It's magic. It's the best game ever made.

This game rocks. It has a momentum and isn't into wasting your time. Game runs fantastically on SteamDeck with something like 4-6 hours of battery life at 90fps, no slowdowns or drops, the pixel art is beautiful and crank the text fully up in size so that it's... mostly ok to read. (It's still kind of small.)

PROS: quests, exploration, character customization.

Quests are quick, but they also require thought and actually reading the directions... there's no minimap or arrows pointing where to go. You will find/buy maps and you can mark them, but it's refreshingly self directed. You can find things THEN discover someone wants that thing so the world isn't just popping up macguffins when someone finally marks your quest journal.

Exploration is extremely rewarding with just plain cool stuff out there... I find a skeleton next to an earth elemental corpse just past a cave in and I can imagine how the battle went down and the rock monsters attack caving the adventurer in to die. I was sneaking in some ruins and noticed my "noticing" eye going up... it was a button that did nothing so I crawled around the ruins finding 4 buttons until I heard a boom and entered a secret chamber. This world building is as strong as Dark Souls IMO, it has that special alchemy of mystery + reward.

Leveling up is the right mix of simple (3 stats, not too many skills overall) and complex. You're balancing leveling your stats to use a new sword vs. hmmm do I want a new shield skill or master crafting?

CONS: lots of running, it's hard early, some things will wombo-combo you.

If you dislike running back and forth, well, you can just not do that (and there's some fast travel later it seems), but there's so much to explore I didn't mind. It was harder to stay focused and not keep exploring!

You will want to either take notes or have a fantastic memory for things. Then again, it's not like missing anything is too painful. I've found mysterious things I have no idea how to access or use yet.


tl;dr This game rules and now I have to play Gothic 1 and 2 since I hear they're similar.

The perfect game does exist.

If you look, even the best reviews have under 20 hours played mostly. It's just not that good of a game which is too bad because the inspiration for it is great. It's plodding and when you get into it, you have to get all new characters to build up again. Not worth it.

I got in a fight with an elf wearing a giant hat. I tried to compliment him on his hat, but he said, "I CAN'T HEAR YOU, MY HAT IS TOO LOUD."

Screw you, buddy!

10/10

This game is so deep, challenging and fun. I can't get enough!