This is one of the games where you delude yourself into playing more because it reminds you of better games. It just isn't up to that and I had to decide to stop playing it as it was habit, not satisfaction, making me play more. Let's face it - this is a clone of Might and Magic 3 to 5, but simpler in ways that quickly takes the wind out of its sails. Yes, you see enemies move on the map and in the dungeons. But you can only engage them when running into them. No ranged combat in spite of there being a Ranger class. The only thing you can do here is maneuver a bit (as they advance semi-randomly) so that the monsters don't crowd up on you. Combat is the bread and butter of such a game, and it's also lacking. Your basic options are hit, cast offensive magic, and cast healing magic. You have a few one-time-per-rest powers that aren't all that great, either. Battles are hence heavily repetitive exercises in wearing down the HP of the enemy. It didn't seem to matter even how many enemies I faced because even single monsters seemed to get multiple turns...? Anyway, the combat is not fun. My choices barely seemed to matter, and the biggest choice you have is when to withdraw a bit and rest. What makes the game uninteresting? On the one hand, it's mostly a game about choosing in which order to fight your battles. You can basically tell from the HP counts of your enemies where you need to go next. But even then it feels like you can't get ahead of the enemies. The game maintains its "challenge" by skewing the numbers in a way that you feel like catching up often. It would be a more palatable game if it at least was something you casually breezed through. It's too bland to spend more time in it. This goes for the map, too. Exploration is nowhere near as fun as in Might & Magic, it just imitates the vibe poorly. The map is too small and there's not enough to find in it. Dungeons have switches but no secrets... I actually wanted to like this but it ends up a solid meh.
I'm reviewing the finished game as of July 30th, 2024. I bought this game at 30% off. It still seems overpriced for what it delivers. The game at its core has a very simple economy. You build buildings on your limited plots to create resources. You use the resources to build, make your itinerant workers happy, and keep the fire going. Problem: The economy is way too simple. There are three food type resources and not a lot of other resources. Constructing entry level buildings consumes wood, higher level buildings consume metal. Never even a mix of resources. With only the simplest allocation of labor I was awash in resources. Same for research. Fulfilling your migrant workers' requests earns you blueprints. Pretty soon I had lots. I encountered two types of disasters you have plenty of time to prepare for. Preparing means buildings are temporarily unavailable. Fortifying buildings over and over feels like a chore, though. The basic buildings run on labor. More advanced buildings require an additional investment of resources - a bit of metal to run a sawmill to get more wood. Veggies help growing bugs. Fish can be use to generate more oil. As long as you produce these resources, you can basically boost your production plentiful. Your workforce constantly changes, so this requires some minor planning to ensure you have the right workers to boost your production. But if you don't? Impact is manageable. There are buildings that boost morale, way too many of them. It's just... they seem entirely superfluous on normal difficulty. Just feeding your cutesy visitors big meals does the trick. Your basic work loop is dealing with events and workforce changes, then assigning tasks, then cooking a meal (with up to 3 ingredients..), then feeding fire. Story events happen at times in these phases, and "disasters" mix it up a bit. But it does get tedious. So very tedious. The story is nice but the lack of economic challenge renders it moot. Cute but shallow in total.
This game is many things. But for me it's primarily a story you can explore through gameplay. If you like things to discover, this is your game. If you seek challenge... maybe. But be prepared - the game's dangers can only be avoided, not undone. The game revolves around a sailor on his boat catching fish. This finances getting a better boat, to catch more fish, shellfish, and stuff you dredge from the sea. As you do so you get involved in a story of cosmic horror (i.e., a la Call of Cthulhu) and also have to navigate several island chains with different challenges, each uniquely themed. The story bits are served to you through a simple interface similar to dialogues in many games. The story parts also feature very interesting character art. The game itself gains its charm from seeing its world from the third person view of your boat, which immerses you quite a bit in it. There's a great variety of dangers on the sea and around the islands you have to face, and you have to either evade them, outrun them, or find a remedy to bypass them. Meanwhile you catch a great variety of regular and mutated fish, all of which are amazingly bizarre. Feel is everything in Dredge. The desire to be safely in port at night is high as the sea is dangerous, but even if you use the game's difficulty settings to bypass that danger, this feeling never changes. The game is accessible to boot if you need that to beat it, and it's not any less enjoyable that way. Just turn it on once in a while to see what the monsters really are like. In terms of bugs I encountered none, but since this is a 3D game, the camera can get in your way annoyingly when you navigate narrow passages. If you do that while also outrunning something... not fun. In general, however, the quality of this title was top-notch. It's interesting how the game tutorializes itself as you gradually grow into the full game over time. If you but it on sale, it's definitely a steal!
The Pale Reach is a fully playable extension to the game similar to the various playable areas that constitute the main storyline. There are two things that are a bit of a drag with The Pale Reach initially. One is the lack of a map at the beginning that gets remedied rather late. The other is that before you unlock the inner parts of the Pale Reach you run into time problems - there are no initial anchor points besides the one at the entrance, so until you do you need to navigate the ice labyrinth back and forth before the usual night dangers make it harder. You could say that almost all challenge is contained at the beginning, and one unfair bit is that one of the unlocks you need to do suddenly forwards time, which might get you into trouble and require a reload, depending. Another, minor gripe is that even with a fast boat, going around the Pale Reach (instead of through) is impossible with regular game mode. An unusual lack of anchoring sites, again. (It makes sense given the theme, but it was unexpected given how the game handles this elsewhere.) Once you unlock the inner reach, this gets better. Still, the Pale Reach is themed unique enough to be definitely worth it, it comes with cool art and is almost as good as the main regions in the game. The winding and at times narrow passages definitely will provide some challenge even in casual mode, I bonked my boat a lot, comparable only to the late game Devil's Spine area. And the story... the story here is definitely on par with the rest. All in all I'm glad to have bought it.
During the early course of the game, you find and deliver an item called the Blackstone Key, but you don't get to use or keep it. Guess what? This DLC adds that. What does it unlock? Basically one "room" in the whole game - which means a minor inventory with two items. One of them is a temporarily useful engine you can install, and one is a rune that significantly boosts your ability to hook aberrations (almost doubling it, depending on your gear). No extra gameplay, no additional challenges. It couldn't be more minor. It seems like a bonus item you would get for buying some special edition (which it is) or preordering, nothing more. Look at the screenshots GOG provided for this DLC - that's it! That's all of it. That said, the completionist in you might not be able to resist, and this pay-for bonus significantly increases your chances to complete your collection of aberrations, so there's at least something. Purely optional, though.
This game has many quality of life improvements over similar games in the same vein, but its main story is not engaging, often also not convincing, contrived and full of fridge logic. Besides advertising for choice the game actually railroads you through the major plot points - having been knocked out twice in two of the presumably three acts while following the main quest, I don't feel bursting with choice. To make the point: My choices and quest experience in the game so far seemed to matter during a courtroom scene which seemed vital to the plot, only to be rendered completely and utterly moot by a plot twist. As far as writing or choice is concerned, that is just infuriating. The graphics vary from decent to unimpressive. The combat is quirky and relies sometimes on controlling chokepoints. Sadly, it's hard to tell when your companions will block each other just as well. This thing would have been better served by a solid turn-based system, for example then you could pick where your "slow spells" hit after casting them instead of making an educated guess about where every enemy might be going. And the game is mostly combat and its dungeon maps taken together are probably way bigger than its whole overworld taken together. All in all comparatively bug-free and definitely improved since my first attempt in 2015. The devs try to build a world and succeed to a degree, but it does not really matter so much for most of the game to really pay off. Quest design is often poorly done, instead of being able to follow clues you are more likely to check every building in a certain map until you run into the next milestone, etc. Performance is decent for a Unity game but loading times are still a hassle, especially since entering any little hovel is done by changing screen and loading all over again. Bought it on sale, decent but not great. Relies too much on the protagonist gimmick instead of investigation and good narrative. A "just do everything" game.
This game is an extended "Whodunnit" murder puzzle with 60 fates to be resolved. You have a crew manifest, a picture of all people, but you must not only correlate who on the picture is which crew member, you also have to find their cause of death. The game helps you by locking in correct answers for every few you get right. The most fun is the unrolling of what happened, when you travel backwards through the ship's fraught history by chains of murder scenes. It gets kind of tedious when you have several similar candidates (same country of origin/ethnicity) to chose from, several people doing the same jobs. But if you pick up on clues, you can at least group the people efficiently. You can assign a crew member role to people before identifying them - like "unknown officer", "unknown steward", etc. Wish I noticed sooner. In fact, the game pretty much gives away some identities in ways that I thought were too easy to assume. What doesn't help is the graphics of a game. Sometimes you think somebody is a certain ethnicity or origin and then it turns out they aren't. Also, navigating between clues and "frozen in time" murder scenes can be terribly time-consuming due to navigating the ship and jumping through the scenes. Visual connections between scenes can be especially hard to spot - I guess it takes the right kind of observer. The amount of clues in this game is staggering and on one occasion even the game itself cheats when giving you info. [SPOILER: Keeping an eye on who is in a scene is more helpful than you might reasonably expect.] The atmosphere of the game is great, I liked the music, and the events that unfold are dark and interesting.
When I saw the hand-made scenes on the GOG store page, I was sold. I love the feel of such scenes and the unique impression they leave. Except, the game's looks fall short of the previews. It lacks plasticity, depth, the whole thing doesn't come together well. Even on the artistic side the game looks gloomy and uninteresting. Some of the dramatic lighting from the preview images seemed to imply some haunted or horror tone, but the effect is never put to good use. Scenes don't even agree on a common day time. The biggest flaw may be the interface. Changing scenes requires extra clicks, no double-clicking to get a quick description, fast-walking is ... not all that faster. Since one traverses the same lengthy scenes over and over again that becomes dreadfully noticable! Interaction with the inventory is impossible, the game shows you which item to use where and even makes the combinations for you. So, inventory puzzles, a staple of the genre, are completely impossible which might be for the best since most combinations you end up with are ... barely logical. In the end you end up just the same - traveling to every location trying everything. Fast-travel is introduced only late mid game and then quite useless and doesn't save much. The game insists on dropping you at the far end of locations - tedious... One of the biggest flaws is that most characters remain underdeveloped, spew pseudo-occult babble, and have almost no impact on the game. They're either there to present a short puzzle or spew exposition and give items. They are quirky for sure, but not even the antagonist has a convincing or any character arc. Villaneous laughter must be enough to establish a role reversal - 50s B movie material. Which is also what the story is: a 50s B movie. The setting doesn't matter much. It's not even very nostalgic in the end. And the music in the middle... made me wish I could cut the scene somehow. A few interesting set pieces, but it doesn't add up. Wish it was better!
I enjoyed playing this game for a while until I inevitably ran into many of the game's limitations and its bad balancing. My first disappointment was when I realised that magic and tech were at odds. Really fantastic doodads that mix magic and tech are impossible. Strange then how many unrealistic and unworkable devices exist in the tech branch we haven't figured out yet to this day. If you opt for the Jules-Vernian-side of this divide, be in for a few rough surprises. Any ranged attack character needs ammo, and ammo is expensive, basically eating up your early gold resources quickly. Since half the time monsters rush you, ranged attacking is not much of an advantage. When the ore golems showed up, being a firearms expert was suddenly worth nothing. This is still early-to-mid-game, mind you. None of the NPCs become more useful through levelling really, you cannot control them much, so everything you really want to do your PC has to do for you. This means that you can't mix and match your party, because the really useful character has to do almost all except cast some minor healing spells - because that's all your first friend can do in magic after even 15 level upgrades. Etc. It is not a bad game per se, but to see a good idea marred by such dismal execution... Very disappointing.
Whatever one's own first gaming experiences were, it is hard to back below that standard. My first Ultima game was Ultima V, the third game I ever owned for the C64. If you play the sequels first, it is hard to go back. Ultima IV is very innovative, as being one of the first CRPGs to depart from simple hack'n'slay and create a storyline based on actually roleplaying. In order to complete the game the player has to abide by the moral standards that do make him or her an Avatar, the embodiment of the virtues. This idea will always set this game apart. However, even compared to Ultima V this game looks dated. Ultima V introduced characters that follow their daily schedule like clockwork. The attention to little details makes the world of Britannia come alive. Compared to even that standard, Ultima IV seems pretty static. Both Ultima IV and Ultima V require building your character to a high level (IIRC Ultima IV can in fact only completed at level 8, the highest, because it determines party size), and collecting money, ingredients and other stuff. This severely detracts from following the plot and makes for many hours of running around to kill monsters to build the character. If you're more into an advancing story, Ultima VI and VII have much less need to toil in the experience point mines, and play much more like adventure games in a great interactive world. Also recommended are Ultima Worlds: The Savage Empire and Ultima Worlds: Martian Dreams, spinoffs on the Ultima VI engine that explore the better interface and item interaction of Ultima VI further. If you want a better gaming experience out of Ultima IV, there's a fanmade graphical update available. The screenshots here don't look like it is already included, but I haven't checked. All in all, Ultima IV hasn't aged as well as Ultima V up to VII beyond. Ultima IV might be interesting for historical reasons, but that wasn't enough to make me want to finish it.
