
A story driven solo RPG inspired by oldschool games like RuneScape and Ultima Online! Explore a sprawling medieval fantasy world full of npcs with dialogue, level skills, fight varied monsters and uncover the story of Rothar Aercrest – the cursed lord to the remote woodlands of Imberthale.
Modeled estimate, not a reported figure. How we estimate →
Discounts
Every price cut of more than 20% we have observed, in each market that quoted one, with this game's chart position on either side of it. These are episodes, not a model: a sale is one event, and one event cannot tell you what the next one will do.
Reviews, worldwide (the counter carries no country): 0.86/day in the week to Aug 20 → 4/day in the week after.
For scale, across Steam · Top Sellers · Brazil over the last 30 days: the 25 chart moves that followed a price cut of more than 20% went a median of 10 places towards #1, and the 2,413 moves with no price cut behind them went 2 away. One store, one chart, one country — it is the only place we have enough observations to say even that.
Prices outside the United States have been collected since 6 August 2026 and chart positions since 19 July 2026, so a cut older than that has no market to compare and a market that joined later has no history yet. Nothing here is converted between currencies.
About

The Black Grimoire: Cursebreaker is a medieval fantasy singleplayer adventure inspired by oldschool games like RuneScape and Ultima Online! Journey through a sprawling open world full of npcs with dialogue, level skills, fight varied monsters and uncover the story of Rothar Aercrest – the cursed lord to the remote woodlands of Imberthale. Increase your power by advancing 4 combat & 8 crafting/harvesting skills; craft, loot or be rewarded powerful items; unlock special attacks and spells which will aid your way in defeating the worst monsters that lurk in the remote corners of the world.
Variety of quests with deep writing.
Numerous weapons and spells to employ in strategic combat.
Large open world that rewards exploration.
12 various skills to level.
Customizable player houses to rest your weary bones.
Social multiplayer - meet other players in towns, taverns etc.

Tired of ‘epic tales’ of ‘world ending proportions’, Cursebreaker offers stories of human pettiness, revenge and greed - all the good stuff. In this game you're not yet another 'chosen one' destined to save all life from impending doom and gloom. Instead, you're Lord Rothar Aercrest - the feudal ruler to the remote woodlands of Imberthale. Or at least you used to be...

One fateful day your path crosses that of a dark wizard, Gabrius, who appears to be both tremendously powerful and frightfully malicious. Consequently you soon find yourself caught within a mortal feud between two powerful wielders of magic, all the while bound by a curse you desperately need to break free from.
If Lord Rothar is to know peace again, Gabrius must surely die. That might not prove to be such a simple task. After all, what is death besides a mere nuisance to the master of the Black Grimoire?

Character progression in Cursebreaker is tied to the various skills you can advance. All in-game interactions tend to give experience in your various skills, and gaining higher skill levels will unlock appropriate interactions, abilities and crafting options. Fighting enemies in close quarters, for example, will increase your Attack and Defence skills. As they gain levels, you unlock new passive and activated abilities, can wield more sophisticated weapons and armor, and gain access to new traits from the appropriate trainers.
The spellbook offers a large variety of both combat and non-combat utility. Finding and learning new spells may prove a challenge in itself, and casting more demanding spells will require preparation, such as gathering specific ingredients. Feel free to create your own playstyle by using any combination of ranged and melee weapons and spells!
The crafting and harvesting skills provide a variety of bonuses too. Gaining experience in woodsmanship through felling trees not only provides you with crafting materials for bows and such, but may allow you to pass through obstacles in the world and otherwise speed up your exploration. Skill in Alchemy does not only unlock potions, but also bombs and poisons!
Available skills in the game include Attack, Defence, Archery, Sorcery, Smithing, Crafting, Tailoring, Alchemy, Mining, Woodsmanship, Fishing and Cooking.
The game automatically saves your progress. In the event you fall in combat, you will be revived at your nearest graveyard, having potentially lost some of your valuables along the way. No worry, these can be recovered either by visiting the place of your death, or by paying a scavenger. Remember to carry restorative foods and protective potions to guard against dangerous enemies!

Although Cursebreaker is a singleplayer game, it provides an option for a social multiplayer; in other words, you will be able to see other adventurers online, but the interactions are limited to chatting and inspecting equipment only. It will not be possible to trade with them or otherwise engage in gameplay-related activities with them. You may adjust the online mode to apply to big cities only, to be always on, or to opt out of it entirely and play fully offline in case you don't care for it.
Two authentic players chatting.
Engagement
Reviews
Themes across 115 recent reviews and how positive each mention is. A keyword signal, not full sentiment analysis.
Reviews
*160hours now and 222/262 achievements. Only continuing because I want to 100% the game, but I'll add a few details + clean up some of the review* I bought this game to grind and 45 hours in the experience feels pretty empty. This is due to new breakpoints in Skills, where you unlock a new craft or equipment, has very small benefits compared to what you were already using. The game is very heavily inspired by Old School Runescape. The tedium of grinding however cannot be lessened with trading for resources like many Skiller accounts do, so it's more like playing an Iron Man account. HOWEVER, if you are someone who feels that mods are integral to modern PC gaming, you can very easily edit any numbers in this game with Notepad. I'm judging the game as a base experience, not one where I fine tune the whole game exactly to my liking. So what about having the game on in the background as you grind these long tasks? The game suffers from memory leaks, so you can't keep it open for too long, especially if you want another game open alongside it. Because of how much clicking you must do to restart mining, fishing, fighting when combat breaks and you suddenly stop attacking, or just picking up the drops you have to farm to level crafting skills, it's hard to have in the background. Not to mention the game has an anti-afk mechanic built in where your screen will just go black and stop whatever you were doing. Imagine my surprise when I started attacking a training dummy, left to make lunch, and came back to my monitor being a black screen. I had this happen while waiting for 5 minute respawns before, but sometimes it just spams me with a red warning message in the chat log about how the game isn't auto saving anymore because I'm standing around too much. The worse part of the grinding leads to why I'm left feeling empty. Many skills, especially combat related ones, give me a sense that my hours of grinding do not equal to an appropriate level of gain. Spending 2 hours smacking bandits to gain +1 attack on your new sword doesn't feel great. Or even worse, tanking 15 bandits for 4 hours to get new armor with vague "Protection" stats. Armor and Shields mainly give Health and Protection. Mana and Mana Regen too for robes. This "Protection" stat doesn't seem to be the same as Defense in other games. Instead of reducing the damage numbers you see, you instead increase your chance at the enemy missing. Because you are increasing an Evasion stat instead of reducing damage, your new gear don't always give a proper sense of an upgrade. The huge damage ranges enemies can have, sometimes as big as 1-50, and then adding the fact some of them can crit or do True Damage, can lead to very spiky combat. I rarely feel safe if there's more than one enemy, unless I know I'm overgeared enough to barely get hit. I know I'm technically stronger because my stats are higher, but it doesn't always feel like you actually got much stronger. Btw, Wands don't have any Spell Damage, no matter what tier they are other than a single wand at lvl53. You're just gaining Accuracy. This minor increase in benefits extends to other skills too since you are mainly crafting those minor upgrades yourself. Cooking ended up with item bloat due to food having minor differences like, "lvl45 food: 70HP over 20s VS lvl60 food: 80HP over 20s" as another example. I also have no idea what the difference is between each tier of Pickaxe, Fishing Rod, or Axe too since they have no gathering stats on them despite Woodcutting Speed being a stat in the game. Oh, Mining and Fishing Speed doesn't exist at all though... Before I get to some annoyances, I will say that there is a "Respawn Enemy" button, which does help slightly when trying to farm resources to craft with. You'll still have to farm for multiple 10-30% drop rate items just to craft a single item, but at least you aren't standing around as much. Some other annoyances: A major bug I found, the support campanion you get for end-game, Loras the Nimble, heals certain enemies instead of you during battles. Despite the graphics, the game stutters constantly, probably due to it saving literally every 5 seconds. It even tells you how many seconds have past since your last save when you go close the game, and it always shows between 1-3 seconds. The pathfinding for your character is garbage, so clicking on your map and trying to auto walk a far distance will run you into the nearest wall instead, or sometimes the complete opposite cardinal direction. There is a Bestiary to show item drops from monsters, but it doesn't tell you where the monsters are located. There are Quests and Tasks. Quests appear in your Quest Log, Tasks do not. So if you find a task, you better memorize what items you were asked to collect. As I mentioned, the stat screen doesn't actually explain what the stats do, which is why so many people are confused to what Melee/Range/Magic Protection actually does, since the damage you take doesn't really change. The stat screen shows Woodcutting Speed, but there no Mining or Fishing speed to help those skills out. This is VERY noticeable for mining, which is a massive chore to grind due to Mini-game, no exp boosting gear, and huge gaps in between each new ore unlock. Accuracy and damage ranges are horrendous. I've had enemies hit for anywhere between 1-50, not counting if they crit for double damage, and the low accuracy on all attacks makes casting the bigger spells feel pointless unless I'm already overgeared for the content. Side note, you are expected to level all three combat types, Melee Range and Magic, as enemy resists will often have 2 high and 1 low, which means a lot of semi-AFKing at the training dummy, or in a group of 10 enemies all hitting you while you eat soup every 8 minutes to avoid dying to level Defense. Finally I'll add that the active 'community' for the game is incredibly small. No one wants to make a wiki, there are barely any videos or guides on the game, and reddit posts will often have no one commenting on them. Not to blame the game or developer for this, but it should be mentioned to let you know that outside help if you do get the game will be limited.
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Stats
All-time low is the lowest price we've recorded for this game since we started tracking it.
Languages: English**languages with full audio support
Hours played at review time, across 115 reviews with recorded playtime.
positive critical· bar length = how often the theme comes up
Here's a list of my grievances with this game (kept brief due to character limits in reviews) -Low drop rates in single-player RPG. Prepare to kill an enemy or boss 100 times for an item, 500 times. -Low Exceptional craft rate at 7% max. Imagine spending hours farming materials to fail the craft 49 times in a row, 500 times. -Leveling skill is very slow and grindy, you will mine the same ore and cut the same tree thousands of times. -Combat is boring and tedious. Most players AFK grind it overnight, hence why so many play hours. -Killed a boss? Prepare to kill him 50 more times for his 2% drop rate spellbook. -Vapid story, no substance. Dialogue is very uninspired and modern, many references to things like Skyrim, Pirates of the Caribbean, etc. One NPC used the infamous "I meaaan..." sentence opener. All cutscenes are unskippable. -Character creation lets you pick special traits that may unlock useless dialogue options. You can pick a trait for Archery where you won a tournament, and when you bring it up to the Thornhill Archery instructor, he laughs and calls you a liar. Nothing else comes of it. -Exhausting inventory management. Constantly looting items from enemies, moving them between bags and storage with clumsy UI. -"Respawn" button mitigates grinds by making enemies respawn instantly, but I did not find this feature until many hours of play. Feels like a debug feature the dev gave players to mitigate the grind. -Late game crafts require thousands of drops from enemies. Going from 60-80 for example will require thousands of Simple Tribal Fittings (which drop maybe from maybe 1/5 enemies if that) and you don't unlock any new recipes really between 60-80. Those levels are a desert just there to pad the grind. 80+ gets even worse. -UI is awful. Sometimes equip an item with left-click, sometimes move it into or out of container by left-click, contextual and confusing. Item dragging sometimes won't put the item where you drag it. Items forcibly stack. Can't have Inventory and worn equipment window open simultaneously. Many other problems. -Can only sell up to 20 items at once, in a game where you will definitely be selling thousands and thousands of items. -Grinding requires crafting thousands of items, you will want to salvage them for scraps. Inventory is very limited so you will be making hundreds of trips from the bank to the salvage workbench and back. Salvage workbench is also buggy for me, requires me to spam click but causes FPS hitches and clickthroughs, game is click-to-move so my character runs from the workbench, closing it. -Portable salvage kit is awkward to use. Click it, then click the item to salvage. Problem is you also click items to wear them, so once I accidentally equipped the item I was salvaging then salvaged the item I was previously wearing. Took hours to grind a replacement to the item as there's no refund/buyback for salvaging. -Achievements are a central feature but many of them are "kill 170 squirrels." -Barbarian ambush minigame is hard to complete not because it's challenging but because it glitches out so often. -Recently-added dragon slayer quest was terrible. Involved tedious fetch quests and frustrating puzzles. The dragon boss fight is possibly the worst boss fight I've ever suffered through in a video game. It's gimmicky, it ignores all of your progression (which you've grinded hours and hours to attain) and it utilizes unintuitive mechanics that contradict how the game previously worked. -Fast travel is needlessly convoluted. There's stablehands and guides to take you to specific places, unlockable wagons, you can fast travel to houses or teleport to houses which are different menus with the same button icon but one requires scrolls, there's teleport spells you can learn and specific travel points you can use, beacons that only work within certain distance, portal network and you can put portals in your house but they don't use the same network and there's two different ones and the buttons are ordered differently and teleports don't work in certain areas but fast travel does and you can make canoes but you need wood and tools and distance varies by wood quality and location and what traits you have blah blah blah, it's so needlessly complicated. -Weird bugs, glitches, and UI quirks. Some enemies in the swamp unattackable, sometimes enemies double-spawn, sometimes I get FPS stutter when enemies die, Horsy's return timer bugs out, can't stop my character from casting spells even when I tell him to, etc. Restarting the game fixes about half of these temporarily. -The game feels like you're meant to look things up or know where things are BEFORE you play, rather than finding things out through organic discovery and exploration. Only one wiki for the game and it's slow and not comprehensive. Most guides and people in the Discord are early game since nobody has the patience to get to later parts of the game. -Game is made for click-to-move, WASD support has been added recently but has some problems. Click-to-move annoys me, sometimes I click through an enemy I am trying to shoot with my bow, running up to them and aggroing all their friends. Sometimes I click my house's door and the game thinks I clicked the doorframe above it and makes me run behind the house. -World is designed in such a way that some areas look like you can move through them but you can't, such as hills in Sliderstone or brush in Silvermirror Fen. -Housing mainly exists for fast travel. Furnishing system is an afterthought. Items don't align properly with the house's grid. Can't put headboard of bed against wall, paintings levitate away from walls they're mounted on, rugs clip through the bricks on the floor, etc. -Long tutorial with side quests but skill ranks capped at 6, so lots of wasted XP. Don't use the XP books you find in the tutorial. -The game is weirdly loud. I have all audio sliders at 1% and it set to 35% in my Windows volume mixer. There's no "master volume" slider. -Game might improve since the dev sent out a survey asking players for their thoughts on how grindy it is, but don't get your hopes up--the Discord community has a strong "yes-men" vibe. -Enemies have some dumb and annoying mechanics. Long stuns leaving you twiddling your thumbs, barbarians who drink potions faster than you attack and heal through your damage, loggers/poachers who run from you but also for some reason their level increases each time you kill them (but not their stats.) -Who is the strongest entity in The Black Grimoire: Cursebreaker? Not Blackshield, not the mad wizard, not Gabrius, not the dragon... nope, it's Thornhill Elite Guard. NPC that runs out and kills you in a side quest as a joke, is much, much stronger than any enemy in the game, undermining the worldbuilding. -"Disengage" skill is so clumsy to use and useless that I don't even put it on my bar. -Many, many skills and spells to find in this game and almost none of them are useful. -Enemies love to spawn on top of me in Amarien Foothills, specifically the skirmishers accompanying the loggers/poachers/etc. They don't seem to be on a normal spawn timer but rather on an unconventional rotational spawn, so it's annoying when they spawn on me midfight, feels unfair at times. -In Amarien foothills I've had enemies basically spawn on top of me mid-combat causing me to get outnumbered. Some of these enemies aren't even on a normal spawn timer but seem to be on some strange rotational spawn related to the bandit loggers/poachers/miners. It's pretty annoying, feels unfair at times. -Takes too long to get out of combat after killing an enemy, annoying since you can't fast travel or respawn enemies in combat. Their loot often takes time to render and become highlightable as well, causing me to miss items or have to wait to get to pick them up. I have many, many more grievances with this game but I'm actually at the character limit for this review.
I really wanted to like this game, and I did for roughly 10 hours. I felt the game was just right for me. The progression was nice and steady. I listened to OSRS music, mined some copper, crafted some copper armor, slayed some creatures. Good stuff. But then the bad started setting in for me. Progression of the game became very slow and I even went so far as to mod the game myself to reduce the tedium of simply just getting mining and smithing to level 25/100 to craft some slightly better armor, but even the drop rates of crafting necessarily items were so low that I just simply gave up on the game. Now don't get me wrong. I played Runescape back in the day (2005-2007 or so), so I expected some grinding, but I did not expect that this game, which is not being monetized by a subscription model, or has any other monetary incentives to keep you playing after purchasing the game, to be *this* grindy. I already paid for the game, so why pad out the game this much? For the first 10 hours I did enjoy the game, and I don't regret supporting a small developer, but I wished it continued to respect my time so that I could actually recommend it.
A super charming game where you can tell whoever created really cared about it. I think many people will find something to like here for a couple dozen hours or more. There's a janky feel to it, but it totally works in my opinion. Its one of those games that I'd heavily recommend for certain people, and not recommend in the slightest to the rest - but if it intrigues you, I'd say wait for a sale and go for it. The game clearly takes heavy inspiration from the likes of RuneScape/OSRS, which is both a blessing and a curse. I've got tons of hours in both those games, and I couldn't help but invite comparison. As RuneScape is a multi-decade monster of a game with lots of staff, it's not exactly fair to compare the two, but its identity being so close to it means it comes with the territory. I truly believe this game has vibes, music, and aestetics that rival that of RuneScape, but its mechanistic flaws, UI design and the like hold it back quite a bit, and will until they're polished up more. Crashes and frame drops are less common than they used to be, but still more common than they should be. Past data suggests the dev is taking this part seriously, as its already come a long way in the last year. And while I love a good grind, I think this game could've eased up a bit on its level scaling and expectations. The padding and grind runescape is known for is iconic, but it's a natural side effect of being a big multiplayer live service game. I fear that aspect was brought over without considering if it was a good fit for the game type. Luckily there are mods that allow players to change the level scaling to meet their needs, which I used without guilt after the grind stopped being satisfying.
Tried really hard to enjoy this game but sadly it is frustration inducing, I guess if you really enjoy horrid grinding and all the worst bits of other MMOs then this is for you. I'll give it 3/10 as the first 30 mins were ok.
This has so much potential as a single-player Runescape alternative, but is sadly too clunky and frustrating to recommend at this point.
Plays like it is in Early Access. Unfinished, unoptimized, and full of bugs. Not even on a sale. There are plenty of other games that are like this that will better respect your time.
Very nicely made game. The skills are self explanatory and cover what you'd expect. Gear is gated behind skill ranks, which is a progression system I really enjoy. Mobs are frequent and aggressive, making exploration challenging. This feels good. Quests and locations have a nice amount of discovery. The only knock I have is that where resources can be found is opaque. I'd like either an in game character who might point in the general direction, or a tooltip hint for things like 'troll claws - Trolls are reported in the west'. For me, it's a nicely chill game.
If you are looking for a singleplayer runescape-lite, this game is perfect for you. Don't listen to the negative reviews that say otherwise, there is plenty of content and the quirks and QoL shortcomings are easy to look past.
It's just not for me but if you're down for the grind then hit it up. The main reason I felt like leaving a review was seeing someone say it doesn't run on Steam Deck - that's not true, it runs perfectly fine.
Active players
Estimated daily and monthly active players (DAU/MAU) modeled from peak concurrency.
Players by region
Where this game's players are, estimated from review languages.
Players also reviewed
The games this title's players most often review too — audience affinity.
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