A very challenging game that captures the old highly mechanical turn based RPGs in a world just as gritty and ruthless as the difficulty. Sort of like playing D&D in a very OSR campaign setting. Hunger, vision, heat, and moisture are always factors, there is no fast travel, and danger is always present.

Unfortunately completing even the simplest task feels like a mountain to be climbed. Every encounter is heavily led by RNG which means even if you do all the right moves a simple roadside brigand encounter can kill you - which it often did for me after returning from an hour of carefully fighting through a dungeon and couldn't save until I got back to town.

Combined with the high difficulty it means that your fate is purely down to luck more than skill which really undermines the RPG side of things. I like a lot of what the game has on offer, but it needs to either be less difficult or less random.

I adore the concept of this game, there's a lot little details, like how the hunger works, how you treat injuries, how trading works, how your field of vision affects you and the enemies in combat, how the sound your character makes allows you to be stealthy or to fuck up and engage in combat, and a a lot more, they went above and beyond with details like those... BUT they also balanced it like shit.

The game is honestly short and they forced it to be longer by making most enemies (specially bosses) WAAAY stronger than the player. Your character is so weak and fragile that every single enemy you fight leaves you injured or kills you. Strategy doesn't matter, leveling up doesn't matter, if you engage in combat you will be forced to go back to town, on every single combat. The only way to progress is by picking a tanky character like Jorgrim or Arna, the other 4 characters are worthless.

It could have been an awesome game, a 9/10 at least, but they fell into the "hard = good" trend, so they made it unplayable and ruined the whole concept.