Reviews

I’m a huge wuss when it comes to scary stuff. Horror movies, spooky video games, a dark hallway in an unfamiliar house – all terrifying. So when I tell you Fobia: St. Dinfna Hotel is scary, you may need to…

Introduction

You may know Raphaël Colantonio as the founder of Arkane Studios, the team behind such titles as Arx Fatalis, Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, Dishonored, and Prey. However, over the past few years, he's been busy getting Wolfeye Studios off the ground. The goal there was to have a smaller indie team that traded Arkane's publisher-supported budgets for some extra creative freedom.

This endeavor has resulted in Weird West - a gunslinging isometric immersive sim. And having played through Wolfeye Studios' debut project, we now bring you our thoughts on it.

Multiple Personality Dishonor

First things first, we have to figure out what an immersive sim even is. It's a terrible name, for starters. Games classified as such are not true simulators, and neither are they a part of The Sims franchise. And immersion is just a nebulous buzzword that doesn't really mean anything.

But if you don't get too stuck on the literal meaning of the words, you'll understand that when someone calls a game an immersive sim, they actually mean a stealth game with a progression system where you have multiple ways to tackle just about any challenge and an option to eschew subtlety in favor of a brute-force approach. A game that is somewhat similar to Deus Ex would be another way to describe immersive sims.

Weird West then is one of those. At the same time, Weird West is also a literary subgenre that combines a Western setting with some supernatural or occult elements prevalent in the so-called Weird fiction. In other words, if H. P. Lovecraft were to write a script for a Clint Eastwood movie, that would be an example of Weird West the genre.

Weird West the game, as you may have already guessed, uses that particular subgenre for its setting. You get a world where an expansive frontier of plains, bogs, steppes, and deserts is dotted with tiny settlements, mines, ghost towns, and haciendas. And in that world, you have farmers growing crops, prospectors lusting for gold, outlaws causing trouble and bounty hunters chasing said outlaws.

But underneath the surface, you also have ghosts haunting their graves, werewolves howling in the night, shapeshifting monsters running slaver gangs, and strange cultists prophesizing doom and despair.

As you play Weird West, you'll get an opportunity to explore this world as five different characters. You will start your journey as a bounty hunter on a quest for revenge. Then, you'll play as a cursed pigman, a demon-hunting native, a god-fearing werewolf, and a witch who can see the future.

These characters all come with their personal stories and an overarching thread that connects them in some way. While playing as any one of these characters, you'll be able to tackle all the optional content you wish. You'll get to take on side quests, bring outlaws to justice, rob banks, hunt bears, explore ghost towns, and so on. But once you're done with a character's main story, you will have to switch.

And while these characters and their stories are pretty good overall, I see this general structure as one of the game's biggest failings. In a game like Weird West, chances are you want to play as either The Good, The Bad, or The Ugly. You know, the classic Western archetypes. And seeing how it's a game with a great degree of freedom, let's face it, it's probably The Ugly, an unabashed agent of chaos. Not being able to create your own character here is a great shame.

This character-hopping thing also ties into the game's progression system. Your characters in Weird West have Perks and Abilities. You unlock them by finding special items while exploring the world. The caveat here is that Perks unlock new stuff for all your characters, while Abilities only upgrade your current one.

Perks range in usefulness between some handy unlocks, like being able to jump higher, sneak faster or deal more damage to unaware targets, and the significantly less impressive percentile increases to your HP or shop prices. Abilities are split between weapon abilities which all characters get, and a special tree unique to each character. These too vary greatly in their usefulness.

To take things one step further, all the upgrade items you pick up but don't immediately use will be transferred over to the next character once you recruit your old character as a companion. This creates a situation where you don't actually want to upgrade your current character, and instead want to hoard all the upgrade items. To make matters worse, your third character unlocks the ability to converse with ghosts, while the final one lets you decipher ancient texts, further incentivizing you to treat your earlier heroes as disposable.

And to complicate things even more, all your characters share their saddlebags and safety deposit boxes, but you can't transfer your actual savings between characters. This results in a rather tedious song and dance where before wrapping things up with a character you have to turn your dollars into gold bars, stash them away, and decide which consumables and items you need to finish your journey, and which you'd rather leave to your next hero.

Once you actually start that new journey, you have to first find a town with a bank, then find a town with a stable, then find one of your old characters and hire them to get all the upgrade items back. And you have to do this four times.

But at the very least, this approach allowed the developers to introduce a great deal of reactivity. During your journeys, you'll be making plenty of decisions that will affect the world around you on both a major and minor scale. You'll get plenty of opportunities to dismantle or prop up entire factions, save or destroy various settlements, and in the end, decide whether to save or destroy the world.

And on a more personal level, you'll be making friends and enemies. The former will aid you in combat, while the latter will be sending their goons after you. There's even a pared-down take on the Nemesis System from Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor.

For example, during my pigman journey, I ended up turning the witch that cursed him into a pig herself. Then, on a later journey, I apprehended her for a bounty, as the pig version of her was now an outlaw. And finally, when visiting the pigman at some point, I had to put her down, as she had apparently escaped and together with her gang, was now attempting to take her frustrations out on the town the pigman was living in.

So in the end, despite some reservations about the game's approach to storytelling, the abovementioned busywork didn't stop me from enjoying Weird West overall.

Twin-stick Six-shooter

Now, usually, immersive sims tend to favor the first-person perspective. Weird West, however, adopts an isometric approach. Here, you'll be looking at your character from up high while using your mouse to control the camera and aim, and WASD to move. Alternatively, you can use a gamepad.

The fact that most immersive sims aren't isometric should've been the first warning sign here. No matter how you look at them, the game's controls are extremely clunky. All the menus seem to have been designed with a controller in mind, making them needlessly annoying to navigate.

Everyone's favorite "press button to do one thing, hold it to do another" feature is a big offender there. Having the cursor completely disappear on you whenever you're not holding the right mouse button (it's what you have to do to pull out your gun and start aiming), is a close second though. Inventory management could also use some drag and drop functionality.

In combat, this clunkiness translates into you having to constantly hold and release the right mouse button to either aim your gun or adjust your camera. You can't do both at once. And should you decide to use a controller, you'll come face to face with the fact that while all the menus were designed for it, due to the game's overall pace and the general scale of the objects you'll be aiming at, trying to use a controller during a fight makes the game borderline unplayable.

But even when you're using a mouse, the game simply moves too fast. The developers actually went all out here and included a lot of systems that can interact with one another. You can set fire to oil puddles and you can then douse said fire with water. Wind can blow flames onto nearby wooden structures. You can get hit by lightning thanks to a dynamic weather system. You can break enemy morale by killing their leaders. You can kick people off ledges, attract their attention by making noise, and set up elaborate traps.

Unfortunately, since things go down way too fast once bullets start flying, you won't get a lot of opportunities to utilize any of this to your advantage. Without fail, every time it's easier and more effective to sneak behind enemies and knock them out, or just shoot them dead if you get caught.

And if you do decide to get all fancy with it, chances are you'll end up being disappointed. Let's say you spend five minutes sneaking around and setting up an oil puddle for your enemies to walk into. Then you set the thing ablaze. Your enemies take around 5 damage each, roll out of the fire and start shooting, alerting the entire dungeon to your presence.

This is especially noticeable early on when you have bad guns and under-leveled abilities, which results in hilarious moments like your silent takedown skill not being able to actually kill your target in one shot, or when you have to shoot an explosive barrel several times before it explodes.

Now, while the game's combat is highly clunky, that doesn’t make it difficult. I was playing on the third out of the game's four difficulties and never felt like things were particularly challenging, aside from the times I had to deal with the crazed miners who like to throw dynamite at you. The idea there is to shoot the dynamite before it reaches you, but those sticks are like 2 pixels wide, while the miners have way too much health and chuck the things like there's no tomorrow. Those encounters were pretty tough.

Thankfully, this being an immersive sim, you don't have to engage in combat all that often. Usually, you can just sneak around your enemies or knock them out. This approach makes things significantly more enjoyable.

Either way, the gear you'll have at our disposal includes several weapon types - melee weapons, pistols, shotguns, rifles, and bows. You will also have access to a number of consumable potions and throwable explosives, as well as an armored jacket and two talismans that usually make your character better under certain conditions, like doing more damage if your reputation is high enough.

Your gear comes in several tiers and variations. For example, you have a choice between a slower and stronger rifle or one that's a bit weaker but shoots faster, and these can range from the common greys to the legendary oranges.

If you're looking to upgrade a particular gun (or a suit of armor), you can utilize the game's crafting system and exchange several ore nuggets or animal pelts for an extra tier of quality. But unless I was doing something very wrong, usually, you'll be able to find plenty of high-tier gear way before you'll get a chance to collect the necessary upgrade materials, making the whole thing redundant.

I guess it's just another extension of the game having way too many systems for its own good. In fact, the game even has a system where NPCs can remarry should their spouse perish at some point. But seeing how Weird West doesn't really have any memorable characters outside the main quest, its side-quests tend to be of the fetch variety, and its dialogue system is extremely basic, chances are you won't remember any of the NPCs you meet, at least not well enough to notice their last name changing.

In general, the game presents you with an abundance of points of interest, but they're just not all that interesting. Once you've managed to build a nest egg with your very first character, you don't need much else. The loot you find is mostly junk, and you can get all the leveling items you need during story-related missions.

And if you do decide to go out and explore, after a while you'll realize that all the mines and settlements and farms here look pretty much the same, like the settlers brought along some prefabs on their journey West.

At times it feels like Weird West doesn't know what it wants to be - a hand-crafted story-driven game, or a procedurally-generated one. And for an immersive sim, a genre with its roots in the likes of System Shock and Deus Ex, the choice should be an obvious one.

In an immersive sim, you want to see elaborate sprawling levels that give the game's systems enough room to breathe. You want these levels to be populated with memorable characters and encounters, easy to miss nooks and side passages. You want Liberty Island, not a handful of shacks in a desert.

Technical Information

For a game with so many systems, Weird West is surprisingly stable. It runs well, doesn't chug too hard, and I haven't encountered any major bugs or issues. On rare occasions, I wasn't able to knock out certain NPCs (that otherwise should've been susceptible to it), and a few times I was detected seemingly through a wall. But a reload sorted those out.

Speaking of reloads. The game has several rotating autosave slots, quick saves, and manual saves. The caveat there is that reloading the game world can lead to some unexpected consequences like enemies suddenly being reshuffled on the map. But while annoying, I just treated that as an incentive to not get caught.

The game's visuals are neat for an isometric title, but once again it suffers from its choice of perspective. There's plenty of stuff in the world you can pick up or interact with, but looking at it from a distance, it's all too small. And as far as I'm aware, there isn't a button that highlights interactable objects.

The sound design is also quite good, even if the game's soundtrack isn't overly varied. And while we get plenty of voice-acted narration during the story sections, the rest of the game isn't voice-acted, allowing you to read things at your own pace.

One last thing to mention here is that when you launch the game for the first time, it just starts. You don't get a chance to tinker with the options menu and instead get the opening cutscene straight away. I really don't like it when games do this.

Conclusion

While Weird West can't hold a candle to the likes of Deus Ex, and it sure does have plenty of questionable design decisions, at the end of the day, the immersive sim market is not exactly oversaturated. And with that in mind, I did enjoy my time with the game. It may not be great, but it's still a perfectly decent way to spend 20-40 hours of your time.

Introduction

Developed by IQ Soup, Age of Grit invites us on a Wild West adventure in a world of steampunk airships. The game is said to be inspired by classic CRPGs and Firefly, the TV series, but at first glance, it's more akin to a story-driven FTL - a game where you control a spaceship by managing its power consumption and a variety of systems and weapons.

And whichever way you look at it, superficially, this makes Age of Grit a mighty intriguing proposition. Which is why as soon as the game graduated from early access, we took it out for a spin.

The Good, The Bad and Mostly the Bad

In Age of Grit you play as Jebediah Rockwell, a war hero who, after being dishonorably discharged, is reduced to making ends meet by smuggling assorted goods in his steam-powered airship all across The West. The West being an entire Wild West-themed continent housing three countries with plenty of bad blood between them.

The game starts with no intro or explanation. It simply places you in your private quarters where you can click on some lore-dispensing items and go through a quick tutorial. From there you can keep exploring your ship and get introduced to your crew - a pilot, a navigator, a mechanic, and a gunner.

All of these are distinct characters with their own stories and personalities, and they're here to stay. As the game doesn't have any sort of level or skill-based progression, you can't upgrade them in any way.

Instead, you'll be able to converse with them from time to time, simulating that thing that should be familiar to anyone who's ever played a BioWare game where you occasionally go back to base and spend some time chatting up your companions.

And as for upgrades, you have your ship to consider. Its inventory is split into three distinct categories - cargo, personal effects, and gear. The first is self-explanatory. As a smuggler, you haul cargo to make a profit.

Your personal effects, on the other hand, appear to do absolutely nothing. Throughout the game, you'll keep finding all sorts of miscellaneous items ranging from rifles and cowboy hats to compasses and piles of lumber. And you would think these items would come in handy during various events by unlocking new options. But surprisingly, this doesn't seem to be the case. The only use for all this stuff I found was selling it for some extra cash.

Finally, there's gear. Your ship has a hull, an engine, a sensor dish, wings, a rudder, and up to six guns. The engine is the key here, as in order to use all that other stuff, you first need to generate some steam.

This brings us to the gist of the game's airship-driven combat system - you use your engine to generate steam, and then you spend that steam to power your weapons and sensors, which is where the whole steampunk FTL comparison comes in. Only in Age of Grit you operate your systems in a turn-based fashion.

However, the similarities here are purely superficial, as the game doesn't have nearly enough systems to facilitate anything resembling strategic thinking. Your best strategy every time is to go all out with your guns and hope for the best. The only tactical decision you have to make is whether you should start blasting immediately or spend a turn building up your steam reserves first.

For a combat system like this to be satisfying, it needs to have at least a few extra dimensions to it, like viable defensive options allowing you to prevent damage, dynamic repairs, active crew management, that sort of thing. When just about all you can do is attack, things get old fast.

And this is a great shame, as the idea behind the game's guns is actually pretty cool thanks to the adjustable levels of steam power you can assign to them and a great many special traits. You have guns that do extra damage when it's the first gun that shoots in a turn. Guns that do extra damage when you pump them full of steam and do a proper burst attack. Guns that set their targets ablaze or disable crucial systems. On top of that, if you use a gun too much, it starts overheating, forcing you to switch things up.

But this alone is just not enough to carry the combat system. What's also fairly annoying is that while the game has a combat log, it obfuscates all of its stats and rolls and just shows you the end result.

In a game like this, the bulk of the fun is looking at your stat screen and trying to figure out how much initiative you need to act faster than your enemies, how to properly counteract their evasion stat, and how much armor penetration you need to do any real damage. And this is rather hard to do when the game doesn't have a stat screen and hides its rolls from you.

 Another fly in the ointment is that when you first leave the confines of your ship and gaze at the overworld map with its neat art, distinct regions, and numerous settlements, you can imagine yourself flying around this place and engaging in various sandboxy activities - exploring, trading, doing quests, fighting, running into other denizens of The West, and stumbling onto cool stuff wherever you go. But that's not how this game works.

What you see right away, is all there is to it - you shuttle between a handful of dots on a static map. Every other ship you meet appears as part of some random encounter. You can neither avoid them nor adjust their rate in any way. Meaning you'll be constantly running into outlaws and bounty hunters that usually die in a single turn, but force you to sit through two loading screens and some stock dialogue that gets old really fast.

And when you manage to roll a non-combat encounter, usually, absolutely nothing happens. You get some descriptive text and that's it. Occasionally, you find some trade goods. And every once in a while, your ship takes some damage. And that's that for encounters.

Being a professional smuggler, you can indeed engage in some trade. But the game doesn't have an economy. It just has a list of settlements that sell things and other settlements that can buy those things, with prices forever set in stone. And with your cargo hold limited to four units of trade goods, it's rarely even worth it to bother remembering which settlements give you the best deals.

To be fun, a game like this really needs its world to thrive. You need to see other ships do their thing. You need to be able to choose, to some degree, when and where to interact with them. You need to have a multitude of options for these interactions.

Hell, you need to be able to just explore, deal with dwindling resources, overcome setbacks, and have at least some degree of freedom. As it stands, your airship is less of a ship and more like a sky train, going from point A to point B and then to point C along a set route.

And for the most part, this isn't even an exaggeration, as your ship has a limited amount of fuel that gets refilled every time your reach a settlement. And usually, with the fuel you have, you can only reach two settlements from any given point - the one ahead of you and the one behind. Occasionally you have a side option, but those are fairly rare, especially in the later stages of the game.

Initially, you think that once you upgrade your engine, you'll be able to fly further. But that's not the case. The initial fuel limit is there to stay. Which can really grind your gears when a quest sends you across the map, forcing you to trudge along your sky rails as you get constantly assaulted by absolutely non-threatening but time-consuming outlaws. It's all just a giant slog.

At least the game's settlements have a decent number of NPCs for you to interact with. And while at this point this may come as a bit of a surprise, these interactions tend to be pretty engaging and very much appropriate for the game's Wild West setting.

You get to meet half-deaf prospectors, fat-cat businessmen, snake oil salesmen, career gamblers, sky pirates, the works. Their respective quests range from simple tasks to complex political machinations, but usually in the end boil down to going to a certain place and talking to someone, and maybe fighting a few ships along the way. But it's all written in this old-timey Western dialect, I guess you'd call it, that makes the whole thing feel alive.

The game's UI is also doing a lot of heavy lifting there. Sure, it's not especially functional, but in this age when even fantasy games tend to have flat and lifeless UIs, having one here where it's all gears, brass piping, and various clockwork contraptions, well that just makes you forget about a lot of the gameplay-related annoyances for a while.

The unfortunate thing about the game's dialogue is just how much there is of it. Especially when you consider that it's usually fed to you at a snail's pace, with you having to manually advance things constantly. In a way, this makes Age of Grit feel like a voice-acted game that forces you to listen to all of its dialogue, only here there is no voice acting.

You also don't get that much input on how the actual conversations unfold. Sure, occasionally you can choose between several options, but as I understand it you never get to roll any dice there. Things just happen as they're supposed to. You can choose to be rude or polite, but you'll end up in the same place anyway.

Now, the game's actual story has you stumble onto what looks like a conspiracy with ties to your painful past. Naturally, you set out to investigate, yeeing and hawing and being a gruff cowboy along the way. Eventually, you'll have to deal with plenty of traitors, old friends, plot twists, and even an ancient technologically-advanced civilization.

While it's not exactly original, I enjoyed the game's story a great deal. It was pretty much the only thing that kept me going when just about everything else served to annoy me in one way or another.

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to see how it all ends, as near what I thought was the end of the game (based on Steam achievements and the general trajectory of the story), I ran into a fairly nasty bug. A particular conversation screen wouldn't turn into a scene transition, essentially softlocking my playthrough. And seeing how the game only offers autosaves you have no control over, and there's only one save slot, I wasn't able to reload from an earlier point to try and avoid this bug.

Now, once again according to Steam achievements, some people have apparently been able to finish the game, so this may very well not be a universal issue.

If I were to summarize this entire game, I would have to reach into my bag of elaborate metaphors. You know how back in the day we usually had family PCs? And in a larger family, the older brother got to play games, while the younger one got to watch? Well, this feels like a game designed by those younger brothers.

The developers here clearly have enthusiasm and appreciation for the genre, and they're skilled enough to design unique and interesting systems and great art. But it's like they have no idea what makes games fun to play, and it shows in just about every aspect of Age of Grit.

Technical Information

The game's 2D visuals are simple, but possess a certain charm and fit the setting. Its soundtrack is similar in this regard. This is a steampunk cowboy game, and it feels like a steampunk cowboy game.

I have already mentioned the fact that the game only has a single autosave slot. But I should also point out that at least you can also save when quitting the game.

The options menu is honestly laughable. When launching the game, you get the standard Unity prompt with resolution options and visual presets. I'm not sure the latter actually change anything. Inside the game, the options menu allows you to adjust the volume, and that's it.

This being a Unity game, despite not using that many resources, it suffers from that thing where after you go through enough loading screens, everything slows down to a crawl, which is especially noticeable when you try to manage your inventory where it feels like you're getting seconds per frame, not frames per second.

With how much text there is in the game, you can't seem to have a conversation without a typo of some sort. It's not the end of the world, but it's very much noticeable.

And while the game never actually crashed or froze on me, some of the gear you can find clearly doesn't work. And without a stat screen, it's hard to tell how much of it actually does anything.

Conclusion

With game-breaking bugs, poor performance, a general lack of polish, and underwhelming systems, I can't in good conscience recommend Age of Grit to anyone. That said, some of the game's elements, namely its writing and weapon design, did manage to impress me. Meaning that if the developers here take this game as a learning experience, I firmly believe they're capable of producing something great in the future. But for now, you best give this project a wide berth.

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Introduction

Developed by Pierre Begue's Heroic Fantasy Games, Knights of the Chalice 2 (KotC2) is the long-awaited follow-up to Knights of the Chalice - an old-school CRPG from 2009.

At its core, the original Knights of the Chalice was a fantasy adventure that didn't try to reach for the stars, and only had three playable races and classes. But it more than made up for it with great encounter design, enemy AI, and a combat engine that was pretty faithful to Dungeons & Dragons.

And so, it's no wonder that a bigger and better sequel for that game was successfully funded through Kickstarter. And now that KotC2 is available for purchase, let's see if it can live up to its impressive predecessor.

Knights of the Chalice Who?

Much like the previous game, KotC2 is based on the Open Game License (OGL) version of Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 Edition, which I personally consider to be the pinnacle of D&D.

And while OGL itself is fairly limited in what it covers, it allows those using it to alter that basic ruleset. So, thanks to its crowdfunding campaign, KotC2 now features a total of 10 playable races and 22 classes. Some of those classes are your usual Fighters and Wizards, but a lot of them are quite unique and out-there, which sort of counterbalances the lack of multiclassing in the game.

On the martial side of things, you have classes like Gladiators and Death Knights. Spellcasters have Bishops and Warlocks. A number of classes are based around Psionics. And even some of the familiar classes can surprise you with new functionality.

Wizards, for example, seem to be inspired by Dragonlance and have several Moons affecting their powers. Rogues exist as the spell-casting variant. Bards get their own unique songs and song-like spells. And Sorcerers, instead of just being lazy Wizards, are positioned as a hybrid between a Wizard and a Cleric.

And this brings us to another important point - a lot of the stuff you think you know about D&D works slightly differently in KotC2.

All spellcasters learn several new spells per level here, and then can further expand their spellbooks by copying spell scrolls. But then, they don't need to further prepare those spells, and can simply cast a set number of spells of each level per day. The one big exception here are the Psionic classes where instead of spell slots you have one big pool of power points.

Attributes can also surprise you with how they work, especially with some of the hybrid classes where you can have a situation where a class needs Intelligence to cast arcane spells, Wisdom to cast divine spells, and Charisma to determine how many bonus spells of each type they get.

And when it comes to Skills, KotC2 doesn't use anything resembling your standard D&D skill system. Instead, a character's class, race, attributes, and even Cleric Domains give them access to Skills that can be used in conversations or when interacting with the environment.

In practical terms, this means that having a Kobold or a Halfling on your team will allow you to explore some tight passages, while a Half-Giant or anyone with over 20 Strength will be able to lift heavy objects and bust down doors.

All these changes, plus just the sheer scope of the options you have, can feel overwhelming, but in a good way. On the one hand, it's a familiar system, that is if you're familiar with D&D. But on the other, thanks to all the changes, everything is fresh and exciting. And with your party consisting of up to eight characters, you can spend quite a lot of time building your perfect team.

What's great about all this is that while the game is undeniably old-school, it uses the popular these days hyperlink system that allows you to click most of the stuff you see on your screen and get immediately directed to a detailed in-game explanation for what a feat does, which bonuses a particular race gets, or how a class works.

Now, the original Knights of the Chalice had this dated but charming top-down aesthetic reminiscent of Ultima VII. KotC2, on the other hand, looks like one of those websites you go to when you want to play some D&D online, complete with flat maps, mismatched assets, sudden perspective changes, and sprites that bear only a passing resemblance to what they're supposed to represent.

And the scary thing is, this is actually an improvement compared to what the game was originally supposed to look like, where character and monster models were portrayed as these circular tokens. You can still use these tokens as an option, and I did try using them, and I have to tell you that watching a bunch of pucks sliding across a flat surface is just as pathetic and disorienting as you would expect.

Thankfully, we now have proper sprites, even if they don't always fit. As in your Centaurs will still look like regular bipedal humanoids. But at least there, you can pretend that this is just like when you played pen and paper Dungeons & Dragons with your friends, and because you weren't insane to actually buy official D&D figurines, you were using a collection of Warhammer miniatures, Lego dudes, and Monopoly pieces for your characters.

So in the end, even though this is without a doubt one of the ugliest games ever made, when you're actually playing it, it feels surprisingly close to the original Knights of the Chalice, and that was very much a pleasant experience. I still would've preferred if this game simply iterated on the original's art style, but I guess it just wasn't in the cards.

Augury of Chaos

The main way to play the game right now is to boot up the Augury of Chaos module. It's a complete fantasy adventure for a party of six characters (and up to two NPCs) that will take you from level 1 all the way to around 20.

The story is pretty simple. Your party of adventurers rolls into a village beset on all sides by various forces of evil. You do battle with those forces of evil and in the process uncover a bigger conspiracy of evil. You confront the big bad before you're actually ready, and in accordance with his Villains Anonymous playbook instead of crushing you, he teleports you into a hostile environment. This gives you a chance to become stronger and come back later to settle the score.

Along the way, you'll deal with squabbling goblin tribes, explore ancient tombs, and battle all sorts of demons, beholders, and necromancers. You know, your standard fantasy dungeon crawler fare. But in a pleasant turn of events, the game actually gives you a lot of agency when dealing with those threats.

At times you can reach an understanding with some of the subterranean denizens, which allows you to trade or rest within their territory. Occasionally, you can use your skills to take out an enemy leader before manually dispatching the remaining rabble. There's even an encounter where you can recruit a former foe to become one of your companions.

The game is split into several self-contained chapters, each represented by what is essentially an expansive dungeon. There's a village and its surrounding areas, a sewer, a bigger sewer, and a stronghold captured by the forces of evil.

Without a doubt, the main attraction here is the combat. Each area is tightly packed with challenging encounters that will put your tactics and understanding of the underlying systems to the test. Much like in the original game, you can only rest here in predetermined spots, and only a limited number of times, which makes smart resource management very important.

When this module was originally released for the game's Kickstarter backers, it was generally considered to be very difficult. And while you can still experience that original level of difficulty, right now, the suggested Normal mode feels moderately challenging without becoming frustrating or unfair.

With Augury of Chaos being a high-level D&D campaign, there are several ways to make things tougher on the player. Something like Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, for example, inflates monster stats and then asks you to build characters that can reliably overcome a long list of natural immunities and an Armor Class of 80.

Augury of Chaos instead plays around with creative enemy placement, overwhelming numbers, and spellcasters that start battles with a long list of active buffs. I find this to be the more satisfying approach. The only thing that feels cheesy there is the developer's annoying habit of granting some of the tougher enemies a bunch of spell-like abilities that for all intents and purposes are spells, but can be used as swift and free actions purely to make your life harder.

On the other end of it, you have access to a wide range of combat maneuvers that feel very impactful, the very much overpowered high-level spells, plenty of ways to increase your initiative scores and simply not give your enemies a chance to act, and a lot of powerful magic items.

And if you're not satisfied with the gear the game gives you, you can engage in some crafting that, just like back in Knights of the Chalice, allows you to create some absolutely monstrous weapons capable of trivializing any threat.

With combat being such an important part of the whole experience, we still shouldn't forget that Augury of Chaos has plenty of non-combat encounters in the form of puzzles, riddles, and secrets.

Seeing how the game was primarily designed by one guy, its puzzles are expectedly quite idiosyncratic. The designer is fond of both math and chess? Sure, here's a puzzle combining the two, because why not. And here's a psych test. Or a coded message you have to decipher. There's even a crossword puzzle at one point.

These puzzles act as a nice change of pace and, for the most part, are pretty fun. But if you don't like them, the game has a built-in hint system that eventually just feeds you the answer.

The one outlier there is the crossword puzzle. While most of the questions there are obvious, a few simply make no sense, and asking for a hint only gives you the first letter that you already have from answering some other question. Thankfully, you can find the solution online, so if you get stuck there, just ask Google for help.

Overall, Augury of Chaos is a neat dungeon-crawling adventure that will take you somewhere in the vicinity of 30 hours to complete and probably leave you hungry for more, even if its later stages become a bit samey due to the imbalanced nature of high-level D&D.

If that's the case, you can try beating this module with a different party or opting for a higher difficulty level. But apparently, more adventures are on the way.

Other Adventures

So, what do you do after you're done with Augury of Chaos? Well, you can also play through the Tutorial module. Apart from teaching you the ropes, it acts as a self-contained adventure that in some ways feels more well-rounded than Augury of Chaos. From my understanding, it was developed after Augury, which can only mean good things for the subsequent modules.

According to the game's Kickstarter campaign, at least three official modules are already planned. A mid-level adventure, a high-level adventure, and an epic adventure.

But in the meantime, you should know that the game is shipped with a powerful editor that allows you to create your own adventures. It's too early to tell just how many of those will get made eventually, but already, you can find some unofficial modules online.

Unfortunately, the game's mod hub seems to be tied to Nexus Mods, a place where you have to register an account before you can download anything, as opposed to Mod DB, where you can just download what you need without too much hassle.

Among the currently available stuff, Hearkenwold deserves a separate mention because it's essentially a standalone game ported into the KotC2 engine. It not being a commercial project, it can be a bit rough around the edges, its journal entries are lacking, its difficulty curve is all over the place, and it can be confusing to navigate. But it exists, it's free, fun, and offers plenty of interesting encounters.

Technical Information

I've already mentioned the game's visuals, so now let's consider its audio design. The music is fine. I'm pretty sure most of the tracks were present in the original Knights of the Chalice. Audio effects are in a similar ballpark. But voice acting, if you can call it that, is down there with the visuals.

Once you get over the fact that the game's main menu for some inexplicable reason keeps talking to you as you click it, you'll be presented with a very robust options screen that lets you adjust and fine-tune a great many things when it comes to both the game's difficulty and what it displays to you.

Unfortunately, this doesn't extend to the resolution, where the only options you have are fullscreen or a tiny window.

On the other end of this are the game's animations. The default animation speed is already fast, but the game allows you to increase it past ludicrous and all the way to plaid.

But what is perhaps the game's biggest technical issue is the fact that it's more prone to crashing than a legally blind octogenarian driving an F1 car. Pretty much anything you do can cause the game to crash, reinforcing the age-old wisdom to save often and in different slots. Thankfully, all this crashing mostly happens outside of combat, so if you quicksave right after you're done fighting, you shouldn't lose your progress.

At least the game is pretty quick to save and load. Still, hopefully, some future patches will make it more stable.

One other annoying problem mostly plaguing the later parts of the game are all the slowdowns that occur when the AI tries to figure out what to do, or when you move the cursor around a bunch of enemies, triggering some calculations regarding potential attacks of opportunity.

Conclusion

The original Knights of the Chalice had a simplistic story, neat old-school visuals, barebones character development, and great combat design. Now Knights of the Chalice 2, and in particular its Augury of Chaos module, trades in the first game's pleasant aesthetics for a greatly expanded list of character-building options.

The end result is an engaging fantasy adventure that feels like both a faithful adaptation of Dungeons & Dragons and a fresh system at the same time. If you like CRPGs and can get over the visuals, there's no reason for you not to pick this up.

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