Right now, this game is a beautifully wrapped, chaotic, and unfinished mess. Your truest companion in the Valley of Mines isn’t Diego—it is the manual save menu. And no, I don’t mean leaning on a quick-save button that ruthlessly overwrites the same few slots until you're trapped. You genuinely have to open the menu, type out a unique name, and hold your breath every single time you accept a quest, cross into a dungeon, or take a step forward. A single broken trigger can instantly soft-lock the entire world, burying your playthrough on the spot.
The overall balance feels like it was hastily sketched out by an ore baron who had too much swampweed. Everything is shamelessly tilted toward melee combat. The game teases you with bows and magic right away, but putting points there feels like a trap. Take the story: the plot expects you to rely on Milten to fashion a scroll and weaken a terrifying monster. But if you’ve built a proper swordsman? You can completely ignore his fancy rituals, walk right up, and cut the beast to ribbons. Ranged and magical builds do pathetic damage. By the final bosses on the highest difficulty, a melee build needs a mere six swings of a blade to end the world. Good luck even reaching that climax if you relied on arrows and bolts.
To be fair, the magical arts aren't entirely useless. The 'Death to the Undead' spell is brilliantly effective, and Ball Lightning is a total godsend for battlefield control. Its true elegance lies in its flexible 4-tier charging system: you don’t need to fully charge it for damage. Releasing it at the very first tier is enough to instantly freeze a foe in place, buying you time to retreat, strike them down, or prepare a far more devastating spell. Healing is magnificent precisely because you can cast it on the move, and it grows incredibly potent once you reach the 4th circle. And the Light spell? It’s the single most useful piece of magic in the game—a weightless, hands-free flashlight that effortlessly works even underwater. Pure gold.
However, high-tier offensive spells are a complex tragedy. They force you to stand entirely still, fully charging the spell to deal maximum damage. Attempting a full cast in the open while a pack of monsters is actively rushing down your throat is pure suicide; you will simply be stunned or slaughtered mid-incantation. Of course, if you can crowd-control them or find a cheesy ledge where they cannot reach you, it can turn the tide. If it’s a late-game masterpiece like Rain of Fire, a single completed cast can stagger and slow the advancing horde, giving you just enough time to chain another spell and reduce everything to ash. But that is 5th-circle magic, and it takes a grueling eternity to get there. Until then, roleplaying a traditional Fire Mage without a heavy bag of dirty tactical tricks is a nightmare.
The economy behaves itself only during your opening hours. If you travel like a normal wanderer—looting only what you need—the balance remains perfectly intact. But if you play like me? By the endgame, you’ll sit on a mountain of 15,000 ore with absolutely nothing left to buy, while your inventory degenerates into a bottomless black hole of unsold trash.
Navigating it is pure torture. Sure, the devs technically added item categories, but they are completely useless when you have to endlessly scroll through pages upon pages of swords just to find one specific blade, with absolutely no sub-filters or search options to save your sanity. To make matters worse, manually dropping things takes an eternity. On my first two playthroughs, this absolutely broke my spirit because my inner loot-goblin physically wouldn't let me pass a body without stripping it bare. By my later runs, I simply gave up, kept my looting to a strict minimum, and stopped caring about lockpicks.
Speaking of which, a recent patch introduced difficulty indicators and matching experience rewards for lockpicking. Too bad the system is a complete lie. You will frequently shatter a 'Difficulty 4' lock in two seconds flat, only to spend twenty miserable minutes raging over a stubborn 'Difficulty 1' door.
Yet, the achievements are where the game's true dark comedy shines. Take the challenge for beating the game without ever sleeping. NPCs love to randomly draw their weapons on you for absolutely no reason. Normally, you would sleep for 24 hours to clear the air. Without sleep, their fury hardens into an eternal grudge. By the mid-game, exactly one trader in the entire world will still do business with you, because the scroll designed to clear NPC hostility is completely broken and does nothing at all. To solve this deadlock, you can try beating them up yourself, but the game rarely accepts your fists as an apology. Alternatively, you can let them beat you up, which is a massive gamble. When you hit the dirt, they will almost certainly rob you blind or trigger a finisher and murder you.
Survival requires a bizarre kind of geometry: you have to position your character perfectly so that when the final blow lands, your body ragdolls down from a high wall or a bridge. The goal is to drop into a spot where the AI either physically cannot reach you, or simply won't have enough time to navigate down before your character recovers and safely gets back onto their feet with their inventory untouched. If you manage to pull this off, their aggression might reset. But because the system is so unstable, it's just as likely to trap you in an endless loop of brutal beatdowns regardless of who won. In the end, I found a much cleaner, medieval solution: I simply slaughtered every camp that refused to speak to me.
If you dare to chase the permadeath achievement, where a single demise deletes your save file, go practice glitching out the final boss before you commit. Breaking his AI is the easy part; the real miracle is reaching his chamber without a game-breaking bug corrupting your world. And whatever you do, do not trust the water. If you jump from a high cliff, the water physics can randomly vanish for a fraction of a second, leaving you to splat against a perfectly dry ocean floor—a tragedy that happens with alarming frequency if you happen to be riding a Rideable Scavenger.
Your final lesson in colony physics is to always watch the terrain before delivering a melee finishing blow. If your target is slumped in a ditch, a shallow dip, or is already partially sinking into the scenery, do NOT go for the kill. The execution animation will violently drag your character down into the void right along with them; it is infinitely safer to just shoot them from a distance while they are down. Even on perfectly flat ground, giant story bosses love to fall in ways that render them entirely unlootable. Their tiny interaction hitbox is tied to their stomach, so if they faceplant, that precious spot gets buried beneath the floor textures. To claim your rewards, you must either spam the interaction key and rifle through their pockets mid-air while their massive body is still falling, or ensure you have a manual save waiting right before the battle in case they land poorly.
We can only pray that the developers refuse to abandon this project. Perhaps in a few years, with enough patches and patience, this magnificent pile of bugs will actually turn into the masterpiece we all know it can be.
