Eschalon: Book I

Eschalon's claim to be an old school RPG is correct in that it will certainly allow you to build your character however you like, then ruthlessly punish you if you didn't build Mr. HackStabby McFireball. Specialization in combat, especially of one weapon type, is vital if you'd like to progress at all. I hope you like sleeping for a day after every fight, or blowing all your cash on healing. Sneaking by encounters is next to impossible and won't get you any XP, leaving you in the lurch. Your only warning of ramped up difficulty in new areas is death. Yes, you certainly can wander alot of places, but get ready with that reload. Spending alot of points getting that nifty cartography skill up will also leave you inadequate in the fights you get into every 10 steps. Quests are fairly common but their locations are so general or incorrectly described, leaving you to do alot of confused wandering. For example, the main questline directs you to the heart of a certain forest. I found the objective in the center of the NORTHERN map of that forest. Keep your money unless you really really really enjoy turn based hack and slashers with sparse storylines.

too random with too many things - diletant game design lacking streamlined rules. too many attributes and too many cross dependancies for skills. the economy "system" tries to exist ... after just a short while playing the game after you have been sucked into the nostalgia curious about exploring the world and gotten past the neglectable outdated graphics or simple core combat gameplay (its really fine not everything has to require you to be a tactical mastermind) - after this short while of joy the game actively just punishes you for playing attacks happen at any longer rest (that is needed) the game systems slowly drain you of all resoruces and joy you had throwing literal curses and diseases at you. its free - everyone should play it to see whats going wrong and the mob grind is simple fun. this is one of those games that would deserve a total remaster and refinement release. is book 2 and 3 better? dont know - im actually hesitant to try after i played book 1 for a bit and i wont torture myself to finish it.

Awesome game. I love how chests are set by random seed so you can cycle their contents by reloading. Because of how I've set up my character the way I win most battles is by kiting the enemy until my mana refreshes. Separating one bandit or goblin out from a crowd of them is hard, but rewarding, work. There's a bug that affects my computer. I believe it's because I have a multi-threaded/multi-core processor? The explanation is here: basiliskgames dot com forums viewtopic.php?f=8&t=1194&start=45#p36725 Basically, two steps of the savegame process execute at the same time, resulting in the loss of the slot# directory. If you see DELDIR you need to go to your Documents subfolder and make a blank directory titled slot6 or whatever. The game will recognize it and allow to save there and access the save slots below it until the next time the error happens. This is not a crash, the game will flag that the save failed and allow you to pick a new slot. The only crashes I've had are when reloading and those are rare. However, if you quicksave on a computer with this issue you risk slot1 being deleted, meaning that the game can't access any other slots as they are all below it in load order, leaving you with no ability to save your progress.

Very fun if you're into a certain type of old-school roleplaying sensibility. I beat it in about 14 hours, and I was happy with the length. There were, however, a few problems: a game-breaking bug occured in hour 12 where a certain key did not spawn. I spent two hours looking for it before giving up and looking online; it turns out it was right where I was looking, but it just didn't occur in my game. I had to resort to hacks to finish the game. Combat is exciting and quick, but results in a lot of kiting and map-jumping for mages. Overall, very fun despite the bugs and I'm looking forward to playing the other two.

A hack 'n' slash at heart trying to be a full RPG. A promising start becomes an unbearable slog through 1on1 battles across an ever expanding map. That's until you hit your character development sweet spot, after which everything turns into a cakewalk, even using a jack of all trades build. There are enough skills to create a few specialized builds, but not enough game to play it again.