Solasta: Crown of the Magister

TL;DR: This isn't a cinematic high-production value RPG like Baldur’s Gate 3 or Divinity Original Sin, or a massive, text-heavy and choices matter game like Pillars of Eternity, Pathfinder or Rogue Trader. The truest spiritual ancestor to Solasta: Crown of the Magister is the original Neverwinter Nights Wailing Death campaign. It is a faithful, turn-based D&D 5e combat simulator. Its visual and narrative presentation is undeniably rough, the fun comes from the combat and builds to play around with. My Playthrough Context: I experienced this entirely single-player on Authentic difficulty. I finished the main campaign and the high-level Palace of Ice DLC, with every intention of diving into Lost Valley in the near future. My run was completely vanilla, bypassing mods or custom campaigns for now. Anyone with a solid background in cRPGs or table-top 5e will find Authentic difficulty to be a bit on the easy side. My party mix was a Wizard, Bard, Barbarian, and a Paladin of Tirmar. The Paladin of Tirmar is absolutly a strong choice for both the original campaign and Palace of Ice. The specific bonuses this subclass provides against the game's primary enemy types make it an absolute powerhouse. The Good: If you approach Solasta expecting the multi-layered narrative reactivity of a modern RPG, you will be disappointed. The main campaign offers almost zero meaningful roleplaying choices, leading to essentially the same conclusion regardless of your actions. Palace of Ice grants a bit more freedom, but at its heart, this is a combat engine first. Much like the Wailing Death campaign, the story, lore, and setting are perfectly serviceable, linear, and predictable framing devices designed to push you from one battle map to the next. The combat itself is where the game excels. The maps verticality is fun: climbing walls, flying, knocking enemies off ledges, firing arrows or spells from the high ground feel genuinely tactical. The pacing is also refreshing brisk. If you feel that games like Pathfinder get totally bogged down in tedious kingdom management, crusade mechanics, or the exhausting overflow of meaningless trash-fights, Solasta is a breath of fresh air. The fights are snappy, deliberate, and better paced neither too long or short. The economy feels fair, forcing tough decisions on what gear to buy. The gear attunement rules means your characters can only equip up to three high-tier magic items at a time. Technical performance is rock-solid with a decent variety of spells and subclasses, none of them feel useless. I didn't experience a single crash-to-desktop, and playing almost entirely on Linux yielded identical performance and stability to Windows 11. The background music is also quite good. The Bad: The mechanical precision means accepting a heavy compromise in production value. The game presentation is remarkably rough. Character models and animations are stiff and unrefined, and the voice acting spans a wildly unevenly between completely purely perfunctory and outright unlistenable. The game suffers from a noticeable performance degradation over long play sessions, where the frame rate crawls to a slow after a few hours of continuous play, especially in denser areas. A quick restart resolves the memory leak. Character progression is also tightly constrained. While there is an excellent selection of core classes and builds to play with, there is absolutely zero multiclassing. You are locked into a single class path from level one to the cap. The maps lean toward the smaller side, and the enemy AI is generally mediocre, though to its credit, enemies are smart enough to mostly avoid walking directly into an active Wall of Fire or Growth of Thorns. The Ugly: The most frustrating design choice is how the game handles social interactions. Rather than allowing you to utilise your dedicated "party face", the game automatically delegates dialogue skill checks based on character backgrounds. Irritating to build a charismatic leader only to watch a low-charisma companion force-triggered into rolling an important Persuasion check simply because their background tag matched the prompt. Conclusion: Solasta is not a cinematic RPG epic. It is essentially a digital dungeon-crawling combat simulator built around D&D 5e mechanics. Just don't expect the presentation, narrative depth, or roleplaying freedom of the genre's modern heavyweights.

I ALMOST recommend this, because as a tabletop DnD player I really enjoy the 5e system and it is implemented well here. I especially enjoy the highly customisable difficulty, because it essentially allows for house rules - something I really appreciate. HOWEVER... - The base game is yet another combat simulator. There are endless generic fights, essentially only combat skills matter, and whatever benefits you would get from having characters with non-combat strengths in your party are negligible. I hate this trend in RPG video games and this one is a pretty awful case of it. - There are essentially NO story choices in the main campaign, so it's a linear combat simulator on top of it. I heard a couple of the DLC campaigns are a little bit better, but that's the other thing... - DLCs account for more than half the game if you add them all together. Several campaigns and half the character-building options are paywalled behind DLC. The most interesting thing about this game, and why I will continue playing it is that people can make their own campaigns using the dungeon builder tool. I look forward to exploring many of the player-made custom campaigns, and it MAY be worth getting for that. But when the most exciting parts of your game are community-made, there is something wrong with that picture.

It's games like this that remind us all that you get a good game if you take care making all the gameplay systems. People often complain about the ways this game is worse than the big budget titles, so instead, here is where this game is [b]better[/b] (!) than other crpgs, such as Baldur's Gate 3. Some of it is due to its (older) SRD 5 ruleset, and the rest is because the makers took the time to craft it. -True 3D combat. When a character climbs a wall with Spiderwalk, or flies, they have an actual altitude value and gameplay reflects this. In BG3, you can fly THROUGH the air, but you can't choose to hover a specific height from the ground. So cool. So great. I don't know of any other game that has this. -A toggled camera option ('planar mode') that lets the mouse wheel control height, and shows your character's movement range as you move your camera up and down. Hence the true 3D movement above. This does not sound special but it is an amazing feature, and the sequel will be a flop if it does not have it also. -The 'Scavenger' system. You no longer need to worry about looting everything on a map, because this faction (the Scavengers) will come and sweep the area for items after you leave, and late you can view the items you missed, take the ones you want, and they will sell the rest and send you the money made, by pressing one button. It is a massive quality of life feature and I wish more games have it. If the sequel does not have it then it has no right to call itself a Solasta game. -Assignable personality traits and beliefs for characters which heavily shape their dialogue. I do not mean unique dialogue options you can choose. I mean the way characters in your party talk amongst each other and to NPCs, without needing your input at all. That way, cutscenes feel so natural and immersive. It is brilliant. -Travelling on the world map. Okay, I know that tons of games have this. Well, the world map looks beautiful (it's a 10), and you have an actual clock in the corner. Plus, crafting things takes real hours in this game, and random encounters happen fairly often, so overworld travel is never boring (which is why it's a great, relaxing 'comfort' game). You also have a 'travel journal', which takes note of a variety of events, such as a party member foraging for food supplies, what people do in their spare time, and random things people observe on the journey. Most of the journal does not affect gameplay, but it's just charming. Quaint, even. -The game engine. Wait whaaaaat? You're saying this game looks better than BG3? No I can never say that, but the way the sun reflects off armour and skin and so on is very realistic. That's all. All the cutscenes are in-engine because the engine is that good. Hope the sequel is at least just as pretty. -The range of environments. I especially love the map where you're in an extremely dark stone maze. It's almost pitch black. That was a pretty memorable experience. I enjoyed zooming all the way in to the environments and just appreciating the detail. You can have the camera as close as the eye level of the characters. -High level wizard spells. Max level in the Palace of Ice campaign is 16. You only have 1 spell slot for spell levels above 6, but the spells are so cool and it's great to have this dnd content in a game setting. DnD nerds would love this. -The cover system. +2AC for half cover, +5AC for 3/4 cover, and not being targetable (!) for full cover. Standing behind someone also counts as cover. It's a great feature, and very suitable addition to this ruleset. -Displayed dice rolls. No, really, I mean absolutely every single dice roll in this game is animated, with actual dice spinning on your screen. If you smited with 4d8 damage and you got a crit, then you will see 8 dice roll on your screen. It's a cool touch. They are colour coded too. It's another reason people say this game is charming. A for effort. -You can choose to roll ice for your attributes, instead of 27-point buy. So if you want 18 in strength, constitution and wisdom, you could do it. It's just fun, and it's a shame it doesn't seem to be in the sequel. You can even completely cheat on your stats, by using the 'free edit' option to manually set every one of them. A bit overpowered, yes, but I like that these are options. So if you want to make a character with 3 constitution, be my guest. -'Old timey' rules. Things like max of 3 unique item effects per character (cannot attune any more than 3) which means less overpowered item combos, having to have a free hand (not holding a weapon or shield) to cast most spells, aka the somatic requirement, rolling dice to craft items, scribe spells, identify what spell was cast by an enemy, etc., only being able to cast one leveled spell per turn (so if you are hasted, you cannot cast fireball twice in one turn), having feather fall as a reaction and not a ritual (longstrider and jump are also not rituals), misty step having 6 tiles of range, the Ready Action option (instead of attacking on your turn, you can choose to wait for an enemy to come into range or take an action before you attack), infinite short rests between long rests (and rolling of hit dice to regenerate HP in short rests), 1 inventory action per turn,only being able to use a scroll if the spell is on your class' spell list, and many more other little things. It's cool because it's authentic. Even if you don't care about authenticity, it is interesting, and I like that. Hope that covers it. The game is not that easy to learn, but if you are familiar with any version of DnD, or if you've played games like Divinity, Pathfinder, Pillars, Baldur's Gate (or any of the Infinity Engine titles), this game is worth a buy and you would probably enjoy it. It's DnD comfort food.

it's like Baldur's Gate 3 if it didn't explain most 5E rules, had a poorly designed UI, half the character options were DLC, the text had constant errors, had aggressively generic music, every character was made of silly putty and every turn took several years to complete. actually that part is pretty similar to BG3

Game 178 of my backlog FOR THOSE WHO CAME FROM BG3 AND DON'T KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH THIS GAME, please continue reading: 1) If you can get by the graphical disparity, then this game is actually pretty darn good. Definitely not BG3 level, but not a lot is. It should scratch that itch you have though if you finished BG3 and are looking for what might be next 2) Speaking of BG3, if you ARE coming from that, you will feel right at home with the character creator and gameplay mechanics. They are maybe 90% similar. Same for items, although there is a different way of identifying them 3) Unfortunately, you cannot respec or multiclass (supposedly being implemented in Solasta 2). So whatever class and abilities you pick, it's final 4) Fortunately, the level does not cap at 12. So enjoy that aspect 5) The magic animations are great. The music is excellent. The voice acting is...overall okay. It has some hits and misses, but on the whole, it works. And there are some comical moments depending on your character(s) personality types, which influences what they say 6) The story is pretty good There is probably more to say, but I did enjoy it once I got over that first graphical hurdle. If you can push through that, then you have an overall great game waiting for you

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I loaded it up and half the base races and classes of d&d are locked behind a dlc paywall. You can f*** right off. Instant refund.

Solasta: Crown of the Magister — the game that boldly answers the question: “What if your Dungeon Master was a spreadsheet… but like, a *really passionate* spreadsheet?” From the moment you boot it up, you’re greeted with voice acting that sounds like four theater kids were locked in, what I can only describe as, a medieval torture chamber disguised as an escape room and told they’d only be released if they fully committed to the bit. And you know what? They do. Every line is delivered with the emotional intensity of someone trying to convince you that *this* time, the goblin ambush is narratively significant. Character creation is where things truly shine—or rather, where they aggressively flicker like a torch in a damp cave. You don’t just build a party; you assemble a council of vaguely agreeable coworkers. Each has a personality slider ranging from “mildly sarcastic” to “HR complaint waiting to happen.” The dialogue system ensures your party will constantly chime in, often to say absolutely nothing of value. It’s like traveling with a group chat that refuses to mute itself. But let’s talk about the real star of the show: THE RULES! Oh yes, Solasta doesn’t just follow D&D 5e rules—it *worships* them. This game will enforce line-of-sight like it’s a sacred doctrine handed down from the gods. Want to cast a spell? Too bad, there’s a decorative pebble in the way and you have no movement left :D Tactical positioning matters so much that you’ll spend half your time rotating your camera like a confused owl just to figure out your wizard suddenly forgot how eyesight works. Combat is turn-based and methodical, which is a nice way of saying you will absolutely bully the AI with elevation mechanics. High ground in this game isn’t just an advantage—it’s a lifestyle. If you’re not raining arrows and spells down from a ledge like a morally ambiguous park ranger, you’re playing it wrong. Now, visually, Solasta looks like it was rendered using the finest graphics technology available in 2007. Character faces have that slightly haunted look, like they’ve seen a man descend with his full weight onto a glass jar and were blackmailed to never speak of it ever again… mostly bugs in the lighting engine. But honestly? It adds a little charm. You’re not here for photorealism—you’re here to watch a goblin get shoved off a cliff in glorious, slightly janky slow fashion. The story is… present. It exists. There’s a crown. It’s magical. You are, presumably, interested. But let’s be real: you’re not playing Solasta for its gripping narrative. You’re playing it because it’s one of the few games that lets you recreate the experience of arguing with your DM about whether you can climb a wall while holding a torch and 500lbs of equipment along with your dignity. Now let's talk about Modding, a.k.a. The People Who Looked at This and Said “We Can Make It Worse (Better?)" Specifically, the Unfinished Business mod — which sounds less like a mod and more like a vague threat. This thing doesn’t just tweak Solasta; it kicks down the door and installs a whole second game inside your game. Suddenly, character creation goes from “respectable D&D-lite” to “I have made a multiclass abomination that would get me banned from three incredibly hardcore tabletop groups.” New subclasses? Yes. New feats? Absolutely. New ways to completely destroy any semblance of balance? ENCOURAGED! Ever wanted to create a character so mechanically optimized that your enemies don’t even get a turn, and your party members quietly question why they’re even here? Congratulations, Unfinished Business has you covered. It’s like giving a min-maxer a loaded spreadsheet and saying, “Be free.” But the real magic is that it fills in all those little gaps where Solasta went, “Eh, close enough.” The mod adds depth, flexibility, and a frankly irresponsible amount of player freedom. It’s the kind of customization that makes you spend three hours in character creation, emerge with something truly cursed, and then immediately start over because you just thought of something worse. And somehow—somehow—it feels like this is how the game was always meant to be played. Like the base game is the DM carefully following the rulebook, and Unfinished Business is that one player who shows up with a 12-page character backstory and a build that technically works but makes everyone gravely concerned. And somehow, against all odds, it works. Beneath the stiffness, the awkward dialogue, and the relentless adherence to rules, there’s a genuinely fantastic tactical RPG. It’s the kind of game that feels like a digital love letter to tabletop purists—written in slightly smudged ink, with a few spelling errors, but undeniable enthusiasm. In conclusion: Solasta: Crown of the Magister is a beautifully awkward, mechanically obsessive, occasionally unhinged RPG that proves you don’t need AAA polish when you have the raw, unfiltered power of geometry and spite. 8/10. Would fail a perception check again.

Most of the character roster consists of DLC content, while the base game dosent includes standard fantasy races like orcs and traditional D&D-style classes. As a result, the core roster feels a little limited and lacks some of the more unique character options. Game play feels a little chunky, not been able to level up on the spot having to go back to rest is a drawback and story is bit corny.