Avernum: Escape From the Pit

Great old-school CRPG. The gameplay is easy to learn and it's easy to jump right in.

有汉化了。。。

太无聊了，简直是underrail的魔幻弱化版，做图形推理都比这游戏有意思

So I've played the og Avernum by the time I was 9yo or something... And I do remember vividly how unforgiving the world was, but I honestly had no memory of how miserable as well. Avernum takes place in a set of caves and underground ambiances (hence "the pit") that is very successful in transposing the feeling of desolation - overworld should be darker without the excuse of glowing things imo, but it's alright nonetheless -, true poverty and how unbalanced real power can be when everything else is lacking. Spells for one represents real power in Avernum, not in a lorewise aspect but considering how broken it is as a consequence in this scenario: quality equips are scarce and mostly with melee or ranged oriented traits; resistances are slooooooowly scalable both as part of character growth and equipment building but their hard cap is kinda low; mana is overwhelmingly abundant; knowledge is just a matter of coin. The way devs nerfed spellcasters? As intended, of course: making armor a nuisance, as you find in so many other tabletop RPG setups following root DnD rules. But as freedom is respected so much in Avernum (which makes the game so enjoyable over and over after all these years), nothing beyond patience stops you from building a medieval Sephiroth-Doctor Strange-esque powerhouse wearing the heaviest imaginable armor available while STILL dealing an humongous amount of magic damage AFTER debilitating enemies AND buffing your entire party, ALSO being able of tearing enemies in close combat. The cost? As stated, patience. A LOT of patience. I truly praise Spiderweb and the Avernum series, specially the 3rd game, for such a wonderful work up to this day in translating homebrew tabletop RPGs to a vastly accessible and incredible experience, specially for all individuals seeking fun over graphics the way we did back in the early 2000s.

I sat and played this game for 12 hours straight, can't believe it was un-played in my Steam Library for over a decade. A striped back CRPG with a great premise, interesting story and surprisingly complex progression.

For those who aren't aware, this is the 3rd incarnation of this particular game. The original version was released in the mid 90s, remade in about 2005, and then remade again in about 2012. This is the most recent version. Apart from Avadon, I haven't played any of the other Spiderweb games, but it seems the Avernum series has been streamlined and possibly dumbed down a bit to appeal to more casual players, as the original versions apparently allowed you to create a party of 6 characters and included survival mechanics. Those sadly have been removed and now you have to roll with a party of 4 characters instead. Travelling through the subterranean world of Avernum seems like a quaint jaunt from town to town as the survival mechanics have been stripped from the game and the only thing you really have to worry about is running into a group of enemies too tough for your party to handle. You also no longer have to spend money to resurrect any dead companions if you don't have the means to do so yourself as everyone in your party is fully healed up and revived when you enter a friendly town. So what's good? - There's a nice lengthy CRPG here. The main objective is to escape from Avernum and get back to the surface world and just to achieve that should easily take 60 hrs plus of gameplay. There are also 2 other major questlines as well as a whole bunch of smaller and side quests so this game should keep you busy for a while. - The writing and story are decent enough, certainly when compared with a lot of higher budget games. So what's not so good? - Graphics are simply not very good. While I'm not too bothered about graphics in general, Jeff Vogel (the main developer of the Avernum, Avadon, Geneforge and Queen's Wish series) insists on using these tiny little assets in his games to represent characters, objects, etc. Little buttons on the walls which open secret doors or valuable objects lying on the ground can often be quite difficult to spot. I would not recommend playing this game for long stretches as it could cause eye strain! - Fiddly, primitive mechanics. Your party cannot be split up as everyone always travels in a group by default. There are no stealth mechanics so you are pretty much up sh*t creek without a paddle if you happen to run into a strong group of enemies as escaping combat is often difficult or not possible. There is no way to examine enemies to determine their powers, weaknesses etc. Pathfinding can be wonky (especially in combat) and characters will often just run off in the opposite direction if you try and move them closer to an enemy when any obstacles are in their path. Objects like gold or weapons lying around cannot be picked up by clicking on them like in most other CRPGs, but instead you have to hit 'G' which brings up a little window displaying any objects that can be picked up. Takes a bit of getting used to. Training your skills or improving your spells is ridiculously expensive and you will often be short of cash. As an example, you can buy a boat for travelling the waterways for about 300 coins, but training a skill up a level will often cost about 4 times that! - Clunky dialogue system. If you have to speak to an NPC about something specific, often there is no initial option to ask directly about it. Instead, you have to work through several exchanges of dialogue first before the option comes up to ask your specific question. If you are stuck somewhere and need to return to that particular NPC later on to ask them the same question again, you once more have to run through the same load of dialogue from scratch, almost like you're talking to them for the first time again. - No in-game music. Probably understandable given this game is mostly a solo effort, but it would be nice to at least have some other ambient audio other than the sound of the wind howling or this generally inarticulate chatter you hear in towns. Overall, it's a decent enough low budget CRPG, but I found its limitations annoyed me the longer I played and eventually I just wanted to get the game finished by escaping to the surface, without doing any of the other major quests. Regardless, it's reasonably priced and worth picking up if you enjoyed isometric CRPGs like the Pathfinder series, Pillars of Eternity or older titles like the Ultima series or the old SSI gold box games. If I had to score it, I would probably give it about 6/10.

Great old school isometric RPG from a small dev team. If you like older RPG's then this is good bang for your buck.