Bellwright (2024)

Played this in early access. Had a lot of fun. I like the style of the game, building settlements and recruiting villagers to do the day to day work. This leaves more time to go exploring, while your village progresses. I like the fact that you can setup several camps or towns and plan deliveries between them. The fact that you can assign gear presets to your characters and they automatically equip the right gear. Replace their gear when its broken and even go equip an upgrade you just unlocked and crafted.

The progress and research feel a bit off. WIthout trying to spoil too much. For some research you need to recruit specialist villagers from existing towns. But you can only recruit these after liberating the town. But some really basic research requires a specialist from one of the higher difficulty towns..

And the overall word is still pretty buggy. Enemies glitching around the place. I eventually stopped playing due to the bugs like next one: There is a fasttravel mechanic for your armies by building boat piers on the water. For some reason wolves kept spawning in the water. But there is no swim mechanic in the game. So the wolves were stuck underwater and I could not go kill them, cause I can't swim. Arrows also didn't seem to penetrate water. So all my boat piers had immortal underwater wolves near them. And fasttravel is not available when there are enemies nearby...

So overall its looking to be a great game. Its just not ready yet and needs a lot more work.

(Thanks to @Ureshi for adding the game to the database!)

Bellwright is the latest in a series of Early Access titles by Snail Games, famous for ARK: Survival Evolved, ARK: Survival Ascended, ATLAS and many other survival/sandbox games.

As mentioned, Bellwright is a sandbox/survival game, providing you with a settlement creation mechanic and a dynamic combat system where you can directional parry/block attacks from enemies. Developed in UnrealEngine 5, the game shows pretty colors and a charming environment - the game itself aims to play and feel like a mix of Medieval Dynasty, Manor Lord, Strongholds and Chivalry.

However, the game is still early in its infancy and I cannot give it more than a two star as it feels incomplete in many ways than one: the gameplay loop sees you as a new-comer to the general land you will start to build your settlement in, you speak to the elder, get your first set of quests and run off into the wild open field ahead of you.

Nature is sprawling but the amount of resources are limited to the very basics, very different from Medieval Dynasty in which you can find a plethora of different herbs to make a number of different plates on your cooking pot. The tech tree is confusing to a degree and requires multiple unlocks in order to get the very basics (Cooking Pot, Farms, Wells and so forth) done - in short, you need to research first all the stations you want to assign to your settlers and then you can start getting to the useful stuff.

The idea is that every settlement you complete (with the idea of having multiple of them) will be completely auto-sufficient with the people within them, given the right tasks and the right amount of settlers living there. That's where the barebones NPC AI comes into play: every NPC has something they're good at and a 'list of priorities' which you can assign manually, with the exception of stocking fires and most things around your village (Bloomery, Campfire, Cooking Pot, Smoking Rack and more) need wood in order to function - only you don't need them always but the NPCs will always restock the fires of these places to their max (4 units of wood) no matter their utility or their assigned priority which makes your stockpile of wood deplete quickly and wasteless-ly as none of the fires actually provide any benefit during, say, Winter.

Seeds can only be found every once in a while while picking a specific resource but not for all resources: some you simply need to buy from a merchant which isn't exactly as exciting as finding them in the wild. The same can be said about fishes: there's no fishing yet, so the only way to find fishes is through a merchant or slaughtering bandits.

The only enemy of the game are also, coincidentally, bandits aside from a few other wildlife enemies such as a boar and a couple of wolves - on which the directional parrying doesn't work.

Speaking of the combat system: it's wonky, sometimes the hitboxes are everywhere, sometimes nowhere. Waiting for the enemy to prepare their strike so you can right click and aim your parry causes most fights - even the shorter and low-level ones - to last way too long. Wolves and boars don't have directional attacks, so they will sure-fire hit you even if you're parrying low - with multiple wolves it's almost a certain death at the beginning.

All in all, I'm interested to see where it'll go, but as of now, wait if you're interested. There's much better out there as the game is right now.