Masquerada: Songs and Shadows

Masquerada is a game I wanted to love but ended up not finishing. The time I spent in the game had charm, but the constantly mindless grind of combat is a real drain when it tends to boil down to using the same abilities over and over again. Reminded me of Dragon Age 2 in which heaps of enemies are mistaken for interesting challenges. In the beginning the unique Venetian aesthetic is fascinating and there is a ton of lore, but even that becomes opaque with weird words replacing ordinary concepts and only explained in a glossary of collectable entires. The style of the art is simple and bright, from cutscenes to gameplay, but almost nothing is intractable in the same environment. NPCs without full dialogue just emit speech bubbles and otherwise are just background elements. You make no decisions in dialogue. It might as well be a visual novel. And about halfway through the intriguing concepts give way to an overlong social message which seems out of place, barely defined, and frankly quite preachy. With the original epic story in shambles I couldn't bring myself to endure more boring combat to see the unsatisfying conclusion. Play if you like the world, but you might get just as much enjoyment watching the CGI introduction which condenses the good of the game into a couple of minutes, and might have made for a fine animated series.

Masquerada nails the idea of a Venetian fantasy. It has strong voice acting and narrative design. It misses the mark in its combat, which I found was too simple and too stale, but at least it was an attempt to do something fresh in the RPG space. Centered around autoattacks and abilities on cooldown, I found Masquerada's combat most like a MOBA (League, DOTA, etc) but this didn't translate well into the single-player roleplaying game experience. You play Masquerada for the story. Ignoring the atrocious pronoun-hurling and storytelling-through-100-codex-entries, the arc of Cicero Gavar and his companions is exciting. There's excellent pacing, and strong themes. Some might say it gets too melodramatic in the final act, but I think the amazing voice acting carries all of Masquerada's flaws on its back, and pushes this title into pantheon of great non-AAA rpgs. Check out my full review here! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o71pW4rX_mg

Such a phenomenal game. The amount of great writing and lore in this game is insane, but be prepared for a lot of reading if you want to get into it; the game even has an encyclopedia about all of it, because it uses many self-invented words and places. Combat is similar to the bioware games from back when they were a thing, so if you like the Real time with pause combat you'll be set here. Everything in this game is just pure quality: amazing story and lore, great combat with a varied party and combo based abilities, great music and nice artstyle and also fantastic voice acting to tie it all together. While it might be very linear and while it doesn't have 100 hours of content, like I said, the quality of everything more then makes up for it. HIGHLY recommended.

It's really worth it, it's like watching great movie with interesting characteres and awsome lore in which you can defeat enemies that stand in a way of main heroes

This game is fantastic, took me years to get around to playing it but I am glad I did.