I love solo dev projects. It can be very inspiring to see what an individual can come up with and follow through on building. Despite some rough edges, this is one of those inspiring projects.

Caves of Lore is an RPG dungeon crawl with clear influence from the old Ultima games. As you explore the various dungeons and towns, you gather lore from books and people that helps you piece together the mystery of why people seem to be losing their memories. While the overarching storyline and character development are both a bit minimal by modern RPG standards, the world building and lore are very well done and kept me interested throughout the 35 hours it took me to beat the game. There are secrets around every corner, many of which reward you with both unique items in addition to lore. This lore often serves a gameplay purpose as well, cluing you into how to find yet more secrets. This secret hunting, exploration, and gathering clues was easily my favorite portion of the game.

The combat, on the other hand, is a bit more hit or miss. The basic systems are competently executed, with a nice variety of spells and abilities to give you plenty of options in the tactical, grid based battles. However, many of these options begin to lose value as the game progresses. Being able to freeze a large threat is great early game, when there is typical only one or two threatening enemies in combat. Later in the game, fights tend to be bigger, and will drag on if you aren't spamming large AoE DPS and the highest damage single target moves. Many other abilities are just never effective enough to be worth a turn-- lowering defense in a PBAoE just isn't worth a turn when you could otherwise be slamming an enemy for great damage and a chance to stun. This is made more annoying by the fact that mastering these less worthwhile abilities through repeated use is required to unlock other abilities at times. Worse yet, the encounter density is legitimately twice what I would have preferred. You can stealth past enemies, but that makes it far harder to explore and can leave you in a dangerous situation if you need to rest and heal up. Finally, the bosses are absolute pushovers, going down in far too few hits. All of that said, though, the basic systems are enjoyable. Combat IS enjoyable overall, there's just way too much of it and some balance issues remaining here and there.

There are some other annoyances as well. New companions join with almost nothing in the way of skills and absolutely no levels in their spells or abilities. Getting them combat-ready is a huge investment of time and money, and simply wasn't worth it for the last few who joined. One of the forms of secrets are based on runes that are sensitive to the position of the games 3 moons. These become more and more common as the game progresses, and require some fairly tedious waiting. I skipped a few here and there just so I didn't have to wait around so much. Finally, the storyline ended with a clear hook for a sequel rather than properly resolving. That's always a bit frustrating when the sequel is still a long ways out. Of course, I cared enough that I was frustrated, so that's not entirely a bad thing.

Still, despite those issues, I had a really good time with the game. The world, lore, and exploration are enough to move past the game's shortcomings. It's definitely worth the time for those who enjoy the genre.