They're in 3d, but made of flat shapes with low-res textures slapped over them, it gets the job done, but it's not all that great looking.

Sound and music is also a mixed bag. What sound the game has gets the job done, but there's only a handful of sounds, mostly used in combat. The game tends to be very quiet when your not fighting, save for the music. The music meanwhile is actually really good, consisting entirely of piano pieces which are honestly nice to listen too. The only problem is that while the soundtrack is good, there's only about three songs and this is a game that you could readily be playing for hours. You'll be hearing the same music a lot while playing the game, and this lack of variety means you may find yourself quickly growing bored of it.

Each town only has so many slots to place buildings in, choose wisely.

The game also suffers form a few flaws, it's nothing game breaking, but I encountered some mild problems with dialogue boxes and the game's UI can have some trouble displaying equipment with long names. One of the big problems though, is the game isn't the best and presenting information. It's mostly small stuff, for example I don't know exactly how much HP or MP the various healing and mana potions recover, at least not without using them first, and you can't check with a skill does unless you're currently able to use it or selecting it on the level up screen, though skill books at least give you a quick description of what they do. It's annoying, but you can at least learn these things as you keep playing.

A bigger problem would be managing your heroes. You can have up to 6 parties of 6 heroes, That's 36 heroes to outfit. While the game cuts you some slack in this manner; inventory is shared across all heroes and you don't need them to be at a town to buy potions and equipment. There's no easy way to see what equipment is best for who or a breakdown of everyone's status or who you've been teaching what skills. If you want to change everyone's equipment or check skills and status, you'll need to check it group by group and hero by hero, which can get tedious once you start growing past your second party. To the game's credit, there's at least a town screen so you an see how many slots a town has, how much gold their pulling in and what buildings they have.

To be fair though, this is a massive game made almost entirely by one person. The only help he had was a world and character artist and a monster designer, listed on the game's credits page. it's honestly impressive a game this big was made by that small a team, and without any sort of kickstarter or crowd funding I'm aware of. So while those problems exist and are annoying, it's kind of understandable. That said the game has seen some extra development post-launch, with new content added and some bugs fixed, so if we're lucky one day they'll have a chance to fix this stuff. As it currently stands? This is an RPG with oldschool influences that makes great uses of procedural content. If you like the idea of exploring a random world, saving towns and fighting monsters while managing an army of heroes, this is definitely a game worth checking out.

Heroes of a Broken Land developed and published by Winged Pixel Inc. It is available on Steam, Desura and Gamersgate. It's homepage, which includes a demo is available here.

Man Vs. Dungeon - Din's Curse

NOTICE: This review used a copy of the game that includes the Demon War expansion, your experience with the base game many vary.

So, awhile back I reviewed Depth of Peril (you can read that here) A... well I went on about this a bit in the Depths of Peril review but, Diablo Clone. That had a few rough edges but brought in some interesting ideas, namely managing a covenant, diplomacy and competition with other covenants, and a living world that doesn't simply wait for you to act. Well, as it turns out the developer wasn't quite done with some of these ideas yet, and decided to make a new game based in the same world.

Din's Curse follows a simple set up. In it you are dead and while they don't go into details your character was to put it mildly, something of a massive jerk. Seeing this Din, champion of the gods has cursed you with a second life. Doomed to wander the world forever, your job now is to redeem yourself by traveling the world, saving desperate towns from monsters and the forces of evil. It's an interesting enough setup, though nothing really comes of it as your placement in Din's Post-Mortem Community Service Program is mostly just an excuse to make with the killing and looting.

Saving the world is nice. But a legendary longbow is better.

At it's core, gameplay in Din's Curse is a straight forward hack and slash affair: pick a class, buy supplies form town then go into the dungeon and start killing stuff for loot and XP. If you've bene playing games like Diablo and Titan Quest it's nothing you haven't seen before, though Much like with Depths of Peril, the game does throw a few twists into the formula. one of the first and most obvious being classes.

In Din's Curse, you have several classes to pick from, mostly fairly standard. You have your big tough, warrior, your spell casting wizard, even a sneaky, trap laying thief. Each class has three skill tries and like in Depths of Peril, the trees are somewhat flexible, having no prerequisite for skills outside of stronger skills costing more skill points to unlock and level up. you even get 3 skill points per level, and even skill that would be considered 'late game' don't have a massive initial cost. So unlocking a later skill only means saving up for a few levels, or spending some money to untrain a few points.

You also get some special challenges to pick from; like only being able to equip gear of a certain quality or better, having no minimap, finding fewer magic items... There's even  one that kills you if you fail to save a town, which makes things interesting if you combine it with hardcore mode: Death is permanent, and failing to save the town means death.

Skills in this game have no sill or level prerequisites to use, giving you some flexibility in building your character.

Outside of normal classes however, Din's curse gives you the option to make a hybrid classes.A hybrid class allows you to pick only two skill trees instead of the normal three a regular class gets. However, those two skill trees can be from any class in the game. For example, you could take the mage's ice magic tree and mix it with the Warrior's Weaponmaster tree. This would give you a character who can pin an enemy down with freezing and slowing spells so he can better beat them up with a sword or axe. There's plenty of combinations to choose from, and if you're feeling like a challenge, you can even pick two trees from the same class. Which I know is possible because I tested it, and not because I had a moment of stupid and somehow managed to pick two trees from the same class without realizing it. Really. I mean that.

Diplomacy unfortunately is gone from the game, instead the dynamic world has been reworked and expanded upon. In Depths of Peril, the living world was interesting, but outside of a few really nasty events didn't have much consequence. If a monster killed a vender, it'd be replaced eventually, a thief stealing goods was annoying but he'd go away eventually if nobody killed him first. In Din's Curse, this dynamic world is now very much set against you. almost every event that happens is meant to make things worse for you and since losing too many people in town can cost you the game, there's more urgency than ever to try and keep things under control before the town is overrun with bad news. This game is very much you Verses the world, and the dynamic aspects of it are much more noticeable thanks to this.

Hybrid classes give you a lot of options to choose from, here's me picking two trees from the same class.

One thing that did carry over from Depths of Peril was the graphics. The game appears to be using the same engine and a lot of models and textures seem to have been ported over from the first game, though things might have been touched up slightly. The game also mostly takes place under ground in dungeons, with no outdoor exploration, and the game seems to handle the underground better. The dungeons are somewhat more interesting than the outdoors of the previous game, though as this game came out in 2010, things are still looking a bit dated.

Music and sound is about the same as the last game as well. The soundtrack is slightly better this time around, it's a bit louder, a bit more noticeable and does a good job fo getting you ready to go dungeon diving, though it's still mostly background filler. It keeps things from being too quiet, but it's nothing that's interesting or stands out enough to have you seeing out the soundtrack. Sound is also much the same as last time: doing a great job of grabbing your attention when something important happens, and monsters make noise to let you know they're there, Everything does what it needs to. But nothing that really stands out on its own.

The game uses a lot of the same graphics as Depths of Peril.

Finally, there something that's not quite a flaw, but more of a warning. The game's pacing can be a bit too frantic at the start. In fact this is not an easy game when things are played normally and being a new character doesn't help. Fortunately you an adjust how fast the game's quests and other dynamic events progress, and I'd highly recommend slowing everything down for your first few towns until you have a few levels under your belt and some idea of how things work. You'll take a small XP penalty for it, but early on being able to actually complete quests and save towns will make up for those losses.

In the end, What I said about Depths of Peril still applies here. If you don't like games like Diablo or Torchlight, this likely won't change your mind. But it's worth if you like those games and want to see somthing different, granted, the lack of diplomacy and a covenant to manage makes it a little less unique than Depths of peril was. but the new focus on you fighting against the world makes the game's dynamic world far more noticeable, and hybrid classes give you a lot of options to play with.

Din's Curse was developed and published by Soldak Entertainment. It is available on Steam, GoG, Desura and Gamersgate. It's homepage, which includes a demo and direct purchase option is available here.

Barbarian Diplomacy - Depths of Peril

Diablo clone. I think it says a lot about a genre of games when it's still being defined as a clone of some other game. Diablo 2 came out in 2000 and even now, 15 years later as of this writing. I still hear games similar to it referred to as Diablo clones. In a world where we have First Person Shooters instead of Doom clones and Multiplayer Online Battle Arenas instead of DOTA clones, Diablo clones don't seem to have quite made a name for themselves yet. I've heard things like Hack and slash, Action RPG and even Loot-Driven RPG thrown around, but I've never seen any one term readily stick and it always comes back to "It's a Diablo clone".

With that in mind, Depths of Peril is... well I'll be tagging it as Action and RPG for this blog but yeah, it's a Diablo clone. Namely, it's a Diablo Clone that sees you as the leader of a covenant, fighting against other covenant's for control of the town of Jorvik. You do this by completing quests to help the town, gaining influence and strengthening your covenant, so you can take down the other covenants, either by making alliances with diplomacy, or as is more appropriate for a town full of barbarians, by gathering your men, storming their home base and beating the crap out of everyone inside it.

Welcome to Jorvik, I hope you brought your axe.

In Depths of peril, you have 4 classes: Warrior, Mage, Rouge, and Priest. They all work how you'd expect; The warrior hits things and can take a beating, the priest can buff and heal, etc. The classes are fairly standard, though there is an interesting twist in how the skill trees are handled. None of the skills require other skills as a prerequisites or even have any hard level requirements to unlock. Instead, skills further down the tree require more skill points to level up, you can even untrain skills individually, though it costs in game money to do this. Many skills don't even have a very high initial cost, meaning you can get what would be late game skills in other games fairly quickly if you can save up for them or have the money to untrain other skills to free up some points. There's also a bonus tree that all classes have access to. instead of skill points, the bonus tree gives various bonuses based on things like stats or level, like extra physical resist for having a high vitality. It's not a major game changer, but it's interesting and help to make things a little different.

On top of your character you also have a covenant to run. You can recruit up to 4 other characters to join you, either by finding them out in the world or by completing their recruitment quest when they show up in town. These characters act like simple versions of the classes you can pick, having the ability to equip a weapon, armor and shield and having a small handful of the skills that class has access to. The skills are random, so finding somebody with the mix of skills is a must. fortunately, you can kick people out of the covenant at any time to make room for new members. These characters will help defend your covenant while you're away, join you on raids against other covenants, or you can have one follow you around while you're adventuring and completing quests. your covenant also acts as your home in base, containing stashes for extra equipment, as well as places to put in guard monsters you can hire, relics that give you're entire covenant various skill and stats bonuses. There's even a book shelf you can fill with books you find, and not only can you read the books stored here, but each new book you turn in gives a small stat bonus.

Your covenant also has a life stone. This stone can quickly heal you over time and acts as your covenants life in a sense, when you or anyone in your covenant dies and resurrects, it takes damage, and enemies can also attack it directly if they somehow get to it. If it's ever destroyed, you lose. Fortunately, the stone slowly heals over time, so one or two random deaths aren't a major problem, but it will add up if you keep dying.

Reading the books is nice, but what's really good is the +1 VIT you get for having it on your shelf.

Of course, your not the only covenant in Jorvik. In each game, you can have as many as 5 other covenants fighting for control of the town, and they are an active part of the game, recruiting members, going out to fight monsters and complete quests. Fighting each other as well as trading and engaging in diplomacy. These other covenants are where the game departs from your typical Action RPG, as a lot of the game revolves around how you deal with them. Your ultimate goal in each game is to be the last covenant standing, or at least be allied with everyone who isn't dead yet, and you have some options on how to do that. You can spread rumors to hurt a covenant's influence over the town, set up treaties and trade routes. Or simply declare war and send your men in to go kill everyone and destroy their life stone. The game has a separate difficulty slider for how aggressive other covenants are, so you can control how much of of an impact they have on the game. That said I'd recommend leaving it on easy for the first round or two, at least until you've got a few levels under your belt and some extra members to help with defense and raids.

The other way Depths of peril makes itself different from other Action RPGs is in how it's world works. Quests in this game are not static, objectives don't simply sit around waiting for you to complete them. not only might other covenants get to them first, but quests can progress or even change when left alone. Is someone lost and need rescuing? If you don't hurry, they might die. Don't gather the materials the armorsmith needs fast enough? he might go out to do it himself and that might get him killed. If your really unlucky, a monster uprising might produce powerful named champions, who will eventually send attacks against the town itself. I actually lost a game once because an uprising I ignored ended with a gate popping up in my home base and flooding it with more monsters than I could handle. It's an interesting takes on quests and adds some urgency to things, forcing you to prioritize what needs to be done, and not just focus on what the rewards are.

While the game is mostly about slaying monsters, diplomacy is more important than you might think.

I should note that this game was originally released in 2007 and made by a small indie team, so graphically the game isn't all that great. Terrain is mostly flat plains dotted with random trees or ruins, many enemies are simple reskins of each other, and overall there's not a lot going for it visually. though to their credit they are using 3D graphics, which makes a nice change from all the 2D pixel art out there and while the graphics aren't the best, they are readily readable, enemies are easily noticeable and while gear can be hard to see, holding down either alt key will highlight things you can pick up for you, as well as things like chests you can interact with. also, what the game lacks in graphical powers it makes up for in modesty, as this game has virtually no system requirements and takes up very little disk space, which is nice if you usually worry about that kind of thing.

The game's music is also fairly minimal. It's actually fairly quiet even with the music slider cranked up, and it's mostly there to keep things from being too quiet. There's not really anything to say about it, it's just there. sound is a bit better, everything sounds like it should including plenty of little beeps, chimes and other effects to help help alert you to important events, such as the sound of someone knocking on a door when another covenant when they want to trade with you. enemies do make some noise as they move around, so there's a chance you'll hear them coming if you somehow didn't see them yet. Sound quality is decent across the board and does what it needs to, so while sound isn't exactly great, it get's the job done just fine.

It's not downright ugly, but it's not the prettiest game either.

In playing the game I didn't encounter any major problems, the game is a bit grindy, as 90% of the game is spent running around killing random things for look and XP, but that's typical for games like this. There is one problem I came across, in that managing your covenant members can be a bit annoying. There's no overall view of your covenant members, to see information about them, you'll have to go look at each one individually, this also makes comparing a member to a potential replacement somewhat difficult. Also, while the game will compare equipment for you, it only compares what your looking at to your equipment, not your covenant members, so upgrading their equipment can be a bit annoying. It doesn't utterly ruin the game, but it's something you'll have to live with.

So with all that said would I recommend this game? It honestly depends, If you don't like games like Diablo this is unlikely to change your mind. If you do like games like that however, want to see something a little different and don't mind a few rough edges? This is definitely a game to check out.

Depths of Peril was developed and published by Soldak Entertainment. It is available on Steam, GoG, Desura and Gamersgate. It's homepage, which includes a demo and direct purchase option is available here.

This is an RPG sequel! - Cladun X2

Here's a game that caught me off guard. The original Cladun: This is an RPG! was a game for the Playstation Portable. A dungeon crawling action RPG, it did well enough to get a sequel in the form of Cladun X2, also on the PSP. Then it just popped up on Steam one day in August of 2012. There were no announcements it was getting ported or even any fanfare over it getting released. It just showed up seemingly out of nowhere and I happened to see it on Steam's front page that day.

Cladun X2 sees your character arriving in a strange world called Arcanus Cella, a small island with seemingly no way in or out save for a strange door that leads to various dungeons. While the basic setup is mostly just an excuse to go into random dungeons in search of loot and experience, and to be honest this is not a game that relies on it's story, there's actually more too it than an excuse plot, as the game slowly reveals information about what the island is and why you and it's inhabitants are there. It's interesting, but can be hard to follow as the story relies on keeping the player somewhat in the dark and there's no way to recap the information that depending on how you play, can end up very slowly drip-fed to you.

The world of Arcanus Cella is full of mysteries, why the toilet has no door is one of them.

At it's core, Cladun X2 is a dungeon crawling action RPG, you make a character, send them into various dungeons, where they can readily run around, attacking enemies, casting spells, and occasionally gathering bits of randomized equipment or avoiding traps. The game comes with a very long campaign that consists of a series of static dungeons to clear. Beyond that though are Ran-geons and Tri-geons. Randomly generated 100 floor dungeons mostly used as a good way to grind, but big enough to be a game in themselves. There's plenty of content here, and while the default gamepad controls seemed a bit oddly laid out and tricky to use, the game does let you rebind buttons and after a little tinkering to find a setup I was comfortable with, I encountered no problems with running and hacking my way through the dungeons.

You have to make your own characters in Cladun X2. For doing that there's a good number of classes to pick from and some options for customizing their appearance, but it's less in making character and more how you can use them where the game starts to show off how unique it is. In Cladun X2 you only control one character at a time, but can assign other characters as support characters. These support characters can't help directly in dungeons but instead act like armor, taking damage in place of your main character while sharing XP with them. Outside of simply being armor however, they can also improve the stats and abilities of the main character through magic circles.

Magic circles are a big part of the game, and you'll spend a lot of time tinkering with them.

Magic Circles are probably the games biggest feature. Each character has a magic circle that you can place support characters on, these spaces then have artifact spaces, where you can place artifacts to increase stats or improve spells and abilities. These artifacts are then activated using the support character's mana. Making things more complicated, Magic circles can grant benefits to subcharacters like earning more XP, or growth spots where you can place artifacts to help strength a subcharacter as they level up. There could also be spots that have penalties, like lowering a subchar's HP or fatemate, where if one character with fatemate dies, everyone else with fatemate dies with them. Each class can unlock several different magic circles as they level up. It's a very large, very complicated system which is both good and bad. You'll be spending a lot of time tweaking Magic circles and for those who like min/maxing characters or tinkering with systems like this, there's plenty of that to do, but while the basics of placing characters and artifacts are easy enough to grasp, there's a lot of information to track and it can be hard to tell just what all of your work, as the game spreads that information out over several screens.

Outside of the magic circles, there's also some other things to tinker with, the most important of which would be entitling. Equipment can come with random titles that increase or decrease stats, and by sacrificing equipment, you can take their titles, and then place them on other pieces of equipment to customize it. Beyond that, you can edit sprites to change how things look in game, make music in MML and even set up relationship diagrams between all of your characters. You can even give character a personality, which in this case is a text message they say when you talk to them in the tavern. All of this stuff is ultimately pointless from a gameplay perspective, as there's no benefit to be gained from making your own music or setting up a diagram, but it can be fun to mess with and it's neat they they included all of it.

You have a lot of options in making your character. Case in point: Catgirl ranger.

Unfortunately, I did encounter some flaws with the game, the first being the games graphics, I experienced heavy flickering until I turned vsync off, and the games oldschool dot-matrix font was unreadable, though fortunately there was a much better smooth font in the options screen. Also configuring my controls was a bit of a mess, as there's two different screens for configuring different parts of the controls and the game doesn't like some functions overlapping but won't tell you what those are. I had to spend several minuets moving between both configuration screens and gameplay to tweak things until I had something that I was comfortable with. though once I got past these hurdles, it was smooth sailing. Finally, the game has a feature for sharing data that when I accessed it, tried to open a wireless connection to receive data. Obviously this was originally meant for sharing data between PSPs and I have no idea if this feature actually works on PC, or is some dead weight they should have removed or altered for the port.

In the end, I'd recommend the game but with a small catch. I'll admit from the problems described above that this game is a bit of a rough port, and if you have a PSP or access to the Playstation store, you'd be better getting this game from there. Failing that though, The port isn't outright broken and is still a perfectly valid way to play the game. If you're willing to spend a little time tinkering in the options menu, You've got an massive, complex action RPG that you can readily sink a few hundred hours into.

Cladun X2 was developed by System Prisma and published by NIS America. It is available with a demo on Steam. It's homepage, which is mostly for the PSP version is available here.

The first part of one of Falcom's biggest series - Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky

If there's one trend I would of never seen coming in gaming, it's Japanese RPGs on PC. outside of stuff by indie devs, JRPGs had been content to stick to consoles and handhelds, but lately there's been a trickle of them showing up on Steam and there seems to be a slowly growing interest on seeing more of them on PC. enter The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky. the first part of a trilogy, itself part of a much larger series. This game had initially seen a release in North America on the Playstation portable, with no sign of the second and third games being released until last year, when XSEED announced not only is a translation of the second chapter in the works, but it, along with the first chapter, would see release on PC.

Trails in the sky is about a pair of characters named Estelle and Joshua, and their attempts to become what are known as Bracers, basically adventurers for hire. As you might expect, this seemingly simple task ends up anything but. I should note that there is a LOT going on in this story, not only due to it being a fairly long game, but because this is the first game in a trilogy, so the game has to lay out a lot of ground work for the later games. Fortunately, while there's a lot of information to chew through, I never found the game very hard to follow. It helps that the game has some wonderful characters and a good sense of pacing: The story is serious and treated as such, but there's enough humor and lighter moments to keep thing from getting too straight faced for it's own good.

You will meet several characters in your journeys, some weirder than others.

At it's core, the gameplay for Trails in the sky should be fairly familiar for anyone who's played a JRPG before: you travel a very large world, solving various quests and fighting in turn based battles. it's worth noting however, that battles battles have a bit more to them than a typical JRPG, rather than your party and enemies lining up to trade blows, battles take place on a grid that characters can move around on. This changes things form a more typical JRPG because you can't simply attack, you have to be able to reach enemies to hit them, also spells take some time to cast and while many can simply target a specific area, some have an area of effect need to be targeted, forcing you to think ahead to where enemies might be in the next few turns when deciding where to aim them. at the same time, some enemy attacks can be avoid by using your characters turn to move out of the way. It forces you to think about how the battle is going and not just constantly attack, pausing only to use the occasional healing spell or item.

Another thing that stands out in the game is orbments While the game does have various pieces of equipment your characters can wield and wear, orbments are how you really customize them. Each character has an orbment with several slots you can put what are called quartz into. These quartz have various elemental values and the total value of the quartz decide what spells the character has access to, on top of that, the quartz themselves can have various stat bonuses or penalties on them, as well as extra bonuses like decreasing the casting cost of your spells, called arts in this game. it's actually a fairy complex system, where slots can require certain types of quarts, and there's lines that decide how your quarts various values are added up. fortunately it's easy to come to grips with once you've tinkered with it for a bit, and the game has a built in magic list so you can see what values you need for what spells.

Battles take place on a large grid

On top of a lengthy main quest, the game also has a number of side quests. From the bracers guild in any town you can pick up any of a number of side quests that range from finding lost items to exterminating dangerous monsters to delivering items.  Fortunately, these side quests are not your typical MMO-style 'find x items' or 'kill x monsters' quests, some of them involve various puzzles, and even the simplest of them: exterminating dangerous monsters' have specific encounters for you to deal with and aren't just random monsters. There's even some hidden quests if you're willing to explore and not just rely on what's in the guild. It helps break up the main quest and gives you a good reason to explore the world beyond what's strictly necessary.

It should also been noted that the game has a very large world. While there's only five major towns to visit, there's plenty of side areas and smaller villages to explore. each chapter of the game takes place in a different section of the world map, and exploring any one of them can take some time. Exploring is also well rewarded, as useful items are often hidden off the main path. This size however, does come with one drawback. The game has no fast traveling, and you're often required to travel between several distant locations. Granted, the game world isn't as large as a full blown sandbox game like Skyrim, but it's still a lot of ground to be stuck repeatedly traveling through.

There's a lot of ground to cover in this game

Graphically the game is pretty decent, the game uses 3D graphics mixed with sprites that appear to be based off 3d models, everything looks nice, textures are nice and colorful, and hte game world is nicely detailed without becoming cluttered. The only major fault I noted is the animation for some of the 3D objects in the game seemed a bit choppy, but otherwise there's nothing to really complain about.

The game's sound is also decent: Everything sounds like it should and while the game doesn't have much voice acting beyond a few lines used in battle, what's there is done well enough. The music, is actually very nice. Falcom is known for producing some great soundtracks and this game is no exception. Though I should note for those who know of Falcom mostly through Ys and are coming here from that series, this game is an entirely different beast so sorry, no rock music to headbang to.

Attempting to take items form the same chest twice has interesting results

Overall I would highly recommended this game if you like RPGs, JRPGs in particular. it's a very large game that took me over 40 hours to beat, and even then I missed quite a few things, the story is well told and the characters are very likeable. As I've said before there seems to be a recent trend with JRPGs showing up on PC and out of all the games involved, this is one of the ones to get.

The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky was developed by Nihon Falcom and published by XSEED and Marvelous USA, Inc. It is available on Steam and GoG. It's homepage is available here.

This game kicks ASCII - SanctuaryRPG

NOTICE: This review is based on the free version of Sanctuary RPG, and does not account for content added in the Black Edition, which was not available at the time this review was written.

As I've said before, one of the reasons I started this blog was to steer people towards interesting games that have flown under the radar, and when it comes to being both interesting and under the radar. a retro text based rpg that's not on steam would be a hard thing to top.

SanctuaryRPG is very much a weird game, a text based RPG that plays with a keyboard only. You'd think it was a VERY old game from the early 80s or even the late 70s, but it was actually made in 2010. It's not quite a roguelike thought it takes some inspiration from them. The closest comparison I can think of is old BBS door games if you've ever played any of those: text only, turn based, and based mostly around menus.

I wasn't kidding about the text. This is the entire title screen

As an RPG, the game gives you a surprising amount of options upon starting a new game. On top of choosing a race or class, of which there's plenty of both, you also get to choose what kind of game to play. You can choose if you want permadeath or not, or to play a survival mode which has you keep fighting battles until you die. Your choice has some minor effect on the game outside of difficulty. playing without permadeath gives you a slight penalty to item drops, and you can't unlock augments, which are small bonuses you can pick on starting a new character.

The gameplay is based heavily around navigating menus. You're given a list of the actions you can take at any point, and go from there. Want to visit the blacksmith? Chose the blacksmith option to bring up the menu for it. Crafting? You've got an option for that. Need to check your stats? Character menu. Since the game is purely keyboard based, it helps keep the controls nice and simple. There's not really any commands to remember, just look at the menu, tell the game what you want, and off you go.

you'll be seeing a lot of menus like this in game.

Combat in the game is also menu based, and it's surprisingly good. Combat is based off chains of attacks and focuses on managing resources. Many attacks cost mana, so you need to avoid running out, though you can readily recharge it by choosing to reposition instead of attacking, at the same time, you might need to reposition to break an opponent's guard or use a turn to break free of a bind. There's also special options like focus or grapple that can show up under certain circumstances. This keeps combat interesting; you have to consider your options fairly carefully, as if you just spam attacks you could get penalized for missing a grapple opportunity, or find yourself unable to reposition when an enemy is charging you.

The game also has some other options outside of normal combat, you can run a tavern to gain gold and experience, there's an area that occasionally creates random dungeons, basically a string of harder than normal fights in return for a prize, and there's a crafting system. As you play, you'll gain various materials you can use in a crafting minigame, the result of which decide how powerful the resulting item is, though the item is unfortunately still somewhat random. You can choose the base type, like a weapon or armor, but not exactly what kind of stats it'll have. you even have a crafting skill that levels up independently of your main level, there's more than enough here to do outside of the usual fighting.

The crafting minigame lets you make new items, though the results are somewhat random

Graphically... well, technically the game has no graphics as it's all text based. That said the game uses a lot of ASCII art and colored text and despite how primitive it is, it's very nice looking. The game manages to throw in some little animated sequences for some things, and many screens have some sort of art to accompany them. Even when the screen is mostly a menu, the game includes various boarders and windows to organize things so it's not just a wall of text to read. The end result is a game that's not half bad looking despite how primitive the graphics are.

The game also has a pretty nice soundtrack, it's all chiptune music that goes along with the retro text aesthetic nicely. The music makes heavy uses of square waves and is just a little scratchy so it sounds like it's from an older game. The battle themes, which you'll likely be hearing most often, are all very catchy and fun to listen to. The Game's sound is very minimal, but is a lot like the music, most of it is small jingles that play for certain events, but what few sounds are actually there are somewhat scratchy and low quality, overall the game really nails the look and feel of older games.

Enemies can have random modifiers, that change how they fight.

The game also fortunately runs very well. I didn't encounter any real bugs and since the game is text based, there's virtually no system requirements. The main problem I have with the game is there's no inventory for equipment, when you find new equipment, you have to equip or salvage it for crafting materials right then and there. Also there's no mouse support. I realize that's likely going against the game's retro ideology, and to be honest the game works just fine keyboard only. It doesn't NEED mouse support, but as the game is all menus it'd be nice if I could simply click through them. Call me lazy I guess.

In recommending this game, I have to admit that it leans somewhat on it's gimmick. This is a game that sells itself on using ASCII art and chiptunes in an age of 3D graphics. To it's credit however, it's not purely reliant on it. Underneath all that text and keyboard-only interface is a surprisingly good RPG that manages to accomplish quite a bit within the limitations the Devs put forward. Plus, as of this writing the game can be downloaded free off their homepage and is pretty cheap everywhere else so by all means, give this thing a spin and if you like it? Go buy it, it only costs a dollar or two.

Sanctuary RPG was developed and published by Black Shell Games. It is available on Desura and directly from the developer. It's soundtrack is available on Bandcamp. it's homepage is available here.

An upgraded version of SanctuaryRPG, called SanctuaryRPG: Black Edition, is available on Steam.

A headbang worthy RPG - Ys: The Oath in Felghana

Here's a game with a bit of a lengthy history. Ys: The Oath in Felghana - It's pronounced "eese" by the way, sounds like ease - is a remake of the older game Ys III: Wanderers from Ys, a platform/rpg that was released to several different systems in the late 80s/early 90s, readers might be familiar with the SNES and Genesis/megadrive ports. The remake was originally released on PC in Japan, then improved upon and ported to the PSP and released in North America. Some time after that, the original PC version was translated and released on Steam, which is the version I'll be looking at.

At it's core, The Oath in Felghana is a top down action rpg, though I should note the game leans much more towards action than RPG, there is equipment in the game and you do gain levels, but stats are somewhat simplified and there's not a lot in the way of skills or spells to unlock, you do gain new abilities throughout the game and certainly grow stronger, but the game isn't very big on customization.

The game has a nice looking intro

The game has a decently sized world to explore and Interestingly, despite the game not being a platformer like Ys III was, the game is still somewhat broken into stages, there's a small overworld connecting several distinct areas you'll have to travel through, and they're all fairly different, from mines to old ruins to castles. There's a little backtracking, usually for secrets, but for the most part things are pretty linear as you visit each area of the map in turn.

Each of the areas you visit has at least a couple bosses and the bosses are where the game really shines. bosses in this game are big, most have several phases they go through as they're damaged and are very hard to beat. Most of the game's difficulty comes from these bosses and while they're hard they're also fair, while they don't seem to follow a fixed pattern, it's possible to learn each of there attacks and they do a decent job of telegraphing things, there's no real cheap shots and losses are usually the fault of the player. Fortunately, if you do lose the game gives you the option to try the fight again so you can try as many times as you need to take them down.

Bosses are big, impressive, and very difficult to take down

Despite the game moving from a platformer to a more top down perspective, there's still some platforming in the game which is a bit of a mixed bag. To it's credit, the game handles the plantforming well enough, and the few sections that heavily rely on it switch to more of a side view to better handle it. The game isn't horrible with it, thought at least one late game dungeon involves a lot of vertical climbing that can prove slightly annoying. It never got horrible and everything works more or less, but the game isn't really built for platforming.

The game has a fairly basic story, though they do a good job of telling it, this is helped by the game's size, it's not a large game and doesn't try to be: I beat it in a little over 6 hours. While this means the game is short it also means the game doesn't waste time or try to stretch itself out with needless padding. You won't find any forced plot twists or derailing side quests because the game needed an excuse for another dungeon. The game does exactly what it needs to do to tell the story it wants to tell and nothing more and the story rolls along at nice quick pace as a result.

almost every character has a name and a portrait, many are introduced with large ones as seen here.

Graphically the game is pretty good. Each area of the game world looks distinct and everything is at least decent, thought somewhat primitive, likely due to being a several years old PC game. Most of the characters are sprite based thought they look to be based form CG models, and outside of some pick ups dropped by enemies, many of which are unusually small, everything is readily recognizable world geometry is a bit simple but there's still a few nice looking areas to be had, such as the bridge leading out of town.

The games strongest point just may be the music. Falcom is noted for have some amazing soundtracks to their game and this is no different. Despite the games fantasy setting, the soundtrack is more than happy to break out the electric guitars and rock the hell out, This is a surprisingly headbang worthy soundtrack as you'll find out almost immediately upon entering the games first major dungeon, and it only gets better from there. Annoyingly, there doesn't seem to be any readily available version of the soundtrack, at least not digitally. Thought the game's music files are kept in .ogg format, so you have that at least.

While primitive in areas, the game still has some nice views like this.

The game's has very few flaws that I'm aware of, I didn't encounter any real bugs, and most of the problems with the game are more opinion rather than anything really wrong: it's a very hard game, even very easy difficulty can prove a challenge at points, and it's short. on the other hand it's a proper challenge and it doesn't doesn't waste time, taking exactly as long as it needs to do what it wants to do and no more. Outside of my issues with the platforming sections mentioned earlier, there's nothing here bad enough for me to have any major problem with it.

Overall I'd recommend the game. However, there is one thing I need to make note of: The steam version of the game is based off an older PC version, and not the more recent PSP version, while I'm not familiar with the PSP version, I've read that it includes features like New Game + and voice acting that aren't available here. So while the steam version is good, you might want to consider the PSP version instead if that's an option to you.

Ys: The Oath in Felghana was developed by Nihon Falcom  and published by XSEED. It is available on Steam.