It's twenty years after your village fled the kingdom and took refuge in Darkwood. You always knew that these woods hold dark secrets but now you start to feel their evil on your own skin. Horrible things are happening. You discover fragments of the woods dark history and come to the conclusion that...
It's twenty years after your village fled the kingdom and took refuge in Darkwood. You always knew that these woods hold dark secrets but now you start to feel their evil on your own skin. Horrible things are happening. You discover fragments of the woods dark history and come to the conclusion that you have to leave your home. You know in your heart that once you step out of the protection of the place where you grown up, nothing will be the same. You have to face a world that's in chaos. A world without laws. Nevertheless you feel something else too. You feel freedom. A completely new world awaits you to explore it, but the feeling quickly turns into guilt. There are people in Darkwood who are counting on your help. You are their last hope.
Balrum is an old-school, hybrid turn-based, open world indie RPG with deep tactical combat. Explore a huge living fantasy world with dozens of side quests next to an epic main quest. In addition to traditional RPG features Balrum has deep crafting which allows the player to craft their own custom items. Balrum also features farming your own crops, building your home, and survival mechanics complemented by the game's main features. In Balrum you will have a faithful animal companion as your pet. Your pet is fully controllable and adds greatly to the complexity of the combat.
Real-Time world with Turn-Based Combat
A huge Open World with dozens of Dungeons to explore
Spend your learning points to create a pure class or a hybrid class
Dozens of Side Quests and an Epic Main Quest
Three separate paths leading to the end
Building
Farming
Tame various animals to be your loyal Companion
Deep Crafting System which allows you to create custom items
I enjoyed this game for a decent amount of hours, about 40-- I could never afford the subscription to UO as a kid, and it kinda reminded me of those days. I just think this needed a little more atomosphere. More scrolls or books about the world. Ther eare some random puzzles or small things, and it just needed more of that kind of charm. The trainer thing of getting skills it not new to RPGS but I feel it was not scucessful here.
The story just didn't make me care much to finish it... the world was open but also very geometric. Not a bad game at all, just needs a little artistic flair.
Overall aesthetic is okay, I guess. Couldn't hack the game play and bugs.
Something is also wrong with the resolution and I couldn't fix it in options. Text is tiny, game defaults in windowed mode, requiring me to lean in to read things and miss prompts. I started skipping dialogue and descriptions and ignoring on-screen prompts, which I never do and also never learned about an in-deptch crafting system because the particulars of ingredients were printed too small. This should be an easy QOL fix from the dev and I'd probably slap another star on.
Ran into trouble with combat a couple of times, got ganked, all acceptable, RPG deaths happen, it's the give-take of more complex gaming systems. No autosave so literally rebuilt my character several times because that's on me.
Then my dog, Jax, despawned. Could not get him to respawn. He didn't die. He showed up on my map. Nothing would bring Jax back.
Ignoring the loss of Jax, picking up and doing BS starter-RPG-hero errands, wandering to do some alchemy in the starter village with some NPC, dig up some dirt, four larva spawn, get stunlocked, spam food items to heal, flee, spider shows up, webs, stunlocked again, devoured by spider. This is in screaming distance of my character's neighbors. That was it for me and Balrum.
Game is janky, I encountered one major bug (Jax!), writing is okay to subpar, difficulty spikes are real, but spawning gangs of nasty mobs on a lvl 1 player out of a loot container is like that one DM who likes to put mimics in starter dungeons with newbie players.
Quit and uninstalled. Maybe would come back to it with some fundamental changes and QOL.
You can't name your character, appearance or even your gender.
The game still has bugs like losing your starting animal companion during your first nightmare and there is no way to recover him.
The UI is rather annoying, walking around is inaccurate, this can get you killed in combat even on easy mode. It makes exploration and item gathering a bitch, especially in houses and with containers that stand too close together.
Remember to safe often! If you miss-clicked and stole an item villagers immediately go to combat with you. You can walk around and explore and collect stuff in the wild for a very long time before running into a no-win combat situation, some ridiculously strong boss, or some kind of trap that just instantly kills you making you lose a lot of progress.
There's no real dialog options in this game it seems (played it a few hours, explored the whole starting village and a little beyond), so far my only choice was to not accept a quest and lose out on exp.
Gaining levels is tediously slow and you barely get any reward for it. There is no real customization of your character beyond the choice to go Melee, Archer or Magic. Only the Melee choice is viable. Archery is useless, the armor you get to wear as an archer cancels out the dodge bonus of the stat needed to wear it which is fucking retarded. And then there are the bullshit limits, like not being able to plant more then x number of farm plots unless your farming skill is high enough. Or not being able to smelt gold bars because your mining skill is to low.
Building your own house sounds like fun untill you realise that you are heavily penalized for not getting everything right the first time. You can deconstruct everything you build but you barely get any materials back if any at all. Also you can't turn furniture, do you want that same chest you already have but turned 90 degrees? Welp you've got to buy the recipe for that chest a second time, this time the 90 degrees turned version.
Just what I have been looking for. I love rpgs just like this. Great crafting system, lots of items to collect and build, fun turn based combat and a unique and exciting setting.
Packed with content, this is a wonderful old school rpg in the vein of divine divinity, with crafting and survival to boot. I fell under the spell of this game fast. It has a lovely slower pace, and the map is packed with things to explore and collect. Well done to the devs on this game. The story is quite emotional and interesting as well. This is old school rpg heaven at its best.
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