Six Ages: Ride Like the Wind

The grade of immersion you can feel in this game and its predecessor are sublime. Don't mind the reviews complaining about bad management, randomness or other fancy words typical of modern gamers in the Contemporary Age. This game, as the manual (yes, there is a manual, and yes, it is there to be read) says, is meant to be "experienced, rather than beaten". You should not, if you intend to enjoy it, think of winning or maximizing your gains or whatever. "You're not likely to fully succed until you get into the spirit of acting like the chief of a Hyaloring clan". If are able to read, you must play this game. Then judge for yourself.

An excellent and very familiar successor to King of Dragon Pass. If you know KoDP, this game is very similar to it. Practically everything has stayed the same, so there's exploring, interesting multi-choice scenes, raids, balancing blessings from deities, politics and lots of lore. The few small changes are not actually to my liking. The new ventures option, where you can choose separate year-long activities from feasting to guarding your herds feels artificial and overlaps the same mechanics elsewhere. Not a big deal but since it is the most notable of the slight changes to KoDP, I mentioned it. The ending part felt a bit rushed and bit too much out of sync from your clan's general progression. Or then I was just lucky (I certainly had been unlucky in the game before with my superleaders getting speared in raids or disappearing in the woods, so I don't know). I clocked 14 hours and paid 16 €, so very good value for the money. If King of Dragon Pass is new to you then you have a very different kind of experience in your hands. You take on a role of a whole clan for years to come in the fantasy setting of Glorantha, a mystical bronze/iron age role RPG setting where gods may walk the earth, spirits protect your kilns and the clan ancestor spirits are a big part of your daily life. Eg. sacrifice to the god of farming to ask benefits for your fields, practice demanding rituals where you need to know the myths. You control the clan by building, choosing its leaders, gaining blessing from gods, trading, doing diplomatic missions, exploring and especially with the choices that come across. Eg. a neighbouring clan might come to demand a tribute from your clan since you look weak (small forces, haven't raided succesfully). You're usually given 4-5 choises from paying the tribute to attacking them immediately. And this was the normal stuff. An ancestor spirit could materialize from your clan's story tent, a T-rex may assault your herds or the sky might tear up.

Visually pleasant and with enjoyable writing most of the time. The actual gameplay loop and emphasis on rng spoils it unfortunately. The game is too vague to be much of a management game with the quantity of your production for any resource (food, goats, cows, horses, goods, population) being inaccessible for most of play and the effect on resource production of any decision unknown until after you make a choice if ever. This may not bother some people if they dont care about management and are more interested in strategy, but combat is just a heavily randomized rock paper scissors with more options that are never explained and still have randomized effectiveness. Enjoyment from a roleplaying perspective might be your preference, but your interactions with the other tribes is at most points out of your control with small lists of possible choices many of which will have the same outcome and which will ultimately be rendered mostly inconsequential as the story grinds on. And many actions are simply unavailable for a nomadic warrior tribe that one would have expected. One could prefer it as a narrative then, but the story is chopped up into such fine pieces for events and scattered through such anemic or annoying gameplay that getting to the next plot point is dull. Even when you do get to the next event chances are it is a slight reskin or a plain repeat of a previous decision that again will turn out to be of no consequence most of the time. And no matter which part you would be interested in you have to deal with a terrible UI with utterly opaque mechanics and decisions with such heavily randomized outcomes. One could try diplomacy with the other tribes but then the game will just make one mad at you. You could build up your economy to interact with others from a position of strength and the AI will just cheat to keep up. You could try repeated raiding a tribe that had attacked you often in the past but the game will cheat to make them stronger.

In a rough outline the game plays just like King of Dragon Pass; you control a clan settling in unfamiliar territory and you need to make sure your clan is fed, keep up relations with neighboring clans and with the gods and spirits, keep your clan in a good mood and deal with sinister inhuman forces. All of it presented in gorgeously illustrated events, where you will be selecting different courses of action with the seven members of the clan "ring" offering more or less helpful advice. There is no one correct course and many actions have unexpected outcomes. Having done a full play-through now I only did three of the heroquests, that is rituals you can undertake to send a hero into the otherworld and reenact one of your clan's myths; probably only explored less than half of the distant lands you can discover; and despite having thought my clan was done for in the beginning, made it to the end and got the "good ending" as far as I can tell. The events are strange and interesting and so are the wonderful illustrations. Every culture in the game is clearly inspired by real world anthropology and archeology but at the same time not just a fantasy version of any one existing culture but unique and interesting in their own right. I recommend mostly not worrying about playing optimally and just going along with whatever happens, but there are some helpful tips you can find on the wiki to help you be a little more competent in guiding your clan, which can be good if you find yourself overwhelmed by all the things there are to do.

A great game and a worthy successor to the King of Dragon Pass cult classic. You guide a clan of Riders in a Bronze Age world of Glorantha, where every rocj´k has a spriti and magic is everywhere. You have just moved to a new land and need to settle, regain lost connection to deities of your pantheon and explore the Black Eel Valley and beyond. There is so much to do in game you never get to finish everything during one playthrough. I know for a fact there is some content in the game I have yet to unlock. Mostly this has to do with exploration, for the map is quite big. There are several gameplay differences from KoDP, which I think a´have added some depth to the game. These include ventures, undertakings by your clan that grant significant bonuses if succesfull as well as the combat system being more complicated and consisting of multiple choices now instead of a few at the very beginning only. Much more suspenseful. The addition of shamans and spirit magic into the game also enrichens the experience. Hunting for the best and most interesting sprits really adds to the exploration aspect of the game. The greatest problem I have with the game is the difficulty of unlocking all the content on a single run, coz there's so much of it. You have to come back again. This kind of game is of course not for everyone, but if you enjoy fantasy and wish to try living in a world where Gods are real and walk amongst you, then this title is for you.