Recent reviews by Odwella

Very interesting narrative tactical game. Took me another hour into the game past the demo completion point to solidly decide I'm going to have to replay the game to explore what could have happened if I made a different choice.

Main Takeaways:
- Aesthetically wise, the game is gorgeous. I love the character designs and especially the visual and mechanic designs of the paladins. The soundtrack is also really lovely.
- Worldbuilding and lore is interesting. There is a journal/encyclopedia helping you keep track of the different characters, houses, relationships, and general alliances. The aesthetics of the visual character design is also fantastic because it helps you group different houses/family members together and even potentially pick up on certain foreshadowing a little bit early. Past that, it's up to you to determine how your choices will affect the established status quo. After one playthrough, there are a lot of questions unanswered and a few more characters to discover.
- Tutorial and Gameplay mechanics: I think I give the tutorial aspects an 8 or 9 out of 10. The majority of combat and non-combat mechanics are introduced naturally and explained pretty decently. The UI on PC using a keyboard and mouse was super convenient to use to hover over different terms/status effects to get a better understanding of what was going on but I am not sure how well that translates over to controller experience. On that note, I really enjoyed the flee mechanic, but again, don't know how the feeling of it would translate over to controller (or if there would be any difference). There were a couple of things that I remain a little confused about in terms of how the 3 characters you control align with different factions (e.g., when Rollo can 'succeed' or 'fail' to meet nobility or peasantry expectations). I assume there is some counter but the results felt off when I would think about how often I sided with one faction v another. It makes me wonder if some choices are more weighted/more important and thus affect this tracker/counter more.

The combat was engaging and towards the end the various bosses introduced new mechanics to keep the sort of "end-game" boss rush enjoyable. However, with this kind of game, I am definitely more intrigued in the story they built up and how messy and purposefully frustrating (in a good way in my opinion) it can be going through the game because it's impossible to fully experience everything. And 98% of the choices you make end up having a messy consequence and it does force you to sit with them (outside of save scumming).

All in all, I really enjoyed the game. I just finished my first playthrough on Soldier difficulty and am immediately starting up a second run through to see if I can make some slightly better choices.

I've been playing this game since January 2019 and it's still positively addicting

It's the game I keep coming back to.

This game is addicting and the relationship I have with it is probably unhealthy. I've only had it for about two days and I already love it and the story. As the name suggests, it's not a walk in the park, and it's the perfect challenge.