Conceptually interesting, but poorly executed.
The game plays like a choose your own adventure book with a simplistic turn based RPG combat system. However, the story seems to lack any real choice, as the outcome is the same regardless of your choices. The game actively discourages you from experimenting too much by dealing random damage to you from hazards from interacting with certain environments and objects. Often when traps and hazards are present, the game calls for a dice roll to see if you bypass the hazard or take damage. However, due to poor RNG, I was always taking potshots from random environmental hazards.
I played as Havelock, the warrior character, who was supposed to be this legendary gladiator, but I often found myself being outmatched by a majority of the enemies in my path. The first couple of chapters, you're statistically more powerful than most of your enemies, but RNG seems to be against you most of the time. I was able to mostly brute force my way through combat in the early parts, despite RNG being really consistently against me. Shortly after, however, I found myself being outmatched by quite literally every enemy, resulting in me needing to buff myself and debuff the enemy every combat, which cost precious limited resources. The game outright discourages you from getting into unnecessary fights due to a lack of resources. If you visit areas out of the "intended" path, which you will only learn through trial and error, you may find yourself without a key item to bypass the combat, forcing you to fight to proceed. I believe this is to encourage you to replay areas for a more optimal path, but the game itself plays so slow, that replaying areas feels like an absolute chore. From what I understand, you play as the other character after you complete the story with your first character, experiencing branching paths you previously missed, but I don't think I would have the patience for this. The game is simply too slow, meandering, and asinine with its punishments.
Asinine is the key word here. The game is strangely punishing at times for no reason other than story convenience, and it rewards you in odd ways. Example, my character was forced by plot to lose a fight and get imprisoned. All of my weapons, armor, and healing items were removed. The game suggested I might be able to find these again. An ally helps you escape, and you encounter guards who are unconscious who have weapons, which the game gives you the option to attempt to collect for yourself. However, the game outright tells you that you are compelled to not take these weapons for no reason other than plot convenience. Later the game gives me a few limited opportunities to attempt to find my equipment, but I apparently selected the wrong choices, and the game pushed me forward, without getting my equipment back. I managed to get a weaker sword than I had before, no armor, no healing items, and less than half of my maximum hit points. Shortly after, the game compels a battle against a werewolf, and I am ill-prepared for this fight because the game just outright exhausted any chances I had to properly equip myself and even outright told me to pound sand when weapons were available from the unconscious guards. My resources were so limited, that I quite literally could not take a single hit from this werewolf, lest I lose the fight. I had to replay this fight maybe five or six times, begging RNG to consistently be on my side. They give you companion characters to do little bits of damage, but RNG was consistently giving them the lowest damage as well. I was astonished by how outright unfair the RNG is. It's almost as if it's secretly weighted in the enemy's favor and just isn't transparent about it.
Later, I amass some money from doing odd jobs, buy a new weapon and armor, but then the game later just gives you all of the items you hadn't purchased for free, so by being proactive, I had screwed myself over when I would have essentially just gotten these things for free and could have used that money toward things that weren't free at the time. Again, it's just asinine. This isn't feast and famine, this is a gotcha moment that exists to trap a first time player, expecting them to replay sections and do things the optimal way.
The art and music are a mixed bag. The music is mostly pretty good, but feels out of place. Art itself is really inconsistent. Some of it is excellent, bold, vibrant, and dynamic. However, a lot of the humanoid characters look really washed out with low contrast, and have a really soft shading technique. Some of the character portraits feel rushed, like they were done in an hour's time. This clashes heavily with the UI, which has higher contrast icons with thick, bold outlines and fat graphical elements. What's crazy is that the tiny community for this game seems to be outright aggressive to defend the art in this, and it seems like a strange hill to die on.
Basically, I rage quit in the Dark Castle chapter. All of the enemies were overpowering me, I was constantly wasting resources to keep alive, enemies were taking environmental potshots at me out of combat, which I was consistently failing the RNG rolls for, failing RNG rolls for non-combat actions, failing in general. The final straw was fighting a loli vampire in the castle, who still had higher stats than me despite buffing myself and debuffing her, to lose the fight once, win the second time, and to have her smugly take a key item from me for storyline purposes without me being able to do anything about it, despite the rest of the game being about dice rolls to determine outcome. I just turned the game off at that point, and I won't be going back. The entire experience is strangely mean-spirited, and in no ways fun.
I also softlocked one time by doing things out of order, making me have to restart a chapter.
Don't bother with this game. The few people defending it just want another awesome Vanillaware game, which this is not.
