Abermore arrives with an enticing premise: a fantasy-tinged stealth RPG centered on preparing for the greatest heist of your criminal career. Developed by Four Circle Interactive and published by Sold Out, the game casts you as the mysterious Unhanged Man, a legendary thief whose reputation precedes him as he returns to the underworld for one last grand score. Over the course of 18 in-game days, you infiltrate lavish estates, pawn stolen treasures, negotiate with shady figures, and acquire occult abilities through tarot-like cards—all to assemble the resources needed for a climactic vault break-in. On paper, Abermore promises an immersive, emergent stealth experience infused with eccentric characters and supernatural flair, something reminiscent of Thief’s brooding atmosphere with a dose of roguelite unpredictability.
The early hours reveal a compelling foundation. Abermore’s world—a neo-Edwardian city brimming with class tension, corruption, and whispered legends—possesses a strong sense of tone. You wander through dim alleyways, linger in the black market stalls, recruit accomplices with questionable motives, and prepare for nightly robberies in mansions that shift their layout each playthrough. The tarot system is one of the more imaginative design elements: cards grant abilities that range from subtle utility powers to outright magical advantages, letting you adapt your approach as you build a deck of tricks throughout the campaign. When everything aligns, Abermore can evoke the feeling of a cunning thief weaving through shadows, exploiting weaknesses in a living city, and maneuvering through a string of improvised criminal scenarios.
But the deeper you progress, the more the game’s structural instability begins to overshadow its creative ambitions. Abermore relies heavily on procedural generation for its missions, and while this theoretically offers variety, the execution produces inconsistent environments that often feel random rather than thoughtfully crafted. Rooms overlap, props clip into walls, patrol routes make no logical sense, and entire areas may contain layout issues that allow you to bypass sections unintentionally—or worse, trap you. Instead of feeling like a handcrafted stealth playground, many levels resemble broken blueprints hastily stitched together.
The stealth mechanics themselves suffer a similar fate. Guard detection is erratic, sometimes too sluggish and other times hyper-alert in ways that feel disconnected from your actions. Light, sound, and visibility systems lack clarity, making it difficult to read how stealth encounters are intended to function. These inconsistencies pull you out of the fantasy of a master thief and push you toward brute-forcing encounters or relying heavily on the occult abilities that trivialize stealth altogether. The result is a game torn between wanting to be a methodical, immersive sim and accommodating its own technical fragility through magical shortcuts.
Technical issues compound the design problems. Performance hiccups, crashes, soft-locks, broken mission triggers, and UI glitches appear frequently enough to undermine the experience. Inventory menus misbehave, cutscenes fail to load properly, and quest progression can simply stop due to missing interactions. Even players determined to embrace the game’s ambition often find themselves stymied by bugs that range from inconvenient to game-breaking. These problems aren’t minor annoyances—they shape the overall pacing, destabilize mission flow, and disrupt the sense of agency crucial to any stealth-driven game.
Narratively, Abermore hints at an intriguing world. The tone is whimsical yet grim, filled with eccentric characters and the lingering mythology surrounding the Unhanged Man. But the fragmented gameplay and constant interruptions caused by technical issues make it difficult for these narrative elements to resonate. What could have been an atmospheric descent into a corrupt, arcane city instead becomes a disjointed march through malfunctioning missions and uneven storytelling beats. The gulf between the game’s appealing concept and its execution becomes more apparent the longer you play.
Still, within this troubled framework, there are flashes of creativity worth acknowledging. The tarot powers can lead to spontaneous moments of triumph or clever improvisation. The sense of preparing for a grand heist over several days gives a unique structure to the progression, and occasionally, a mission will come together in a way that captures the mood and intent the developers clearly aimed for. Those fleeting successes hint at the ambitious stealth-RPG hybrid Abermore wanted to become.
Sadly, the game never consistently reaches that vision. Abermore feels less like a completed experience and more like a rough prototype full of imaginative sparks buried beneath unstable systems. Its heart is in the right place—a world rich with personality, a clever progression loop, and a distinctive supernatural touch—but its technical shortcomings prevent it from delivering on its potential. For players fascinated by flawed, experimental stealth games, Abermore may offer moments of charm and curiosity. For most, however, it will likely stand as a reminder that ambition alone cannot carry a game that lacks the stability and refinement its genre demands.
Rating: 3/10
