King of Dragon Pass

I first heard about The King of Dragon Pass on a forum where several of us were comparing lists of RPGs we had played. It received a favorable mention but I didn't think much of it. Recently I read it in an article that compared it to the Banner Saga, which I've been anticipating since the Kickstarter. Around that point I dropped the other games I had been playing and devoted myself exclusively to King of Dragon Pass. The game play blends elements of role-playing with point-and-click adventures games (like Oregon Trail), plus overworld number management of Total War. You have the opportunity to compose a seven-person clan ring from a list of potential characters, assigning them various roles based on their abilities. The role playing element comes into play as you develop histories and legacies for your clan and its characters based on random, choice-driven events that have extraordinarily elaborate consequences on the game's narrative. The events themselves are patterned after point-and-click adventures like Oregon Trail. The strategy comes from acquiring the sources necessary to manage your civilization. It is a VERY engaging and entertaining game, with spectacular drawings.

If you like the sound of it, you probably will. Lead a clan to glory (or most likely ruin) and lead a people with their own culture, customs, religion and all!

This is one kind of game I was always looking for. A game in which you can rule over a group of people and influence what happens in a very close and beliavable way. You got a village and a council to advise you, the game bassically happens in seasons where you made decisions about exploring or allocating resources, attacking other villages or defending from them, trading, using magic.... The way the experience gets more close and real than other is the narrative, this game is filled with lore and dialogue, events happen, disputes between clans, monsters, discoveries....and your choices impact the world greatly. For an older game, is incredible how far it goes, my only big issue with it is that it's scripted and there are limited pathways, once you know which choices are the good ones, the one that gave you a better dice chance, get's let's interesting, but there's still a few amount of replayability. I would LOVE to see in the future a game like this but AI driven to give you more choices and keep playing indefinetelly.

King of Dragon Pass is an experience unlike most I've encountered. It has a tremendous amount of narrative content and you never know exactly what your choices will lead to. This is however also one of its issues, as it can feel disorenting and like you're just running in circles. It also suffers from pure clarity issues that more modern UI/UX would easily fix. But the enjoyment I get out of its varied events, and how quirky a lot of them are, more than outweigh its flaws. It is also refreshing to play a game where you really need to get into the spirit of its world and where its lore is legitimately relevant to both your enjoyment and to succeeding in various things. I heartily recommend it to anyone with an interest in dynamic narratives in games. Or even just anyone who likes quirky stories.

What a game. I haven't felt this engrossed in a game in a long time. The best thing about this game is that it's like reading a story; there is no time wasted traversing, grinding for experience, or finding collectibles, and instead every moment is meaningful. People say that Fallout: New Vegas is a prime example of a choices matter RPG done right, but this game (and other old-school ones like it, no doubt) have choices that matter far more often. I have just played this game for 10 hours, and I've found it to have a steep learning curve. During this time I've been able to engage heavily with the religion/magic, raiding, and now trade/diplomacy systems, and I'm only just starting to realize how much the composition of your leadership team affects how you fare in your endeavors. This management aspect is intriguing in the variety of systems it lets you engage with and becomes challenging. In fact, this experience is fun and frustrating at the same time. But this isn't just a management game where you balance different systems, it has fully fleshed out lore and presents you with a story with narrative choices that makes it super engrossing while affecting the management part of the game as well. You'll also have to pay close attention to the lore in order to advance your clan, and that might get frustrating if you don't have a good attention span for that. A minor annoyance in the game is there are times where you have to send one of your clan members on a task but the clan members' names aren't written next to their portraits, so you'll have trouble if knowing which is the right person you should send. With the wealth of choices this game presents you with, I can easily see this game having lots of replay value, provided that the story choices don't converge to a single possibility. 1 star is deducted for frustrations about the seeming opacity of the economy early on in a first play-through.