Recent reviews by [DE] SunWatcher

This is how the gaming industry should be. A small passionate team creates a masterpiece without early access, micro transactions or a good amount of content locked behind a deluxe edition. And then they don't put a $80 or $90 price tag on this.

Thank you Sandfall. Thank you for making this amazing game and for showing the industry how they're blinded by greed.

Immersive, kinda faithful to the D&D 5e rules, many options to flesh out your character. Even if not all subclasses and archetypes are available at full release; there's an active modding community already doing so. I see myself playing almost any D&D character I want in the future!

Had to convince a suicidal AI-controlled cab not to jump.
10/10

I’m trying hard to like this game. But some things just don’t let me.
First, I’m a relatively experienced D&D and Pathfinder player. I’ve both played an GMed over the years and got the gist of these systems. Also, I’ve played Baldur’s Gate, Icewind Dale, the Neverwinter Nights series and the Pillars of Eternity Series probably thousands of hours in total by now. Not to mention the considerable amount of time I’ve put into Divinity: Original Sin 1 & 2.

So, what makes a good old school RPG? This game only kinda gets the idea.
Don’t misunderstand me, I’m really impressed by the number of races, classes and mechanics they’ve crammed into this game. That is worth mentioning and well-realized.
But the balancing. Uh, the balancing. First you get some nice companions to recruit into your party – but they’re totally crappy class builds. Then, after completing the tutorial, almost every fight you encounter is unforgivingly hard. Especially the ones to progress the story. You spend most of your fights in pause to give party commands, just to immediately pause again (I’m not a big fan of AI in this genre). A party member or even the player character failing at an attempt to use an ability can result in death. The enemies are also overpowered in my opinion… Overpowered and outnumbering. Random encounters can also result in a total party kill easily. As a GM I learned that random encounters are supposed to be fun and not punishing.
And the resting… I know it’s very close to the Pathfinder rules system. But please, it’s a PC game. Each time you rest you must annoyingly manage your party and assign certain jobs to them. Failure will be punished with an overpowered random encounter that could easily cause a total party kill again. Resting, something you need to do frequently to restore spell slots if you rely on your casters heavily, is a pain in the butt.

The problem of this game is, simply put, that failure is punished harshly with something that makes you fail again even worse.
But I think this is still fixable.
Once players recruit a new party member, please let them choose most of the stats. Race, appearance and class should be predefined (storywise). Stats, archetype, skills and everything else should be player choice. A game system with so much freedom of choice to build almost every fantasy character imaginable is being used here. Please let players use their imagination and the system’s flexibility a bit more.
Rebalance enemies and random encounters. Give us a challenge but don’t be the evil GM trying to kill us all the time.
And this resting system. Please have an option to disable it. Let us do it the “old way” like in other games: find a spot away from enemies, hit the rest button… and boom, the party is restored.

A comparable game is Neverwinter Nights 2 which uses very, very similar Pen and Paper mechanics. I liked to play it in D&D hardcore difficulty setting and it worked just fine. It simply realized this Pen and Paper feel better while not forgetting that it’s a PC game. Pathfinder: Kingmaker sometimes forgets that it’s actually a PC game, right? All those things that take too much time at a real gaming table should be slimmed down in a PC game.

And… I also think a turn-based mode like Obsidian added to PoE 2 would do this game good. It would be totally doable for this game and make combat more immersive. Micro-managing would be fun again. Really.

This game was great. Until they released turn-based mode.

Now it's perfect.

Went to the Elfsong Tavern and finally met Lady Alyth from Baldur's Gate - Dark Alliance.
A fantasy refugee crisis as criticism on the real world.
Traveled further and met a transsexual cleric.

10/10