Beat on Normal. Downloaded pc version for free after seeing a random video about it. It was an old school 1st person turn based rpg. With 4 party slots and 5 classes party design was a tough decision. Warrior as the general weapon user with special combat moves, including a hp transfer heal. Assassin with more dex, archery, monk weapon focus, and a stealth move that could allow limited movement without suffering attacks from adjacent enemies. Priest as the typical healer buffer but enough offensive skills that you probably could make more of a paladin. Mage with elemental nukes, though lightning was considered fire damage. Then the summoner who was kind of a mix of the other classes with brute melee shapeshifting, revive, buffs, nukes and minions. The skill point system looked versatile enough to have more than 1 of the same class in the team and have them be completely different builds. There were only 3 attributes: strength for melee and hp, dex for archery and dodge, constitution for non physical resists and mana. I settled on a warrior with str and swords, summoner with str and stone skin, priest with con and heal, and mage with con and frost. Then with the early levels up I had the warrior invest in hard strike for the stun, but it was lame that the % chance to stun was not even close to 100. I did not want to marry him to a particular weapon type until finding out what was best so I put more points into str and dex to be able to use better gear. I didn't buy any weapons. He went from the crappy starting dirk, to a mace, to frost axe, and I bought him a ring and gloves of str. The summoner invested too much into stone skin such that he only had enough mana to cast it once. All skills increased in mp cost with points spent. I gave him 1 point in skeleton and poison cloud. His starter weapon was the best of the team and he used it until I got the frost sword at the end of the tomb. Also bought him the winter cloak for the hp boost as he was supposed to be more of a front line than caster. The priest pumped up heal, which was a full group spell and excellent. I also pumped indulgence, which made npcs pay me gold. It was hilarious, especially using it on the beggar. I probably should have not used it on the beginning people until I had more points in it because the game did not allow getting gold a 2nd time. To max gold gain you would have to avoid using it at all until just before leaving the chapter, but I already seen a few NPCs go away after talking to them. I gave her the xp and skill point items so she had the most going on; got cure poison, bless, holy strike for the option to convert mp into damage, and a point in passive damage. I bought her the heal ring and she was using a cutter axe. The mage struggled a little early on because of doing the least melee damage and frost being hybrid multi target nuke and freezing CC. Plus the tomb had cold themed enemies. After putting some points into fireball she was rocking some hits. I bought her the wizard hat and fire wand, which massively improved her normal attack, and a point into passive mp and thaw. I got wrecked by the street fight guy so came back later after completing the tomb and then he was the one wrecked. I had to leave the tomb 2 or 3 times to rest at the inn, and use some healing potions and mp food during the boss fight. The mage especially needed food to keep up the high damage, so I made sure to buy some cheese in town. Hp food was less important with a healer. Summoner got the forest leather armor while everyone else got vests. I think armor will be more important than extra mp but I kept the robe. I had 2 extra shields but priest and mage needed more str to use them. Fiddling around with the obelisk in the tomb revealed it to be a teleporter sending me to the next town and I already had the quest item to move to chapter 2.

Chapter 2 was a forest area with no town. I failed the wolf pelt quest because not enough dropped. I would have needed to bring some from the previous area. I bought sweet ice claws and wolf hat from the druid for my summoner. I cleared out the forest and struggled with the milk puzzle until I realized cheese = milk. Then the final dungeon here was full of fire demons. Warrior took a lot of damage since the fire was bypassing his armor, and I had to leave to rest. I gave mage 1 str to use the frost sword and learned ice bolt, the single target ice nuke. The fire boss began as a ranged fight with the mage nuking, warrior shooting bow and other 2 throwing rocks since they lacked the dex for any other ranged. Eventually the boss moved into melee and my summoner used beast form for 1st time. It seemed to set his fire resist to 0 but the party did well. Everyone except the priest did good damage, while she had no trouble keeping the party healed.

Chapter 3 was a snow area so those frost weapons were not as effective. White wolves and tree trolls were easy. Dire wolves were very tanky for some reason and I had to keep stone skin up while the mage chugged potions to keep slinging fireballs. I settled on buying small blue potions instead of cheese since they seemed more cost effective. Stone trolls were pretty tough but seemed vulnerable to blunt damage, while ice trolls were like the cold version of the fire demon boss. Warrior spent points into str, dex, hard strike and 2 into stamina regen on kill. Soon he was able to use the 2h pole arm dropped by the fire boss, but this did not last long because I found a spiked disease club that had better damage and was 1 handed. Near the end he switched to the tree troll arm which was the same type of blunt poison just with higher damage and was a staff. I also found a 2h fire axe for ice enemies, and at level 8 gave him the dex ring. The disease club was not quite as good as the summoner's ice claws but since it only needed str I kept it for back up against ice enemies. His offhand increased damage done while every jewelry slot was filled with the summoner only tooth necklaces. His points went into str, con, stone skin and poison cloud. Priest was using a tireless staff that gave +mp, offhand tome with +1 heal, and a new +2 heal ring. Despite all these bonuses I still had to put points into heal to keep it effective. In this area I waited until her next level up to max out gold from NPCs, and otherwise she got some con for mp. Her damage output was minimal but stun shield was interesting in that it reflected damage back to enemies that hit her with a chance of stun. I bought +mp gloves for the mage that need 5 str but then later got mage only gloves with close fire damage, which was bonus damage on melee strikes that already did fire. So priest later put 2 into str for those gloves. Mage mostly increased fire ball, meleed with a fire staff, and got some nice robes with +mp and only slightly less armor. The boulder pushing maze was annoying but I solved it on my own after numerous attempts. The lever puzzle in the mine though I looked up. The solution was given by coordinates rather than the names of the levers so it was not that helpful, but knowing only 3 had to be pressed helped me solve it. It was obvious when I went to town and read the statue though.

On to the graveyard and cloister which were full of undead enemies. The basic enemies were not too difficult but the elemental attacks and resistances really jumped up. I discovered that using a weapon which the enemy resisted led to many misses while exploiting a weakness gave pretty much 100% hit chance, so it was good to have 4 different weapons for each character to exploit each damage type. There were a lot of zombies, rats, worms and spiders as fodder. Living dead had ranged attacks, fat zombies stunned, and headless hit hard with poison. Spiders did a lot of poison and some were fire. Skeletons and igors were heavy physical attackers, there were nasty fire undead and frost ones, and ghosts were completely immune to physical and frost while the undead and living cultists did every elemental damage and were immune to everything except physical. There was a lot of weapon switching and I discovered that while switching equipment cost a turn in combat, stuff could freely be swapped while the character was in the turn complete state. So all I had to do was let 3 characters act then swap gear around before the last guy went. This also worked on potions and food, which I don't think was intended since the tutorial specifically pointed out that drinking potions consumed a turn. The bosses were not too dangerous on offense but has such massive truck loads of health that they were very tedious. Especially how the monstrous Igor boss was more a normal enemy with boss stats given how many of them were there. Puzzles were getting more complex and I had to look up 2; the walking the correct path for the sun room, and putting the 4 body parts on the correct tomb. The solution made no sense and I mentally check out when it comes to brute forcing all the different combinations. At that point I might as well look up the solution. But it might have been faster to brute force since I had to decipher the map coordinates from the walkthrough. I'm still not even sure if it is actually coordinates, or where 0 0 is supposed to be, or if it is just arbitrary. Warrior dropped off a bit and went to last place in xp. I put most points into str, a few more into stun strike, and got passive resists. I wonder if he needs the passive weapon skills to keep up on damage, but he was using a variety. The poison tree branch staff was replaced by an axe with fire and + axe skill, which was very slightly better on damage but missed the stun chance. Then he found a poison sword with life steal, which was his best weapon so far. I also used a yellow great sword, which only did physical, and that old fire 2h axe to exploit weaknesses. He had no ice weapon since I sold the weak ones from chapter 1. Summoner was 1st place in xp coming in here, and I put most points into str, a few in con, and like 1 in stone skin. He definitely felt the lack of defense from having any dex. I still never bothered to use poison cloud or summon skeleton, and rarely used werewolf form. His role was to keep stone skin up on physical enemies while meleeing. Those ice claws I bought were still his best weapon, especially with the 5% freeze chance. He switched to the tree branch for poison and physical, but had no fire weapon. I really should have bought those fire claws from last chapter. He had severed heads for offhand like a Diablo 2 necro, and had 2 great ones that I swapped between; one with + physical damage and the other with + hit to undead. The priest zoomed ahead from last place xp to 1st. Part of it was the shadow jerkin she wore with +15% xp and how I fed her every xp and skill point book, but most of it was from the sweet gear and points spent. I got her str to 5 for better gloves and belt. She got excellent priest only gear as an amulet with +20% hit, shields with + stun shield, a frost hammer with sweet damage, and a crook with +hit undead and sweet damage. Combined with points into passive holy weapon she was consistently hitting for the most damage. She had no poison or fire weapons though so she went back into heal bot mode for those enemies. Heal and cure poison got a lot of use. I put 1 point into spiritual shield, which gave a % boost to armor. Stone skin gave a flat amount so the 2 synergized very well. I only used both occasionally though against the toughest physical hitters, as just 1 or the other was enough most of the time. She also had a ring and hammer with + summon angel. I spent 1 point to get it out and was not impressed. It used ranged cold shots and was permanent, but could be attacked and could not be healed. I found it died far too quickly to be worth the mana. I kept her gold skill maxed and used it on every npc, which led to the hilarious situations of getting gold from the few non hostile undead, the ghost king, and the prisoners of the cult. Such a dumb skill. I think I found an infinite gold exploit at the beginning of the royal tomb because there was a non hostile zombie that only became hostile after talking to it, and it respawned a few times when I went out for healing. It stopped after I opened a shortcut from further inside but I do wonder. The mage was the only character with weapons for all the damage types and spent way more time meleeing than casting spells. She got elven armor and shield, frost sword, icicle staff with 5% freeze and better damage, fire staff with +2 fireball, voodoo poison staff, and ice staff with double max hp. I put her points into fireball and protection ring, which was like stone skin for non physical damage. Instead of resting this chapter had altars to donate for hp and mp. It was much less cost efficient than resting in the previous chapters though. I only used to cheapest 100g option which restored less than half of hp and mp. The altars in the cloister doubled in cost but I was rocking almost 40k gold despite buying a few upgrades and keeping small and medium stamina potions stocked. Only the mage needed bigger than the small potions for boss nuking. There was a point near the end where I got captured and lost all gear. I love when games do this as I can put my high level characters to the test and feel the exciting early game loot acquisition again. Thankfully this event also counted as a full rest. The mage did the best obviously, and I used werewolf form more than before. It was only a few battles before getting all gear back and the only gear I found was a basic mace for the warrior. So it was not long enough to be all that exciting. The end boss fight was like 10 cultists plus a boss cultist. I began surrounded and had to abuse infinite potion drinking to survive. Seriously, how would you survive being surrounded by 8 enemies without that? I killed the 2 behind me so I could move into the narrow area to fight 2 at once. The big boss himself was not really any harder than the minions.

Last chapter in the city and resting was back but at 5x the price. Debatable how worthwhile that was compared to food and potions, and I only rested 2 or 3 times. I spent a lot of money on xp and skill point items, pretty much only buying a freeze orb for the mage and +2 str gauntlets for the war. The mage had like 25% freeze when using that freeze staff, which was awesome. Unfortunately the 2 bonus freeze items only worked with the freeze staff, and the 2 fire hit items only worked with the fire staff. It was a tough call whether to chain freeze or get the consistently good fire damage. There were a large variety of enemies, mostly assassin and warrior humans, ghouls, and creatures from previous chapters. Only 2 stood out. The apocalypse rat at the zoo was impossible to hit with godly evasion so the mage had to chug potions to nuke it down. And the lizard men in the sewer seemed to be highly resistant to everything, even fireball, so that was a slog. However 1 lizard and several other enemies could be killed by shooting across a pit. Finally I got to use the 100s of arrows and throwing items I had found. Warrior was the only one with dex to use use them, summoner used the blow gun, and the casters used the stones. The MVP though was the summoned angel, and I had a few ranks in the skill now plus the +2 hammer. Probably would have been more efficient to sell all the ranged stuff for mana to fuel the angel. She still was not worth using for normal fights. Got some good pole arms including 1 with ice damage, so warrior had every element. No weapons in the stores were worth buying so looks like that poison sword will be his best weapon so I put some points into swords. He finally got some magic ring mail, replacing the forest leather he had been wearing since the beginning. Summoner only got a better helm and still using those ice claws with no fire weapon. I really regret not buying those fire claws. Why were they not for sale in the city when the ice claws were? He was in last place xp and struggling to do as much damage as the others. I put more points into stone skin. Priest now had a poison weapon from the viper staff from last chapter but still no fire. Still 1st place in xp and doing very good damage. Her holy warrior skill only applied to priest only weapons though. I put a point into that and another in heal. I used both stone skin and spiritual shield for the tough physical enemies. Then I got stuck getting to the plants in the park. I had no idea what to do. Walkthrough said to find a key inside a tree, and it was in the absolute last place I looked after scouring every bit of green on the map. It also had a journal obviously from the little kid I rescued from the park, but how the hell was I supposed to know there was even a key to find or have any idea what to do? Seemed like the kid or his mom should have given a hint. After this was the final dungeon. There were a lot of various undead enemies that were not too much challenge, lots of teleporters, and dark rooms that required finding the light before the wraiths could be harmed. I let the summoner put 2 points into his fire nuke so he could contribute a bit vs cold immunes. Eventually I got help from a dead necromancer, who I made pay me gold, to get into the astral plane to meet the final boss. Who I again made pay me gold. That priest skill was so ridiculous. This area had a bunch of stones to smash, teleporters and enemies on the other side of gaps. The demons and skulls had ranged attacks, and I killed almost every enemy here using ranged attacks, including a powered up rank 7 angel (from the hammer and ring with + that skill), and giving the priest a +dex item so she could use throwing weapons. The final boss was reasonably tough, doing every elemental damage but I don't remember physical. His resists were not great though so every character chipped away at him nicely, except the angel who died long before the moment I had to fight in melee. Seems she was immune at range. I had to use some healing and stamina potions, thaw and cure poison, and the mage even died once. This was the only time in the game where I actually used the resurrection spell rather than load a save. After this was one last opportunity to use the shops before the ending, which sequel baited hard.

End stats:

68k gold 94 skeletal remains 93 cheese 3 elven wine 2 ale 36 brandy 31 small healing potions 62 med healing 7 big healing 2 small stamina 60 med stamina 9 big stamina 2 small purple 11 med purple 4 big purple 3 small elixir 14 med elixir 3 big elixir 18 medicine 22 revive 5 resurrection 42 stacks of arrows (ranging from single digit to 50 arrows in each) 29 throwing bombs

I should have used the alcohol more often because it buffed str while lowering dex.

Warrior: lvl 16, 905k xp, 18 str (4 from gear), 7 dex, 2 con, 8 sword expert, 2 mind of steel. 2 regeneration, 3 true leader (all from his belt), 11 hard impact. His weapons: treacherous blade (poison), spiders heavy crossbow, tool of havoc (2h axe with fire), razzik glaive (pole with ice), slayers halberd (only physical but never used). Armor: might gauntlets, full helm, cloak of rage, fearless ring mail, elven shield, barbarian chain, captains belt, ring of undead eater, ring of elements, warriors grace, top boots.

Solid character that I don't think I would change other than keeping an ice weapon from chapter 1.

Summoner: lvl 16, 745k xp, 19 str (3 from gear), 2 dex, 11 con (3 from gear), 1 turn to beast, 8 stone skin, 2 thorns, 3 plague, 1 summon skeleton, 1 revive, 1 alchemy. Weapons: ice claws with warrior's sword or forest claw for poison, blowpipe. Armor: bear gloves, full helm, warrior cloak, exceptional knight vest, dark skull (for undead, otherwise mummified head), heavy ring of vigor, hunters heavy belt, eye of warlock, rainbow ring, ring of ogres, chain boots.

I never tried alchemy and have no idea what it could do. I believe the main reason he fell to last place at the end was the lack of any fire weapon. I wish a better variety of weapons was available at the final chapter as my biggest mistake was not buying those fire claws. He could probably skip points in summon skeleton and nukes in favor of more beast form and one of the beast attacks.

Priest: lvl 17, 1192k xp, 5 str, 3 dex, 10 con (3 from gear), 12 holy warrior, 2 stun shield, 15 indulgence, 1 strike of faithful, 1 bless, 4 angel, 6 heal (2 from gear), cure poison, resurrection, 3 spiritual shield (2 from gear). Weapons: bishop crook (physical vs undead), hammer of spirits (ice), hammer of archangels, viper staff (poison). Armor: chain gloves of freedom, guard helm, winter cloak, shadow jerkin, large templar shield (also books with +hit undead or demons), iron heavy belt, martyr sandals, ring of mercy, ring of immunity, necklace of will, inquisitor chain.

Probably the best overall class who did the most damage from the graveyard on while also being the healer. She by far used the most mana consumables. Strike and bless could have been skipped and malediction would help with her lack of fire damage. I'm not even sure if there was a worthwhile fire weapon for her since so many were class locked.

Mage: lvl 16, 775k xp, 4 str, 2 dex, 10 con (1 from gear), 5 lore, 9 ring of protection, 1 wall of energy, thaw, 14 fireball (2 from gear), 1 river of lava, 1 frost, 1 ice bolt. Weapons: fire bringer, icicle, viper staff. Armor: fist of flame, wizard hat, winter cloak, elven ring mail, arctic orb, protective belt, small ring of life, ring of frost giant, snowflake amulet, glowing chain.

She did fine without a pure physical weapon and had the most reliable melee damage output. Points in frost and lava could have been skipped, and I only used wall of energy once in the arena to avoid fighting 2 groups at once. I think the 1 point in ice bolt was ok for early game.

Maybe I would play again to do a more optimized run or to try the assassin. This was a fun game that made me think of the old Might and Magic and Lands of Lore games I played back in the day. My 2nd favorite genre too. This game was somewhat simple with more comical and irreverent themes but hit the exploration, tactical combat and build design that I love about this genre. The only flaws were a few obtuse puzzles, some spongy enemies, and lack of mouse wheel inventory scrolling. I would have liked all previous shop goods to be available for sale during the last chapter, a way to determine the stats of enemies (like a scan spell or revealed after killing 1 or a few), maybe a way to spend gold to respec, and a Hard mode. The combat was pretty tough but I had way too much supplies and would have enjoyed being stretched a bit more. Though I definitely could have burned more resources on big nukes to kill faster.

8.0/10