Rune Classic

Playing Rune Classic in 2024 makes you wonder on how game design could regress itself so much throughout 25 or so years. Compared to the reboot of God of War, original Rune slaps at any concinveable angle you look at it. Art direction, visual language, level design, pacing, and straightforward, self explainable gameplay with simple but so fun to interact mechanics, brutalizes its nowadays counterparts. Simplicity and focus always produces better results than overgrown egos and overthinking things. Rune has its issues: unbalanced difficulties at places, occasional collision hiccups leading to unearned deaths (remedied with free quick save/load). Classic release also has its graphical/physics bugs (like twisted into grund foliage). However, the single player campaign is such a great experience overall, you can overlook these.

I had problems with game crashing, inability to change resolution to 1920x1080, game being too dark and unable to make game brighter (slider didn't work). The solution that fixed all of that for me was this, and it worked for v1.10 and v1.11: Peixoto's Patch - www(DOT)buymeacoffee.com/Peixoto (replace (DOT) with .)

The game is good. It plays on windows 10. Its got decent graghics for its time. Combat can take some getting used to but its fun. You can chop limbs off and beat your enemy to death with them. Quite a few weapons that you can use. Alot of viking mythology. If your looking for a good challenge this will give it to you. Its a pretty long story and i believe is a good gem.

Rune is a game which nails the sense of wonder and exploration. If you go in to it expecting it to be more 'Indiana Jones' than 'Rambo' you'll have a lot of fun. There are a few questionable design choices but the good outweighs the bad in this case. Just don't expect to be slaughtering legions of enemies for the whole game and you'll have a blast.

It's one of the best examples of a genre that used to be called "slasher" as opposed to a "shooter". Meaning, you run around and kill things by cutting them up instead of shooting holes in them. It was so good that nothing came close for a long while and the whole genre fell into obscurity until Darksiders picked it up again and then later Dark Souls expanded on the formula by merging it with Rouge-likes (something I will never forgive it). It's one of those games that sucks you in and is hard to put away, with a mix of amazingly fun gameplay and a decent story. To me it was one of the few I played to completion at the time because most games back then became progressively harder as you went on but they rarely offered anything in return for the increased effort, this game did. I fought the last boss more than once just for the fun of it. This relates to why I mentioned Dark Souls doing the genre dirty, it brought back that pointless difficulty purely because people mistake nostalgia for good game design. Anyway, if you've never played it and don't mind the aged graphics it's one of all-time classics that's definitely worth playing.