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Premise:
You’re a soul woken up by the Gods to do their bidding, to aid the pantheon in their war against the “One-God”.
Good:
- Open world. Exploration is rewarded, you get notes, interesting enemies or quest NPCs/quest hints as you explore the game.
- Interesting lore and world. It has basis in Slavic Mythology.
- Interesting quest design. You have NPC provided quests and “world events”. The latter are basically random events that happen. They don’t have an indicator on the map but you get enough clues to know where to look. For example, a world event announced thar a trader cart crashed somewhere. You go to the location and get quite a bit of loot. Some world events announce the consequences of your actions. For example, I stole Griffin egg. This led to an increase in Griffin attacks everywhere.
- Character selection and death mechanic are very unique. You don’t just create a character, you literally possess a NPC in the game world. Some have their own quests that you can solve, while others don’t. Each NPC has predefined attributes that suit certain playstyles. Dying causes the death of the NPC but you can decide to pick another NPC instead. You can turn the death mechanic btw.
- Has tons of other stuff to do like foraging for food and herbs, cooking and alchemy.
- Expanding upon the character selection thing. Remember how I said that the player character that you possess are actual NPCs in the world? Well in my playthrough, I took over a slave looking for his wife and kid. Eventually I stumbled upon them and freed them. At this stage, the Gods appear and give me (PC not the NPC being controlled) a choice - leave this NPC a.k.a. Reroll OR stick to this NPC but he’ll need to leave his family behind to continue with God’s mission. I picked the former and rerolled. Then, I went to the same spot where my previous character was and found my equipment, a unique item and a thank you note.
- As you may have guessed from the previous point, your choices do matter quite a bit.
- The passive system is also interesting. Your passives depend on your playstyle. Being too honest affects stealing negatively but benefits “good experience”.
Neutral:
- The skill system is very basic when compared to Diablo II or Grim Dawn. That being said, the dual mastery counterbalances this and keeps things interesting. Moreover, your skill choices do matter so you can’t just roll with whatever.
- Itemization isn’t as extensive as Grim Dawn but there was definitely some thought given to this aspect as you can notice the depth to itemization once you start getting the good stuff.
- There’s a bit of inconsistency in the writing style and art style. Some stuff is well written or drawn, others - not so much. This is because the game has like 1 or 2 full-time artists and maybe 3 devs.
- Transformations have limited use. This is more of a personal nitpicks, as I loved the Druid class in Diablo II. The way transformations work in this game is that they’re not locked behind classes, but rather are available to every mastery. But, they’re essentially things meant to make traversing the world easier. You can use them for combat, but I’m not sure how viable they’re against bosses. One interesting thing about transformations is how people respond to them. For example, you can safely morph into a stag in front of NPCs but if you transform into a werewolf, they’ll become hostile.
- Endgame is pretty basic. You only have something similar to the Crucible available.
Exapansion:
The game got an expansion recently that improves a lot of things and adds a new path for the main story.
Conclusion:
I’ve played a lot of RPGs and this is easily one of the better ones, I recommend these to anyone that loved Grim Dawn. This was developed by a very small team that included 1 full-time dev, his artist wife and few others artists for hire. This was their first RPG. Despite this, I found a game w/ a good amount of depth w/ a decent amount of replayability.