Recent reviews by KneeKo

I have spent literally the whole ~90 minutes just trying to get past the character selection screen. I have a 5700XT, and in no way such a game with non-heavy visual fidelity "run out of VRAM" even on low settings.

This game needs to get back to early access. This is the 2nd game they released, and despite "extending early access for quality", they are far, FAR from ready. This game feels like an alpha game with its literally non-existent optimization.

Do NOT buy right now, even if the game is on discount.

It's been years. Almost going to be 3 years now. Anything majour between release and now? Not really. They initially predicted a year, but with how they're just doing this as a "side hobby", it will take, another 3 years MAYBE, if I'm being generous. With how their monthly update fixes or polishes VERY FEW bugs (maybe 10 bugs, 10 polishes) PER MONTH, the game will be finished in about 6-8 years. By the time this released, it's going to have been superceded by a similar but more modern and polished game being sold at the same price point but has much more going for it than this. Don't believe me? Look at Sea of Stars, Chained Echoes. We'll get much more by the that 6-8 years at the same price point.

Funnily enough, these devs refuse to realize how games like this DO SELL WELL. Instead, they are egotistic and refuse to give this more focus and get more things done. They think that the same 30 people in their Discord will stick with them for another 5+ years and that'll somehow magically inflate to Sea of Stars level of popularity.

There is a rough diamond here, but this diamond is going to be largely ignored because the developers failed to give this game proper focus to be finished. Instead of capitalizing on the initial popularity and having all hands on deck to work on it full time, they continued working on this the same pace as they did, making this obscure into the background.

Shame. These were one of the games I bought expecting the devs to realize the potential of this game and double down on efforts, instead we get a Valheim thing going on where the devs work on it on their spare time.

I won't judge, they can of course choose how much time they'll alot into the development, but they should expect a similar amount of success: Pennies.

The game is great, the art is interesting enough, but I wish as something based in a traditional rogue-like, it had better keyboard-only support. It doesn't have enough of it, and since the game is already full release, and the dev has future plans already, I sincerely doubt this will change.

Regardless, the game plays very well, and I will still recommend it even if the flaw stated above was a dealbreaker for me. Will not refund as well, because of how much love and focus the devs poured into this project. Hopefully, in the future, the dev will consider more keyboard-focused gameplay support!

EDIT: I was banned from the forums due to "Aggression and starting arguments on solved issues".

For one, I was harsh on my feedback, but it was not aggressive at all. Secondly, an argument is fair, and it was in no way aggressive and targetting the person. The community manager of this forums is a snowflake and can't take feedback, and is very unprofessional.

Be careful where you thread.


REVIEW:
Controls are extremely awkward and non-intuitive if you're using a mouse and keyboard. it's purely designed for controllers, because depending on the angle of doors, it's very hard to move through it properly. There's severe lack of indicators, the GUI is all over the place, and there's a lack of shortcuts for navigating certain common actions. Targetting, interacting, is also very awkard.

The game has some nice aesthetics, but the abstractness and the lack of context on what, where, and how to manipulate and go about navigation is extremely tedious.

I wanted to like this game. I really did. But when it takes 15 seconds just so I can properly click the head of an opponent because he's facing an awkward position that makes it hard to aim at the head, then I'll take more time moving around, trying to click things properly, and trying to make sure I can properly enter doors without having to walk somewhere I did not intend to, and ultimately, this breaks immersion. Everything in the game feels very "beta".

Until they change these fundamental flaws, I cannot in good faith, recommend this untested, "pay us so you can QA our game" game.

TL;DR:

- Passive-aggressive, egotistic dev/s.
- Game was advertised as "challenging turn-based RPG", but is severely veering away from this concept and becoming a "survival simulator".
- After years and years of development, the game still has barely functioning mechanics, no character creator, and a map that's big but very, VERY empty.

LONGER:

The most recent update brought more tedious survival mechanics into the game. You now have to manage the following to keep playing at your BASE STATS:
1. Hunger
2. Thirst
3. Sanity
4. Injuries + Part damage
5. Morale
6. Pain
7. Fatigue

So now, the game has become much less of "challenging turn-based RPG" (as per the store page description), to "survival simulator". These all would be great if they were implemented to make the game more immersive to play, with the incentive of managing these mechanics to help you fare better. But when it's there just to literally pad progression and cuck you from playing at your base statistics, then this becomes literally unfun. When the devs decided to give you a craftable sleeping bag that requires ingredients that take up more than 70% of your inventory and then is only usable ONCE, then you know these are difficulty mechanics designed to make you spend more time managing, rather than playing.

At first, they said "mechanics first before content like story, etc.", but then with all these mechanics veering to trying to make this play similar to Cataclysm, you can expect very little additions in the future after all base mechanics have been implemented.

This game is becoming more like a pure roguelike sandbox rather than a true turn-based RPG as advertised.

It doesn't help that the dev/s are not receptive of feedback, egotistic, and are at almost always passive-aggressive. They keep making the excuse of being "indie developers", but do not accept the demerits that come from it. e.g. lacking the insight of intuitive game design. No, they only use it to excuse what they do.

The only thing that'll save this game is once it's finished, people will mod it to remove these absolutely silly mechanics that do not benefit the depth of the gameplay itself.

Crash simulator 2021.

I'ts been years since this sorry excuse for a game was released, and it's extremely poorly optimized. There is no way my system runs this game at 25fps only. Bethesda executives really are greedy trash.

An extremely polished game. Plays very well, the story of each character is very nice, and is "comprehensive" enough for its price. Highly recommended even on full price.

While the game's sound value and visuals are decent, it looks like the budget was all put on it, rather than even remotely optimizing it.

While I am enjoying the game, I am not recommending it for the sole reason that the optimization is so bad, that you can only see half of the animations of almost all attacks due to frame skips. if the developers can't be bothered to fix this, then people shouldn't be bothered to buy this as well.

EDIT (Post 1.2 patch): The latest patch DOES NOT even touch optimization. The game still stutters a lot when combat, non-basic attack moves initiate, and when a combat session ends, EVERYTIME. Loading is still iffy (not too much of an issue, this one).

EDIT 2 (Past 1.3 patch): The game still runs at the exact same poor state. Stutters still happen EVERYTIME you do something, FPS is still low at certain areas, even at the lowest graphics settings. I have a 5700XT, and in no possible way should a game with this low visual fidelity run at such a poor state.

I think devs should stop releasing content and optimize what they have first before releasing content.

Decenty game. Good time-waster, but not something you should play as a main game. Was designed to be played in short gaming sessions, so steel your expectations that this is not like other story-driven rogueliets that have one grand plot, as you will be playing short campaigns.

PROS:
- Good amount of cards.
- Easy to pick up, not very complex
- Very flexible build options. While starting cards are tied to how your character begins, you can build your heroes to your liking. Want a spell-casting assassin? Go for it!
- Immersive campaigns. While the campaigns are similar to D&D's "One Shot"s, they are deep and engaging enough despite how being short they are.
- Smooth animations and sound production value. Animations and sounds on melee attacks, spell casts, blocks, card shuffling, all sound unique, crisp, and very good.
CONS:
- Ocean wide, knee-deep. Albeit there are alot of build options, on higher difficulties, the only purpose of using say an all-melee party is purely for the challenge. At the end of the day, to viably an reliably finish a campaign, you'll need to build spellcasters and have ranged DPS on your party.
- Imbalance. Again, while the number of builds you can play with is plenty enough, ranged DPS is the way to go. Going melee can be very risky, especially if you get unlucky with a bad encounter and bad card rolls. Melee attacks cost around as much as ranged spells, do single target damage, and you'd be dead before you can even reach your target. Spells/ranged DPS offer more utility and AOE damage, and is overall better.
- UI and aesthetics. While it does look nice and solid enough, this feels like it is supposed to be played on a tablet or something smaller. The font is really large, and how the interface works just screams mobile game.

Overall, still recommend the game, but I am not very sure how the price is justified. You get 3, 5-6 hour campaigns in the game and one open-ended, procedurally-generated campaign, so there's that. Again, don't expect one grand epic campaign, but rather a time-waster roguelite meant to be played in short sessions. If you're looking for that, maybe go for Tainted Grail or Griftlands.