Recent reviews by Default

If you liked Case of the Golden Idol, there's a fair chance you'll enjoy this too.

It's not quite as good as Case, partly because of a change to the way the mechanics of the idol operate, which my brain never fully reconciled, and partly because the narrative itself doesn't cohere in the same way that Case did in that the stories may relate to the main issue, but for one Act involve 'one off' incidents in a way Case didn't.

Still; it was good, and fun. You can expect it to take about the same amount of time as Case - 7 or 8 hours (mine, here, was extended because I took a four hour nap during a session).

A great game with chill mechanics which ends at the perfect time to not overstay its welcome.

Easily recommended.

Hard to say anything negative about this, other than it uses an engine from the early 2000s.

If you can get over the quirks of the engine, the actual content on offer here is fantastic. Just fantastic.

Every Gothic/Gothic 2 fan should play it.

I write this review because others I’ve read don’t replicate my experience.

I recommend the Google Doc put together by Waladil here[steamsplay.com] and this Steam post prior to starting a character. Hopefully with both you aren’t surprised by requirements for perks.

TLDR Conclusion

Setting, alternate methods for quest resolution, some encounters are good. Narrative was ok, but not fire. Unfortunately, the game incentivises you to do tedious activities to level up. If you can force yourself not to do them, or don’t care, the game could be for you.

Good Stuff

Choices
Dialogue options and skill checks will be available, or not, based on your skills, attributes, the ‘wing’ of CRONUS you chose in character creation, your faction reputation with the person you’re talking to and the dialogue itself. Most quests (possibly all) offer multiple ways to resolve them based on how you’ve built your character.

Setting
You play an employee of CRONUS, exploring “The Dome”, an area which (in the game’s universe) appeared around 1970 and contains inexplicable phenomena. It’s a unique setting.

Random Encounters
These encounters are the most interesting events in the game – even if a lot don’t award more than a narrative reward. You’ll get descriptions of weird environmental phenomena and events.

Side Quests
Mostly pretty interesting – find someone’s torn off leg or hunt for a chess game. Unfortunately, to access them you need to travel the entire overland map or talk to every NPC in every ‘city area’. This design will certainly see those who aren’t interested in exploring everywhere miss out on good content.

Pacifism
I believe you can play the game without killing anything.

Average Stuff

Narrative
An event occurs and you try and deal with it. This resolution doesn’t explain the event but instead focuses on how the various factions can use it to benefit.

The denouement of the narrative fell pretty flat; resolving the mystery would have been better.

Companions
Outside of initial meetings, companions don’t really offer much in the way of dialogue. Companion pathing is awful. Anticipate them to be precisely where you don’t want them.

Factions
You need a ‘thing' from each faction which involves going to their area, finding the relevant ‘faction head’ and asking them for it. Their chains usually involve a couple of quests, about half of which are banal. That’s about it for ‘connecting to a faction’; the rest of the inhabitants could be people from anywhere, and a few merchants.

Combat
Combat is turn based - you generate action points, move and attack, so does the enemy. Someone dies. Non-fatal weapons exist, but they’re pretty pointless. You can combine the stealth system and quiet weapons to avoid turn based combat.

Stealth and Crime
You activate stealth mode. NPCs get two concentric circles – a white and a red. Outside of the white, they can’t see you at all. Inside of the white, they’ll see you if you leave stealth mode. Inside of the red, they’ll see you if your stealth timer runs out. Your stealth timer lasts a number of seconds determined by your “Criminal” stat.

When you’re in stealth you can also pick pockets – the value you can take off any person is determined by your “Criminal” stat, now they’ll look for you for a few hours, and you can’t pick them again for a few days. “Criminal” stat also determines the highest value lock you can pick.

It’s hard to imagine playing this game without taking Criminal skill.

Money
One option is to play the game on easy mode – pick the pocket of merchants (and NPCs). Alternatively, don’t take Criminal and be strapped for cash the entire game. It feels like the developers assumed everyone would invest in Criminal.

The Bad

Experience and Learnability
Experience is generated from many sources. The problem is how these things are valued. Quests and combat (i.e. ‘playing the game’) generate comparatively little – finding hidden things on a map, or discovering expensive shoes in a box can produce heaps.

This incentivises you to maximise experience doing the most banal activities – such as opening every container on a map, or scanning every possible thing.

This is compounded by Learnability. Learnability effectively operates as a multiplier to experience generated, and comes from a mix of attributes, armour worn, perks and skills. Relevantly, in the Criminal skill tree you can generate Learnability when you’re stealthed.

When you’re stealthed, you move slower. Despite this, you’re likely to find yourself stealthing for hours across a map, opening boxes (and praying they aren’t locked, which will slow the process down) to generate experience. This isn’t the only ‘edge case’ for learnability.

Containers
The experience problem is made worse by the way the developers have placed containers.

Holding alt reveals most (but not always all) containers on the map. Because loot is randomly generated, any could hold something worth hundreds of currency and thousands of experience... or nothing at all.

A single building, on one decent-sized city map, could hold twenty or thirty containers. Your character has to walk to each container to open it and, if you’re lucky, perform an animation. If you’re unlucky there’s a search bar as well. If you’re really unlucky, it’s locked and you have to pick the lock.

Having picked the lock and waited for the search bar, there’s still no guarantee you find anything.

So because any container could contain epic pants or a fantastic relic, you open everything... while stealthed... in power armour... because those things maximise the Learnability, and therefore the experience, you get if you open a container and find a pair of orange boots.

There are likely thousands of containers in the game, and the loot/experience economy of the game commends itself to opening all of them.

Loot
99% of loot is random.

Expect to spend hours opening boxes to find nothing of any gameplay value, but you’ll keep doing it because the system incentivises it for experience earning.

Level Scaling
The game has some pretty mad level scaling.

Outside of scripted encounters, enemies level with you and so do merchants. You won’t find any level 10 weapons in a store at level 1, and everyone will sell them by level 40. Not-for-nothing, this also renders the crafting system almost pointless.

Perks
You earn one perk point every three levels. One of the perks drops this to a perk point every two levels. That, and several other perks, vastly outclass the majority of perk options.

This is one problem with the system – some perks are useless (faster fatigue recovery when sleeping) and others a no-brainer selection (more skill points every level). This makes early perks feel like less of a choice and more of an obviously optimal path.

Additionally, there are perks which don’t function as their text appears to suggest; several add benefits only to your companions, not the main character, even though the text would suggest otherwise and you won’t know this unless you manually check to see if the stat increased.

Finally, prerequisites for perks sometimes seem arbitrary. For example, a perk that adds to ‘psionics damage’ needs “Muscle”, as well as “Psyche” even though “Muscle” adds very little to a psionics build and would be sensibly a dump stat.

No Respec
The game contains no respec method, which is an egregious failure given perks rely on arbitrary attribute allocation that can’t be reset after creation.

It's hard to criticise this too much, given the chapter I just played (the first chapter) was free. It took me about 15 minutes, other users seem to have taken the same amount of time.

Ultimately, even free, I can't recommend it. It's simply a waste of your time.

Stepping through the issues:
1. Performance is awful and options are almost non-existent. Any game which comes with a warning above its graphics settings that low frame rates can break the game is already warning you away. From what I can tell, the game locks you to 30 FPS - I assume that's because high frame rates can also break the game. What a winner.

2. Sound mixing is off; it's very hard to hear some sections of what characters are saying by radio because their voices are simply too quiet. The sound overall is too loud and - with no options - can't be edited.

3. Level design is more suitable to a 90s twitch shooter. You're directed towards a ship (I'd say this is a spoiler, but it's visible on the screen when you open the game, so it isn't really). That ship is subject of a common indie-game phenomena where 'size' somehow makes the thing seem 'more epic'. Ultimately, it produces tediously lengthy levels to walk across however and is impossible to believe it was used for anything remotely connected to human occupation - design of the ship you investigate is impossibly cyclopean (which may contribute to the atrocious performance inside it) - the idea of heating these spaces boggles the mind. Imagine working there - your pen, your book, you at your desk, sitting in a room the size of Fenway Park.

4. The game has no challenge or interaction beyond opening doors. There are, being kind, three types of doors. Type one opens when you walk towards it - it is the only possible door. Type two exists next to a closed door - it has a blue light and the closed door has a red light - it is still the only possible door. Type three exists next to an obvious keypad. Somewhere in the room will be an obvious computer. That computer will contain an email with a code in it. That code opens the door. This is almost the hardest thing you will have to do in the game.

5. The game has attempted to use a keypad design popularised in Doom 3 - your mouse cursor converts to the panel so you can 'type' on the keypad or 'manipulate' the computer to read emails, but unfortunately the cursor isn't locked to the bounds of the in-game monitor. The frustration this produces is immeasurable - it's very easily to flick onto a computer and then flick off it, leaving the cursor possibly meters out in space (invisibly) and you with no better solution than mindlessly spinning your mouse and praying that it will pass by the small part of the window you can interact with and see, to stop it.
6. Graphically, it's incredibly ugly. Stark industrial reflective surfaces akin to the worst of the XBox 360/Unreal Engine 3 time with thousands of garish bloom lights which (contrary to expectations and all real-world use) seem unable to light anything, while still blinding you if you glance towards them.

To sum up:
Graphics: average to bad.
Sound: average to bad mixing; far too loud (which can't be edited in game because there's no options menu - I could turn it down from outside the game, but I still criticise the game for this lack).
Level design: nonsensical.
Voice acting: fine.
Typos: numerous (but I largely forgive games for this - not everyone speaks English as a first language after all).
Story: pretty prosaic from what I saw in chapter 1. I won't spoil what there was of it, but I suspect nobody is going to be having any kind of SOMA-style revelation about the human condition.
User interface: easily the worst aspect of the game, given the way the cursor on pads works. Having said that - but for the user interface, it probably would have only taken me about ten minutes to finish, so the UI did extend my playtime by about 1/3.

Can only say again - stay away. Maybe with four extra stories and the twelve months extra development time, it could be worth while? At the moment, the developer has this episode listed as mostly finished, if they consider this 'mostly finished' it's never going to be worth your time.

I cannot review this game positively.

Any game which introduces a feature which, in effect, directs you to just leave it running on your computer for two hours with you contributing nothing towards it, while it runs a simulation, doesn't deserve a recommendation.

Specifically, here, I'm referring to "winter" which is such a pointless season in the game that all I could do was leave the computer running and walk away. If 1/4 of your game is literally just a direction to leave your computer running while it calculates stuff, I might as well be playing "folding @ home" - that would both help the world and be free.

This game is stupid. Play New Lands instead.

First hearing that Gothic was getting a remake, I was excited, but:
1. the dialogue system is a travesty - Diego spoke in as slow and cumbersome a manner as William Shatner; and
2. the combat system, with a mouse locked onto enemies and no way to unlock, may be the worst modern combat system ever devised - if the combat system remains as implemented, I would never play this game.

I *almost* alt+F4'd to escape the dialogue with Diego it was that atrocious. Why it's been implemented in the way it has I've no idea; it's distinctly unpleasant to play, doesn't assist with presence in your character, and limits options as well as - I've absolutely no doubt - being about four times as expensive as it could have been with a more standard (and better fleshed out) dialogue system.

The combat though; that is flatly grisly. I've finished all the Risen games and Elex, and Gothic 4... and I've never felt such visceral rejection at a system as I did with this one. I don't know if it's designed for controller or something, but the feeling of your mouse being locked into a blocking mode as it was here was awful. I hated it; truly, actually, hated it.

I quit during the fight with the wolves - actually ALT+F4'd to escape it.

I love the idea of a remake of this game, and I love the idea of modernising the controls and systems, but this shares little of the brutalist 'feel' of Gothic and - from what I could see - somehow had a WORSE combat system.

A perfectly good game. I enjoyed my time with it, at least as much as I enjoyed Legend of Grimrock and Legend of Grimrock 2. I recommend it as a purchase to anyone who's mildly interested in grid-based dungeon crawling.

That said, I agree with the other reviewers that this is no more "Might and Magic" than "Prey" was "Prey 2". It would be grand if Ubisoft, having outbid other developers, would use Jon Van Canegham's IP for more than just a generic fantasy universe. Ideally they could turn out a true sequel to Might and Magic VI/VII/VIII (though I acknowledge this is almost impossible, given design trends have changed so much it would end up looking like Skyrim).

This feels remarkably like Quest for Glory didn't stop production at five, and continued on. It's not going to win any prizes for textures, lighting simulation, or graphics, but it's a charming and unique product which is well worth playing, from an era where not everything was explained (but that didn't mean it was hard to figure out).

Some frustration lurks as a result of the way it handles in-game time and movement, but given time management is possibly the most important mechanism in the game - you're a student and have to be at classes, and dinner, and in bed, by specific times, it works. The game progresses in real time, and events can time out, so the movement system makes sense - if it went much faster, you'd see the clock count down far too fast.

Again, possibly because of the way time is dealt with, there is no fast-travel mechanism. I found this pretty irrelevant in my playthrough, because I was usually trying to push the clock to improve my abilities in the gym, so didn't really feel a need for fast travel.

Combat is basic but functional - real time exploration becomes turn based when combat begins. If you sneak up to enemies, you can start combat for a first turn attack and (if you're behind them) a flanking damage bonus. Other than that it's you versus them with either hand-to-hand, thrown weapons, traps or spells in an attrition system. But it works, and is pleasing.

All in all, I give it 9/10 for it's genre (Quest for Glory is really in its own genre), and 8/10 overall, with a strong note that as with many indie games, the graphics arn't really the point here. Pick it up and try it - if you can get over the gruen transfer of being lost in what seems a large school and figuring out the systems (try google if you feel really at sea), there's a decent chance you'll get to the end.

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MINOR SPOILERS AHEAD: You may enjoy the game less if you don't explore, and think about, how you're going to spend each day to maximise your time. As an example, in negative reviews, people complained about being required to attend dinner (you're teleported to dinner at 6pm). However, if you view it as a time-based fast travel option, you can instead make maximum use of your time at the training end of the school, and avoid the slow-walk to dinner afterwards by waiting for the dinner bell (you'll get teleported straight after you finish whatever activity takes you past 6pm).

Not all training activities take a full hour, so you can work on skills which use less than an hour to consume fractions of time. There will be points where you can opt to take an elective which starts at 3pm and finishes at 5pm, but you get the full benefit of the two hour long class as long as you get to the room *before* 4pm. Some activities take 5, 15 or 30 minutes and conversations take random amounts of time based on how much you say. If you only have 5 minutes before dinner, you might be able to start a 30 minute activity, and you then get the benefit of the activity *and* dinner.

Making best use of your time is a puzzle to be solved, like much of the game. Learning the timings for events will let you feel in control.

The Bard's Tale IV: Barrow's Deep is a new take on the 'modern tile based dungeon crawler' which Legend of Grimrock enlivened several years ago, and now contains its sequel, Ubisoft's Might and Magic X, and a couple of indie's. Barrow's Deep stands proudly in the company of the Grimrocks, and Might and Magic X, at least - as an RPG/puzzler hybrid.

Voice acting, combat and world design are all extremely satisfying. Combat should really be viewed as a puzzle in its own right, with more than a few obvious 'puzzle' combat encounters featuring in optional sidequest areas.

The levelling system is a little obtuse - a minor ♥♥♥♥♥♥ marring an otherwise excellent experience, but the absence of a level cap allows the correction of most errors over time, even if it does delay instant optimal pathing. Barrow's Deep also has one of the least pleasant inventory systems implemented in a CRPG in, I believe, at least a decade. Further, unless you're running a 1080Ti or greater, you should expect performance hitches at high settings, sometimes down as low as 30FPS, which seem hard to explain given the graphical fidelity presented (although the languid game pace mean this is a visual annoyance, only, and doesn't impact gameplay).

Some bugs exist - but on my playthrough (start to finish with all sidequests I could find), I saw no crashes to desktop, and only two bugs which forced me to repeat content (I fell through the ground in one area, and couldn't get out, and a switch stuck in place in another).

Despite the above, I thoroughly recommend Barrow's Deep as an entertaining CRPG. It definitely feels like a game designed with the sensibilities of the 80s and 90s, interpreted through a modern lense - whether or not you appreciate that will be a matter of personal choice. I think it worked - turn-based combat, tile-based puzzles, free-roaming movement and an obligatory Maguffin-based 'hunt the evil' story.

Expect to enjoy yourself.