The Necromancer's Tale

This is a good game. At times, it's a great game. It's not without a bit of jank, but if you enjoy the gothic vibes and point and click detective stories, it's easy enough to overlook. For context, I played this game on the hard difficulty, so some of my experiences where combat is involved may be exclusive to that setting. The Good ----------- It's a really enjoyable story. The opening prologue has you setting up your character sheet, stats included, through a series of backstory decisions. In addition to setting up your stats, you're building a background that will change how some characters interact with you. This approach gave me a character that was close to how I typically like to play these types of games, and you also have the chance to tweak the suggested stats before entering the main game. The game also does a good job of supporting two opposing fantasies-- gleefully leaning into the necromancy or being forced down a dark path as a means of survival. At times, the dialogue options become exclusively cruel, but it feels more like the character is not fully in control than a dissonance in the narrative. The romance options are a nice add to the game. They give you a reason to care about your humanity. You really have to put in effort at times to not lose your preferred companion. I also appreciated (after a bit of mental retraining on my part) that there is some risk in your choices of dialogue. Not every line of inquiry will help your investigation, and some may actively harm it. It can be a little jarring at times to see a path through a quest suddenly close itself to you because you were too thorough. But as the majority of the gameplay is these dialogue trees, it feels better to have risks in conversation rather than checking boxes. If you happen to stumble on one of these reputation-ruining options, it's usually obvious in hindsight why you should not have chosen it. The Bad --------- The combat is by far the weak point. Maybe I missed something important, but for almost the entirety of the game, both I and my minions were single ply toilet paper to nearly every enemy. Player character and minion alike could and would be one-shot by most enemies in melee. While you do have armor slots, I'm not certain I ever saw an option to upgrade from the leather pants I began the game with, or the breastplate I happened upon in the first ten minutes. I knew my physical skill points were low, but most combats became about having enough minions to keep a wall between me and the enemies I was hoping to defeat with 3-5 ranged magic attacks that could only ever have a 76% chance to succeed. You do have the opportunity to acquire a major infusion of stats in the late game. At which point combat becomes entirely trivial. I entered the final encounter with 16 skeletons and 49 zombies. Between that and the stat boost, my presence at the last encounter was really just a question of how quickly I wanted to wrap things up. I can't help but think I missed some critical spells or opportunities to enhance myself or my minions. But I also ran a pretty thorough playthrough (I thought), so it's hard to say where I might have strayed. The Ugly --------- There are a few technical oddities. The game struggles with navigation of multi-story interiors. It doesn't always know when to draw or hide lower floors, which sometimes means an errant click will send your character zooming for the nearest staircase. It can be a tricky with certain interiors to know if a room belongs to the floor you're on. Similarly, trying to select things on the ground (something you'll be doing a lot of in a game about raising the dead) can be a puzzle as you try to find the right camera angle and zoom where your click action isn't being blocked by a nearly translucent tree or accidentally choosing one of your minions that's unhelpfully standing on top of your target. Your inventory management is also a bit odd. As best I could tell, you can't destroy or drop excess items. You can only store them in alternate containers. So do your best to keep track of those. Not every item is sellable either-- including some you would expect to sell-- so don't be afraid to dress up those zombies, even if some of the item slots aren't adding to their armor score. The reason all this is ugly rather than bad is the inventory capacity. I hit the capacity in the late game, and am all but certain that a key spell component was deleted to make room for a mission critical item. At no point did I encounter an 'inventory is full' message, even as my bags were overflowing. Minion raising is also a bit tedious. Especially skeletons. It felt immersive in the early stages of the game, but I kept hoping a mass raise dead spell was just around the corner. OVERALL I do recommend the game. It's stumbles are frustrating, but only because you get so wrapped up in the story.