Vambrace: Cold Soul

its very boring around 1 chapter after kill boss team almost dead .. and then encounter another enemy and dies .. done that 3 times now cant beat .. even well prepaired. so not recomended lucky i got it free

Looks like darkest dungeon, but you can't level up your party.

I'm not looking at the character bio every time just to see what a skill does.

Like many recent reviewers, I downloaded this game because it was a free giveaway from GOG. This game is overall mid in quality and truly worth a 3/5 stars, but I thought other reviewers were being ungenerous, particularly toward a game they didn't have to pay for. The character portraits and backgrounds are all quite beautiful and inviting. The game even comes with a digital artbook too! The art alone is worth a star. The overall plot and character archetypes are predictable and formulaic, but not too annoying. I was expecting worse, considering other indie fantasy media I've subject myself to before. The dialogue, codex, and other written labels are the least polished thing. There is a backwards E in one of the menus. There are oddly-placed commas. Sometimes, you aren't expecting to have the option to respond, but end up skipping through and choosing the first option on accident. However, this isn't an RPG, so the dialogue options are inconsequential anyway. I think the problem with this game is that it constantly presents itself with RPG features, but it is a 3rd person pov visual novel + dungeon crawler and should've owned it. The RPG elements function more as aesthetic choices rather than integrated elements of the gameplay, which confuse expectations. Dungeon crawling and combat is repetitive, but that's not uncommon in the genre. You can't progress more with skills, and gear options are limited. You're not gonna get a deep, customizable experience. It's meant for when you want what I call "battle meditation" - the kind of mindless hypnotism you get from level grinding in Pokemon or watching one of those plot-absent shonen animes. I'm glad this game was free, since it's not worth $25. But it's not irredeemable, it's just not a deep experience. If you're looking for a fantasy game that won't give you a headache with numerous narrative threads or complicated battle mechanics, this will deliver. Just make sure you get it on a deep discount - at least 50%.

This isn't a game. It's a slideshow telling a story with a few minutes of action here, an unskippable cutscene there, then a lengthy click-to-converse conversation, then some exploration. It took me five minutes just to get to a point where I could quit to the main menu: the ESC key doesn't work when you are in a conversation, apparently. I don't even know what the conversation was about, as I clicked through it as fast as I could to get someplace where I could exit the game. Beautifully drawn. Limited UI. Unintuitive gameplay. I'll give it one more chance and then chalk it up to a $2.99 evaluation.