Traysia is a little-known 1992 Sega Genesis/Mega Drive RPG that I did not expect to be revived in 2026. I knew about Phantasy Star, Shining Force, and even Shining in the Darkness growing up, but I never even heard of Traysia. I don’t even remember seeing Traysia’s cover art (with the cool dragon) on the shelves at video game rental places. Ergo, I went into Traysia as blind as could be. 

Would this be a hidden gem worth uncovering, a piece of junk that should have stayed buried in the past, or something in between? After enduring Traysia’s 5-chapter saga, I’m sorry to say that if not for the cheats and exploits made available via Ratalaika’s porting, I would have shelved this poorly designed game before the first chapter ended.

The one and only positive note is that within Traysia’s soundtrack exist three good pieces of music: the lovely title theme, the evocative end credits’ theme, and chapter 5’s stirring field theme. The rest of the music, be it town, dungeon, battle, boss, shop, etc. themes, is decent if forgettable 16-bit chiptune RPG music. Considering the Genesis/Mega Drive’s sound chip was less powerful than the SNES’s, the music lacks the clarity, fullness, and dynamics of many stronger SNES RPG soundtracks.

I like that a scan of the old instruction manual is included, but its pictures are too small and impossibly blurry to read. Too bad, because that manual explains what happens between the introductory cutscene (where Roy bids his girlfriend Traysia goodbye to travel with his merchant uncle) and when you take control of Roy, lost and alone in a wooded village. What happened between these two points? Well, according to the manual, Roy’s uncle ditched him during their travels.

With little but his sword, Roy joins an expedition of able-bodied fighters to hunt the monsters terrorizing merchant caravans on a forest path. During that hunt, one of Roy’s companions (a wizard named Floyd) double-crosses the party in the name of a mysterious Master aiming to usurp rule. Now, Roy and his remaining companions have to stop Floyd before he grows from a nuisance to a real threat. The story is far from original, but it does feature a couple of late-game plot twists.  

Each chapter starts with a time skip and zero context of what happened between the prior chapter ending and the current one beginning. Dialogue is minimal as well, making storytelling as barebones as can be. The majority of the game occurs in lengthy, labyrinthine dungeons or wide-open spaces with no landmarks; these could have been cut in half to make more room for much-needed exposition and storytelling. Plot direction is vague as well, and often left me wandering around, not knowing where to go or what to do. And did I mention how fiddly it is to perfectly line up with NPCs, treasure chests, signs, and so on to interact with them?

A higher-quality scan of the manual would also help with gameplay. Controls are unintuitive, the icon-based UI is not self-explanatory, and even simple tasks like shopping for equipment and equipping said items are twiddly processes through menus that offer no information. What do the gemstones I can buy do? What restorative properties do different food items have? Who can equip what? I had to look for online guides to tell me things that should be in shop menus. Not helping matters is that each party member has their own inventory with limited space. This makes buying, selling, equipping, and simply managing items a disorganized mess.

The turn-based battle system seems simple enough, but characters’ positions change after each action and get in each other’s way, sometimes preventing them from taking action against foes. It’s basically small-scale SRPG-style skirmishes (similar to Rhapsody’s battles) shoehorned into a basic turn-based interface.

The mismatch between available commands and the nature of battlefields makes battles clumsy and overly lengthy affairs. For example, I only discovered by accident that the defend icon (a helmet) is what can move my character around the battlefield, while the foot icon is to escape. I eventually figured out how to somewhat work the battle system, but I would have preferred a more streamlined turn-based battle system to keep Traysia moving along at a smoother and faster pace. The one consolation is that the random encounter rate is fairly low. That being said, Traysia is still grindy.   

Other unnecessary additions to the traditional RPG formula include delegating healing duties to the medics’ offices and saving to the inns, when one-stop shopping is the more convenient norm. Both facilities charge for their services, so it feels like the game nickel-and-dimes Roy’s party to save and heal.

Making things even worse is that some towns don’t even have medics! After traipsing through multiple overlong dungeons and finally getting to a town for reprieve, I expect there to be a full-healing facility! It’s a good thing this version has save states, because inns in the sparsely located towns would typically be the only places to save. Even in the early going, dying during a random encounter can really set back progress since the prior save in town was eons ago.

The opening and ending cutscenes have decent visuals, but the rest of the game is not appealing to look at. Graphics have that grainy quality with washed-out colors typical of many Genesis/ Mega Drive games. Some of the floor textures are quite busy and actually caused me mild eyestrain. Dungeons and field areas have little textural variation and few, if any, useful landmarks. I made full use of the turbo speed exploit to get through dungeons and fields. Traysia’s dungeon and field areas are not as agonizing as Phantasy Star II’s, but at least Phantasy Star II was appealing to look at.

Traysia is no Phantasy Star or even Vay. It is an absolute slog that’s only playable if various cheats and exploits are used. A few good pieces of music are not enough to save Traysia from itself. Even if you have morbid curiosity about obscure 16-bit RPGs and/or poorly reviewed games, there are far better games to spend your time and money on than Traysia.

Remember Maya, from Shell 2? All of twenty-five years ago?! Starbites wears its lineage on its sleeve, drawing direct inspiration from cult classics like Septerra Core while navigating two decades of JRPG evolution. It delivers a distilled concentrate of everything that makes the genre beloved and occasionally frustrating. Turn-based skills, with a dedicated ‘limit break’ system? Upgradeable and craftable parts? Mechs? Characters demonstrating most tropes you’ve come across in the genre? All present and correct. Starbites rewards curiosity as you traverse the treacherous, expansive wastelands of Bitter, and it mostly succeeds in forging a genuine connection with the team and systems as they fight to escape the drudgery of their lives. There’s nothing new under the sun here, but it’s warm, comforting, and not a little challenging.

The straightforward narrative in Starbites heavily riffs on familiar sci-fi tropes from the outset. You follow Lukida, a down-on-her-luck scavenger desperately seeking a way off the planet Bitter. The dusty, broken terrain is a graveyard of smashed spacecraft and ruined buildings from an orbital battle decades prior, which dragged every ship in orbit down to the surface. Alongside her companions, Gwendoll and Badger, Lukida searches for an escape route while slowly uncovering the secret machinations of the planet’s rival factions.

While the concept of exploring decades-old wreckage for hidden secrets sounds tantalizing, the execution falls short due to some thin characterization. The cast relies entirely on predictable stereotypes. Badger plays the classic role of the big, slow brute who turns out to be calm and gentle, while Gwendoll’s personality begins and ends with revealing outfits and a constant craving for alcohol. Antagonists like the dastardly Ebony—who primarily communicates by shouting in anger—receive the same one-dimensional treatment. Despite a more nuanced narrative shift in Act 3, the uninspired writing inhibits Starbites’ story from landing anything deeper.

Fortunately, the voice acting and soundtrack fare better. There’s a wide range of voice options, and nothing is overtly wooden, even if characters sound exactly as you’d expect. The soundtrack is full of genre staples, from the moody, isolated synth of the mech Library to the typical bombastic percussion of the battle tracks.

Visually, Starbites feels like a nostalgic time capsule trapped between eras, bearing influences of a high-fidelity PS2 or early 3D-era JRPG. The game manages to establish a distinct, charming identity through its colorful 2D character portraits and detailed, miniature mech designs, but its overland and dungeon locations are more drab and uninspired, with few memorable parts and an overuse of assets. The dusty wastes of Collapsed Sierra don’t look too different from the frigid Corpse’s Cradle. To be fair to the small development team, the few cinematic cutscenes are reasonably well-directed, though a lack of high-resolution textures and occlusion leaves them with an overly simple, flat look when compared to the portraits. Yet, despite this visual simplicity, glitches frequently disrupt the immersion. Local NPCs regularly wander straight through dramatic conversations, clip into the scenery, or vanish entirely due to broken camera angles—technical hiccups that occur most frequently within the central hub city of Delight.

Rather than a seamless open world, the map is split into interconnected zones. Fortunately, a fast-travel system links the major settlements, sparing you from the tedious chore of navigating from one side of the world to the other. World exploration occurs in real-time, requiring you to pilot Lukida’s mech around the locations to solve environmental puzzles, scavenge loot, and navigate around patrolling foes.

Every enemy demonstrates a zone of awareness and will immediately pivot to intercept your mech the moment you breach their perimeter. Unfortunately, the mechanics don’t allow for sneaking up on your targets; even striking an enemy directly from behind yields no stealth bonuses, leaving the resulting combat timeline and damage unaffected.

Aside from the environmental puzzles, your primary overworld activity is a built-in scanner that highlights nearby hidden secrets and points the way to your active objective, provided the selected mission or subquest has a defined destination.

When Lukida collides with wandering enemies on the overworld, the game transitions into a familiar combat system. Everything from the turn order to the game’s version of “limit breaks” feels comfortably intuitive, even if the design itself breaks little new ground. Your combat options split into standard attacks and specialized skills that consume SP. Because you draw from a limited SP pool, you must weave weaker basic attacks into your rotation. This is the main way to restore these points, or you can replenish them with items.

Every offensive action carries an elemental property, which plays a critical role in triggering the Break mechanic. To break an enemy, you target its specific elemental weakness to chip away a set number of shield points. Shattering these defenses immediately shunts the enemy to the back of the turn order and leaves them vulnerable to massive damage. This shield-breaking loop essentially lifts its blueprint straight from the Octopath Traveler series, simply swapping out traditional fantasy elements for sci-fi energy types.

As the squad fights, they each build up a Driver’s High gauge. Once filled, you can activate the gauge any time for a character to interrupt the current turn order and use an empowered skill. There are a few other combat wrinkles as the story develops and new characters are added to the core team, but everything builds from these core tenets.

The strength of all these mechanics is in how they lock together. Success hinges on a delicate balance: weaving basic hits between SP-heavy skills and timing them to either trigger a Break or exploit a defenceless target. Because your party has a small health pool and enemies hit hard, defensive buffs are vital. Deciding when to trigger a Driver’s High injects constant tension—do you burn it to force a Break, or hold it to unleash maximum damage on a vulnerable foe?

Collectible Mech Cores deepen these tactics by adding powerful passive perks, like restoring SP on a kill or boosting defense at critical health levels. The game’s bosses serve as strict exams for all of these mechanics, occasionally flipping the script entirely by punishing break states. Ultimately, while these systems are deeply familiar, their tight interplay creates a steady stream of engaging choices—just don’t expect anything revolutionary.

True to its classic inspirations, the game demands a level of grind and preparation. Bosses are brutal, wielding area-of-effect attacks that can easily slash your entire party’s health in half with a single blow—and early-game healing does little to offset the damage. Playing on normal difficulty, I found at least one squad member was permanently locked into healing or buffing duties, turning boss battles into long, gruelling wars of attrition. While levelling up does raise your core stats, the power curve is quite flat; you won’t feel a tangible difference in combat unless you spend a couple of hours grinding out five or more levels.

A grid of interlocking Talents is how you manage your character development. Most of these nodes boil down to enhancing specific character skills or optimizing how efficiently your pilots gain and deploy Driver’s High. These nodes are locked behind ascending tiers that mirror the skills you unlock in the mid-to-late game, and the grid serves as your primary method for permanently raising core attributes.

Talents can be respecced, which is great, as the game rarely makes it clear which talents become vital later on. For instance, I didn’t realize how essential Lukida’s Reconstruct healing ability would be, so I foolishly pumped my early points into her offensive skills. Resetting and making Reconstruct cheaper and more potent helped alleviate some of the need to grind. Similarly, Mokobo’s party barrier buff is an absolute necessity, one you should prioritize upgrading almost to the exclusion of others.

Beyond leveling and Talent allocations, crafting and equipping new weapons, limbs, and frames is a means to improve your mechs. While basic gear is readily available for purchase, superior parts are tucked away in hidden exploration chests or rewarded for completing sidequests. Unfortunately, these side missions are even thinner than the main story, largely consisting of uninspired item hunts. They do skew toward the eclectic and daft—perfectly matching Starbites’ cartoonish tone—but they offer little meaningful narrative weight or world-building.

Ultimately, exploring party combinations and uncovering powerful synergy loops drives the bulk of the engagement. The fun lies in figuring out the best tactical approach as you recruit new characters, unlock fresh skills, and experiment with different Driver’s High and party buffs. While some scattered lore drops in Act 3 attempt to flesh out the universe, they do little to move the needle. If you need a break from the loop, the developers did include a fully playable version of their 2023 game, The Ramsey, tucked away inside the game world as a surprisingly delightful, clever diversion.

Throughout my time with the game, I couldn’t help but think I’d played a better, similar game somewhere, and sometime else. Its systems are solid and there’s a decent challenge inherent in the action economy, with plenty of interlocking combos depending on the makeup of the party. Starbites’ overall world is easy enough to explore; its characters easy enough to get on with and its themes easy enough to place. And maybe that’s the whole problem.

Starbites is derivative, almost to a fault. Much like its protagonists’ scavenged mechs, it finds a way to bolt on different parts from established systems and influences to create a close approximation to many of the original inspirations. But it’s only an approximation, and while imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Starbites might have had its time in the sun. You might feel the need to explore a fresher experience. But for those who’ve never had the pleasure of bathing in a JRPG light, they could do a lot worse than take Lukida and the gang for a spin.

When Disco Elysium was released in 2019, it was immediately regarded as a genre-defining work of RPG narrative design. From the way it recontextualized player agency and decision-making, how it represented the various mental faculties and barely-restrained impulses of protagonist Harry Dubois as anthropomorphised residents of his own mind, or its uncanny ability to immerse the player in heady concepts like religion, political ideology, and existential philosophy while simultaneously maintaining an uproariously funny (and deliciously crude) tone, one thing remains true: there has never been another game like Disco Elysium.

I’ve made my love for the game clear across numerous podcast episodes and pieces for the site over the years. I’ve followed the aftermath of the game’s development, including the firing of the creative leadership team (Director and Lead Writer Robert Kurvitz, Lead Writer Helen Hindpere, & Art Director Aleksander Rostov), and the subsequent dismissal of most of the remainder of the original development team (including writer Argo Tuulik) after the cancellation of several Disco Elysium follow-up projects. Suffice it to say, the story of Disco Elysium after its release has been characterized by despair and disappointment. 

However, the studio ZA/UM still exists, under the direct control of investors Tonis Haavel (previously convicted of financial crimes) and Ilmar Kompus. This duo allegedly stole the studio and its intellectual property from under the original creative team and brought us such masterful innovations in merchandising as the $165 plastic bag. Not exactly an auspicious foundation—but I decided to approach ZA/UM’s newest title, Zero Parades: For Dead Spies, with an open mind.

The “espionage RPG” concept was distinct enough to pique my curiosity, and the game certainly looks the part of a Disco Elysium successor. My time with the game has left me torn much the way protagonist Hershel Wilk is between her former compatriots; the core experience remains compelling in much the same way Disco Elysium was, but the game never truly steps out of its predecessor’s shadow and stands on its own merits. Zero Parades: For Dead Spies is ultimately defined by an inherent comparison to what came before, and crumbles beneath that pressure.

Zero Parades follows protagonist Hershel Wilk (cryptonym CASCADE), an Operant (spy) for the Communist Superbloc. She has just been deployed for fieldwork after five long years sequestered at a desk job inside the Superbloc spy agency Opera’s archives department thanks to a botched assignment in the independent city-state of Portofiro. Her new assignment sees her returning to Portofiro (specifically the neighborhood of Quisach) to assist her new double (partner), PSEUDOPOD, with his work, given her familiarity with the location.

Upon arriving at the photo development shop they are to use as a safehouse, Hershel discovers PSEUDOPOD has been zeroed out by the enemy, left in a catatonic state by a mysterious red disc. It’s an intriguing start, albeit similar to Harry Dubois’s disheveled beginnings. It’s up to Hershel to investigate her surroundings, ascertain the details of her assignment, and assemble her previous comrades (The Whole Sick Crew). Doing so requires that you walk around, talk to the locals, and stick your nose where it doesn’t belong, all while avoiding detection.

The new team at ZA/UM wisely set Zero Parades in a new setting, rather than Elysium from the previous game. The world of Zero Parades evokes the Cold War conflict of the 1970s and 1980s: a grand conflict of subterfuge and ideology between the forces of communism (The Superbloc), a techno-fascist expansionist empire (La Luz), and the capitalist neoliberalism of the Developed World (ruled by transnational bank EMTERR, a stand-in for the IMF). Portofiro is caught in the crossfire, similar to various countries in the Non-Aligned Movement, which struggled to develop and thrive amidst the animosities of the multi-polar world established after World War II.

Portofiro is an amalgamation of Italian culture and various South American cultures; the colorful streets full with tourists, the local bazaar bustling with black market goods, the locals eking out a meager living in service roles. Portofiro had previously flourished and then fallen into disrepair under a dictator named Nestor and his “Nestorism” (inspired by Argentina’s Peronism), a nationalist ideology with elements of both socialism and capitalism. 

Against this backdrop, the spies of Opera, La Luz’s Weeping Eye, and the hired guns of EMTERR compete for dominance. Each major power has its own methods for bringing countries like Portofiro under its influence. For La Luz, it’s cultural domination, flooding the bazaar with cheap Luzian goods (pop music, fast fashion, and violent animated children’s television), followed by the threat of military invasion if the cultural approach fails. For the bankers of EMTERR, domination is financial: cutting high-interest loans to struggling economies and then enforcing their will when the bankrupt nations cannot keep up with payments.

The Superbloc’s influence is waning in this war waged through financialization and commodification, forcing the communists to resort to disruption tactics. For Opera, gaining influence over Portofiro is a foregone conclusion; keeping them out of the hands of La Luz or EMTERR is the only achievable victory.

The Cold War-style setting is a fitting backdrop for an espionage tale, and it’s clear ZA/UM know their history. Where the game falters is in its adherence to Disco Elysium‘s structure. It made sense for Harry Dubois, a known police detective, to bumble around the streets of Martinaise and engage the various residents in conversation to solve a murder. Hershel Wilk, on the other hand, is a spy trying to keep a low profile in hostile territory, so the main mode of gameplay (open conversation with strangers) feels significantly out of place.

Similarly, the core design elements of scrounging the environment for consumables and equipment are equally ill-fitting; it made sense for an amnesiac with poor impulse control to drink alcohol he plucked from the garbage and wear a strange assortment of secondhand clothes, but it’s strange for a trained assassin (for whom stealth is paramount to survival) to assume the same behaviors and draw attention to herself. 

Zero Parades‘ mismatch of mechanics and narrative carries over into the character-building and roleplaying elements. “Conditioning” replaces Disco Elysium‘s Thought Cabinet, serving the same purpose of internalizing various thoughts and proclivities gleaned from conversations and character backstories. These personality quirks convey various passive bonuses in conversation and boost various stats, broken down into three major categories—Faculty of Action, Relation, and Intellect—with five distinct skills in each category. These skills determine your chance of success in dice rolls during conversations, as well as your options in action segments (Dramatic Encounters).

Apparently, there is only a nominal difference between the skills of an alcoholic police detective and an international spy. Perhaps the biggest diversion from Disco Elysium‘s format lies in managing Hershel’s Delirium, Fatigue, and Anxiety. Conversations or various actions (such as physical exertion) will spike one of these three parameters; when they max out, the player is forced to lower a corresponding Intellect, Action, or Relation skill. In theory, this serves as an additional pressure on the player befitting the high-stakes nature of spycraft. In practice, it serves as a steep punishment at the outset when Hershel’s skills are low, and an easily ignored annoyance later in the game when you have the consumables and equipment to compensate.

One of Disco Elysium‘s foremost innovations in RPG design was its ability to convert failure states into unconventional outcomes rather than simply impeding progress. This naturally discouraged the player from ingrained practices like save scumming, encouraging players to live with their decisions and, in turn, heightening immersion into the world of Elysium. By contrast, Zero Parades is far more reliant on repeatable skill checks, where failure does not permanently impede progression, but also fails to transition into novel states of play, instead prompting players to return to the check when their stats are higher.

For the checks that are single-attempts, failure rarely resulted in novelty, instead forcing the player to achieve the desired result via a different stat check, or another environmental path. In Zero Parades, I never experienced a failure state with an unexpected or heterodox result. This inability to replicate one of Disco Elysium‘s defining design flourishes is accentuated by a Conditionable thought in Hershel that grants significant stat bonuses at the cost of a metatextual restriction on manual saving. Some might see this as an inventive solution to common RPG player behavior, but I found it to be the developers admitting they couldn’t craft significantly interesting failure states such that players would avoid reloading saves of their own accord.

As with the mechanics and design philosophy, the writing and aesthetics never step far enough out of Disco Elysium’s shadow. The art style is carried over almost exactly, with spartanly animated 3D character models that contrast with the impressionistic 2D background art. It certainly looks nice, and the change in scenery is appreciated despite it feeling overly familiar. While the NPCs crowding the streets should make Zero Parades‘ Quisach feel alive and bustling, the inability to interact with the vast majority of said NPCs makes the world feel emptier than Disco Elysium‘s Martinaise, where you could talk to nearly everyone.

The writing is engaging, with a general bar of quality above most games. Certain characters, like Petre the Format Fetishist, EMTERR banker Oskar Metamoto, or unlicensed medical provider Doctor Ganza are as fully realized as any Disco Elysium character. The surviving members of Hershel’s Whole Sick Crew are particular standouts, with clearly defined personalities and intriguing backstories. Unfortunately, the quality of writing is inconsistent—many of the characters you can interact with don’t meet this standard, and the internal monologue inside Herschel’s head tries too hard to emulate the esoteric neuroticism of Harry’s various competing psyches. 

Another issue with the writing is anachronisms that don’t fit the setting. I appreciate that the writers wanted to comment on absurd modern cultural and economic phenomena like TikTok shifting or Buy Now, Pay Later microcredit schemes. However, this behavior is synonymous with the digital age, emerging from the social and financial relations created by communication and commerce over the internet. Zero Parades‘ world is decidedly analog and defined by a multipolarity in which communism remains undefeated. Including elements of late-stage capitalist domination, where the free hand of the market has us all in its iron grip, undermines the immersion and authenticity of the setting in exchange for cheap, referential humor. 

The biggest flaw with Zero Parades‘ narrative is Hershel’s characterization. Disco Elysium‘s Harry was a blank slate; he had a set backstory that led him to Martinaise, but due to his psychic break and resulting amnesia, the player could mold and develop his personality as they saw fit. Furthermore, his interactions with other characters and his constant companion, Kim Kitsuragi, provided ample opportunity to get a sense of who you wanted Harry to be and how he related to the world around him.

Hershel, by contrast, has a rigid past and a rather one-note personality. You can influence her skills as a spy, yet she remains utilitarian in expression and persona, without a companion to act as a foil or further develop her sense of self through relationship development. She’s not that compelling on her own, and I never developed a sense of what Hershel was truly like beyond her work as a spy and her regret over her past failures. Her most interesting interactions are with her former comrades, but these are established relationships shown in short glimpses. It’s a poor replacement for witnessing the satisfying development of new character dynamics. 

Zero Parades also fumbles the fundamental lessons for introducing political concepts into the narrative. In Disco Elysium, the characters do not just espouse their political ideology; they embody it. The dense political conversations and musings go down easily because they are rooted deeply in the humanity and personalities of the various characters. The fascists are motivated by a deep insecurity and fear of the unknown, the liberals a sense of moral superiority and rational practicality, the communists by theoretical understanding applied to their material conditions. In Disco Elysium, every character is a true believer; in Zero Parades: For Dead Spies, every character is a cynic.

Characters will explain the political ideology or aspirations of their side, only to undercut those explanations immediately in self-service. Perhaps this is more accurate to a bunch of spies, trained professionals who care more about the execution of their assignment and chasing thrills than the cause they are ostensibly fighting for. Unfortunately, it makes it much more difficult to buy into the political content of the narrative, turning most of these digressions into pastiche rather than genuine insight.

Finishing Zero Parades: For Dead Spies, I had no sense of what the developers wanted me to take away from this story, and felt decidedly empty despite being sufficiently entertained throughout the game’s 15-hour runtime. Disco Elysium spoke to me as a game about broken people in a broken and forgotten place, where a broken man finds community and purpose among the wreckage wrought by vast political forces and his own mistakes. Zero Parades is ostensibly about the people who break places like Revachol and Portofiro, but is so consumed in illustrating how they destroy a community that it offers very little insight into why they risk life and limb to destabilize places already hanging by a thread.

Something I reflected on after finishing Zero Parades is the capital-serving perspective the industry takes toward game development. Players and publishers alike think of gaming in terms of franchises and intellectual property rather than the people who make them. It’s not uncommon for AAA development teams to shed themselves of veteran and rookie talent alike upon completion of a project, scattering the team members to the four winds until they inevitably hire a new crop of exploitable labor and set them hard at work applying the franchise formula to the next entry.

I think part of what made Disco Elysium so innately compelling is that it was developed so far outside of those conditions, by an artist collective who had carefully crafted their world of Elysium over years of communal tabletop roleplaying sessions and other creative pursuits. Disco Elysium represented the culmination of all their creative energies, and the result was almost magical in its ability to speak to the human condition and connect with players. Leading up to the release of Zero Parades, writer and voice-over director Jim Ashivel commented on perceived similarities between Disco Elysium and Zero Parades in an interview with IGN:

“I think it would have made sense for us to go in a completely different direction if the entire team was comprised of new talent. But since such a large number of the key players that built Disco Elysium are here to build Zero Parades, it just didn’t make sense for us to just disregard that part of our experience as amateur game makers and start learning new ways of telling stories. We’re still the same people.”

Current studio head Allen Murray, whose long list of AAA credits includes games like Halo and Destiny, clarified that 35% of the developers on Zero Parades worked on the original Disco Elysium or the Final Cut (dialed in Disco Elysium fans will know the studio scaled up significantly between original release and the release of Final Cut). While these statements from Murray and Ashivel are both technically true, they are also disingenuous.

Of the original core writing team for Disco Elysium (Robert Kurvitz, Helen Hindpere, Argo Tuulik, Cash DeCuir, and Olga Moskvina), not a single member remains. Aleksander Rostov, the art director who painstakingly established the aesthetic identity for Disco Elysium, and Martin Luiga, an original member of the artist collective who helped establish the setting of Elysium, along with too many others to name here, are long gone.

The only names shared between the original core development team and Zero Parades are Justin Keenan (additional writing on Disco Elysium, writing director on Zero Parades), Jim Ashivel (voice-over director on Disco Elysium), Sim Sinamae (additional writing on Disco Elysium, writer on Zero Parades), Kaspar Tamsalu (artist on Disco Elysium, art director on Zero Parades), and Eduardo Rubio (animator on Disco Elysium, principal animator on Zero Parades). These people are immensely talented, as are the rest of the team who worked on this game as their first original project with ZA/UM, and I wish I could see what a truly original vision looks like from them, no longer beholden to the mechanics, aesthetics, and structure intended for Disco Elysium.

What troubles me about Zero Parades is that its journey to release is more typical of the industry: numerous canceled projects, mass layoffs, all culminating in an almost entirely new team building a new game using the tools and design template established by creatives long since disposed of, meant for an entirely different world and built for an entirely different purpose, repurposed for this title. In that context, it’s a miracle the game is as competent, humorous, and well-realized as it is, despite not fully standing on its own or carrying the torch for what made Disco Elysium so special.

The investors want their return on investment, and while they can’t own the people who created what we love, they can own the product of their labor under the guise of intellectual property, and wring out as much value as possible. It’s a reminder to value the people who made the games you love, and hope for the best for those still working within the system. The developers at ZA/UM recently unionized their workplace, a first for the British game industry. Hopefully, that’s the sign of a bright future ahead.

Mechs and anime share a bond as inseparable as Saturday mornings and sugary cereal. Developer DESTINYbit leans heavily into this classic synergy with Nitro Gen Omega, a turn-based roguelike RPG oozing a specific brand of weekend magic. The game thrives on its visual flair, utilizing fluid, stylish animations to breathe life into a timeline-based combat system. These aesthetics do more than just decorate the screen; they evoke the cozy nostalgia of sitting on the living room carpet in your pajamas, eyes glued to the TV while waiting for the next localized giant-robot epic to begin.

However, the experience isn’t a flawless victory. While the combat sparkles, the story remains mostly paper-thin, offering little more than an excuse for the next skirmish. Much like the retro cartoons that inspired it, Nitro Gen Omega provides an immediate, smile-inducing thrill, yet the narrative cracks show through once the initial glow of the art style wears off. It’s a stylish, punishing tribute that mostly succeeds on raw charm and significant mechanical depth.

Nitro Gen Omega establishes a striking visual identity from the very first frame. DESTINYbit delivers the narrative through a polished blend of fluidly animated cutscenes and expressive static portraits. This style extends to the top-down overworld, using a saturated colour palette and heavy shadow contrast to highlight an apocalyptic landscape. The player’s squad treks across a world scarred by massive craters and ridged, distorted earth, where every environmental detail serves as a cryptic clue to the planet’s downfall.

The character and mech designs double down on this punchy aesthetic. Each anthropomorphic machine and pilot feels distinct, bolstered by vignettes that mirror the energy of classic morning cartoons. These brief animations range from light-hearted character pranks to intense combat sequences featuring high-speed dodges, parries, and explosive weapon effects. It’s all accompanied by a punchy, rocking music score straight out of the nostalgia matrix too.

The narrative is Nitro Gen Omega’s primary weakness. While the developers clearly prioritized combat mechanics, the lack of context surrounding the squad’s origin—and the exact nature of the threat they face—stifles any real investment in the wider world. Missions often feel arbitrary and disconnected, largely because the gameplay loop revolves around generic requests from various settlements scattered across the map. Although these outposts represent different factions, the script rarely explores their unique motivations or political friction.

The plot eventually settles for a collection of well-worn tropes: an AI went rogue, humanity suffered a near-extinction event, and the survivors retreated to massive towers soaring above the Earth’s surface. Your squad exists by taking contracts to scavenge the wasteland below and destroy any hostile machines they encounter. Unfortunately, this bare-bones setup provides the only justification you will receive for the endless mechanical slaughter. Without a deeper narrative hook to bridge the gap between missions, the war against the AI feels less like a desperate struggle for survival and more like a series of repetitive, context-free skirmishes.

Combat stands as the Nitro Gen Omega’s crowning achievement and is a refreshing departure from standard turn-based mechanics. Your four-person mech squad operates on a timeline split into six distinct segments. Every action—from both your team and the enemy—consumes one or more of these segments. Positioning further complicates the math, as enemies occupy one of four cardinal directions that dictate the effectiveness of your melee and ranged options. Because some abilities trigger instantly while others require specific conditions or multi-segment wind-ups, every turn feels like a high-stakes tactical puzzle.

Will I slap, before I get attacked? Will a slap get attacked?

The system thrives on initial uncertainty and wary positioning. Since enemy intentions remain hidden at the start of a round, you must make agonizing choices based on incomplete data. You might spend one segment empowering a melee strike for a massive follow-up in the next, only to watch your target move to a different zone before the blow lands. While the “Scan” ability reveals an enemy’s planned move or attack, you can only use it once per turn, forcing you to save it for the most critical threats, or for when you want to reveal key information before all others.

The complexity deepens as you juggle heat build-up, limited ammunition, and finite ability uses. You cannot simply fire at will; success requires careful cooldown management and precise timing. Furthermore, Nitro Gen Omega’s priority system dictates the order of resolution, meaning a misjudged window can ruin a perfect combo. A quicker enemy might leap away mid-turn, leaving your most powerful attack hitting nothing but empty air.

Admittedly, Nitro Gen Omega’s steep learning curve and cluttered UI—which struggles to clearly display heat levels and movement directions—can overwhelm newcomers. However, once you master the rhythm, the combat takes on a poetic, balletic quality. The beautifully animated vignettes for every ability transform these tactical decisions into a lethal dance. By the time you face the Promethean—an enemy with an attack that circles the map in a fiery four-segment dervish—you will finally appreciate the nuance of positioning and the vital importance of a perfectly-chosen Scan.

Nitro Gen Omega fields an extensive array of enemies and enemy combinations to test your tactical mettle. What begins as a series of skirmishes against basic melee and ranged units evolves into encounters with trickier opponents, such as the Knight, who litters the battlefield with bombs while staying on the move. As the game progresses, the AI deploys pairings and trios that demand far more sophisticated planning to overcome. You are not confined to your starting chassis, either; once you clear specific story milestones, you unlock specialized mechs like the Ocelot and Patriot, each with a distinct slant on the rules of engagement.

The part upgrade system integrates seamlessly with the combat, adding a layer of strategic depth that rewards careful planning. While some components provide standard statistical boosts—such as increased HP or enhanced ranged damage—the most compelling gear introduces utility-focused modifications to fundamentally alter how you outmanoeuvre the enemy.

For instance, enhanced scanning modules grant the ability to read enemy actions both before and after the current timeline segment, providing a massive informational advantage. Similarly, specialized plating can negate all burning damage, effectively neutering enemies that rely on fire-based status effects. These upgrades often turn the tide of difficult encounters; I found that the overwhelming close-combat swarms of Goblin mechs became far more manageable once I equipped a part featuring the Riposte command. This single addition allowed my team to negate incoming melee strikes entirely while dealing devastating counter-damage, turning a defensive struggle into an offensive slaughter.

Beyond mechanical upgrades, your core squad has specific abilities dictated by their expertise and combat roles. Nitro Gen Omega adopts a management style reminiscent of XCOM-likes, forcing you to balance a roster of pilots who suffer from physical damage and plummeting moods triggered by gruelling combat or random narrative events.

To mitigate fatigue and permanent crew loss, you will hire a larger stable of pilots, drawing on specific talents or fostering internal relationships to keep the machine running. These relationships serve a functional purpose on the battlefield; strong bonds between squaddies unlock the ability to swap command types mid-turn. The open-world structure grants you the freedom to recruit anyone from cheap rookies to exorbitant veterans, provided you can stomach their monthly wages. Between missions, crewmates pass the time with various activities—such as cooking, training, or bonding—all rendered with charming, character-specific animations that reinforce the game’s cartoon aesthetic.

However, unless you manually rename your pilots, you will likely struggle to remember them. Nitro Gen Omega provides no backstories or distinct personalities, leaving the characters to feel like interchangeable cogs that exist purely to serve the combat engine. Even the ability to customize your initial starting squad fails to bridge this emotional gap. Despite the cute vignettes of them sharing a meal or a joke, your pilots remain blank slates whose only real value lies in their stats and their survival.

From the first tutorial battle, Nitro Gen Omega makes its punishing nature clear. This is a demanding experience where a single lapse in judgment—using the wrong skill in the wrong segment or failing to predict an enemy’s advance—can trigger a lethal downward spiral. Losing squad members and sustaining critical damage often occurs at a rate that far outpaces your ability to earn credits for repairs and replacements. Consequently, the early game harbors definitive fail-states where a depleted bank account can effectively end your run before it truly begins.

Red jackets are the rage in the team, currently.

Nitro Gen Omega further emphasizes this difficulty through a stingy loot curve. You must grind through multiple side missions to afford the parts and abilities necessary to survive main story encounters. There is no shortcut around this progression wall; the game demands a significant investment of time and resources before your mechs can stand toe-to-toe with its greater threats. There is the ability to save anytime, but there are no options to adjust this difficulty. For players who enjoy a steep challenge, this ensures every victory feels earned, but for others, the barrier to entry may feel like an impassable hurdle.

At its heart, Nitro Gen Omega captures the soul of the best Saturday morning cartoons: it offers bright, breezy, and hyper-stylized combat that demands your undivided attention. Much like those classic series, it provides a high-octane thrill to linger in your visual memory, even if it leaves behind very little in the way of lasting character growth or narrative substance once you’ve binged through a season or two. The anime aesthetic never truly loses its lustre; instead, it flourishes every time you unlock a flashy new skill or trigger a rare narrative event.

The core of the experience is an intense strategic puzzle, even if the game occasionally mumbles its instructions like a poorly dubbed transition scene. If you are happy to forgo a deep plot or memorable characterization in favor of a challenging combat system rewarding meticulous min-maxing, this game could easily become your next obsession. For those who live for the tactical dance and the glow of a well-animated explosion, Nitro Gen Omega is a mecha well worth the investment. PJs and Sugar Puffs optional.

Tension arising from unknown variables. Foreboding atmosphere. Moment-to-moment tactical decision making. These elements form the foundation of any good survival horror game, yet they could just as easily describe the nail-biting experience of playing an engrossing turn-based strategy title. Team Vultures‘ debut title, Vultures – Scavengers of Death, capitalizes on this convergence of mechanics between two otherwise disparate genres to deliver a hybrid survival horror/turn-based strategy title that marries the shared strengths of each without sacrificing the core identity of either. Invoking the experimental ethos of hybrid titles from the mid-90s to mid-2000s survival horror golden age (Parasite Eve and Koudelka in particular), Vultures nails the vital core pulsing at the heart of foreboding, atmospheric horror and tense turn-based tactical combat, faltering only in its technical execution.

Vultures – Scavengers of Death follows the titular VULTURE, a special forces extraction team sent to the Salento Valley to uncover the causes of a viral contagion developed by villainous corporation Eugenesys. A familiar setup for any Resident Evil fan, and the game wears its inspirations and devotion to Capcom’s survival horror classic on its sleeve. The two playable characters, Leopoldo and Amber, mimic Resident Evil‘s protagonist duo Chris Redfield and Jill Valentine. However, the game’s structure differs significantly from its main inspiration; rather than a single set location you explore throughout the game, Vultures is divided into a variety of missions in different locations and assigned to either Leopoldo or Amber. Leopoldo is beefier and can use his superior strength to push enemies or reposition objects in the environment. Amber, on the other hand, is lithe, stealthy, and possesses a grappling hook, enabling her to traverse long distances or gaps in a single turn.

Missions are set to specific characters because the level design incorporates these unique skills, and you can choose the order in which you complete the available missions. There are an equal number of missions between the two protagonists, and the game builds upon these minor differences in move set across each mission. This culminates in the final mission, which you can complete as either character. The story is perfunctory at best, and cutscenes generally consist of mission briefings between VULTURE’s client Alexei, remote handler Satsuki, and the two protagonists. Most dialogue focuses on basic plot progression, with very little room for characters to express personality or develop. Narrative depth isn’t necessary for a mechanics-focused strategy title, but its absence leaves Leopoldo, Amber, and crew feeling like pale imitations of the larger-than-life personalities that populate the Resident Evil universe.

Each mission is essentially a small-scale version of the Spencer Mansion or Raccoon City Police Station, where you explore room to room, gathering resources, solving puzzles, and completing objectives, just like you would in any survival horror title. The settings range from spooky mansions and overrun police stations to military facilities, underground laboratories, and abandoned prisons, hitting virtually all of the typical locations from various Resident Evil titles. I appreciated the sense of familiarity and the addictive, room-by-room pace of exploration and backtracking, though I would’ve liked to see more urban or residential locations that show the virus’s impact on Solento Valley beyond the corporate conglomerate’s research and testing sites. The visuals and audio are on point, creating an unsettling atmosphere with the low-poly environments and ominous hum of ambient mechanical sounds. The game employs a visual CRT filter that fittingly obscures the fine details of character models and environments, though I eventually turned it off for sharper visual quality and easier readability during combat.

Movement is grid-based and real-time outside of combat, and the protagonist can run, walk, or sneak through areas. Stealth is a major component of the gameplay, resembling the stealth systems in other strategy titles like XCOM 2 or Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden. You employ stealth to get into a favorable position in a room full of enemies, perform takedowns, or even avoid enemies entirely. Walking is used most often during normal exploration and combat, and I only saw fit to run when I needed to cover a lot of ground while backtracking through areas cleared of enemies. I appreciate the thoughtful inclusion of multiple movement options with clear strengths depending on the situation at hand.

There is a fog of war mechanic that obscures environments and enemies relative to the character’s line of sight and light sources in each room, ensuring that you must tread carefully as you advance in a mission and load into a new room after opening a door. Old school survival horror games used fixed camera angles to obscure the player’s vision and tank controls to limit their evasiveness and heighten danger during encounters. Vultures employs familiar strategy game mechanics to achieve the same goal, striking a delicate balance of elements common to both genres to create a sense of tension and unease driven by uncertainty. It’s a very unique combination, and Vultures – Scavengers of Death proves that the marriage of strategy and survival horror is ripe for further experimentation.

Combat sees the game transition to an entirely turn-based system, governed by action points (AP) and movement points (MP). Generally, the player has access to 3 AP and 3MP each turn, but these can be increased through consumables or equipment upgrades. Standard zombies have the same limitations, so in combat, I quickly learned to maneuver myself at least four spaces away from enemies to avoid taking damage. Since you only control a single character at once, even a couple of enemies ganging up on you can be disastrous. Many rooms (particularly late in the game) can have upwards of four or five enemies at once, and enemies hit quite hard relative to the player’s health. Combat becomes a careful, deliberate dance of managing AP and MP while keeping out of the fetid clutches of your undead foes. I found the action economy well-tuned, giving just enough room for creativity and expression without leaving the player overpowered.

Most of your weapons are firearms, so there is a focus on ranged combat. You can target certain parts of the body to deal more damage or sacrifice power for the chance to disable a foe temporarily. Enemy variety is not extensive, but I found the enemy types all served a purpose, and that most encounters combined them in clever ways. While most enemies need to be within melee range to strike, some enemies can quickly rush forward multiple tiles and attack, others can burrow underground to avoid damage on their approach, and some even employ ranged attacks. Thankfully, you have access to a wide variety of weapons and tools to dispatch foes, and most missions reward you with a new addition to your arsenal if you explore thoroughly. The trusty pistol and knife are mainstays that cannot be unequipped or removed from your inventory, with other weapons serving situational roles. For example, the shotgun is great up close and can stun enemies, but falters at range. The assault rifle, on the other hand, is great for burst fire over long distances or spraying a wide area against multiple foes, but it applies damage more randomly. Mastering these tools is key to success, and I found that each weapon had clear uses and drawbacks I needed to integrate into my planning.

Resource management is a core pillar of survival horror game design, and Vultures – Scavengers of Death commits to this tenet well. My initial experience with Vultures had me swimming in resources near the beginning, while the later missions required everything at my disposal to survive, winnowing the surplus I’d carefully collected over the initial hours. This difficulty curve is inverted from most survival horror titles, where the game is often hardest at the beginning but gets easier as you acquire more weapons and ammunition over the course of the game. Although I never died during my playthrough, keeping Leopoldo and Amber alive required full strategic engagement and provided a satisfying challenge.

I do wish the game had introduced more variety in objectives, as most missions boil down to finding keys, activating switches and panels, and solving puzzles to open hidden areas. These are all survival horror mainstays, but ultimately boil down to keeping the protagonist alive. The best strategy games offer variable objectives beyond simply surviving, like limited turn counts, shepherding vulnerable NPCs, or defending specific points. I think the decision to limit the game to a single character was a wise choice to maintain the appropriate survival horror tension and atmosphere. However, the focus on one character does limit strategic options compared to turn-based strategy classics like XCOM 2 or Into the Breach, something more objective variety could alleviate.

I’ve been quite positive about the game up to this point, and I firmly believe Vultures – Scavengers of Death is a great proof-of-concept for fusing turn-based strategy and survival horror mechanics. Unfortunately, the game begins to fall apart in its technical execution. I’m not exaggerating when I say that it’s more riddled with bugs and glitches than there are maggots infesting the skull of one of its undead foes. My initial hours with the game revealed a cornucopia of minor issues, from interactive elements in the environment failing to trigger to the odd camera glitch obscuring my viewing area after cutscenes. As I progressed further, more frustrating issues began to arise, like UI elements overlapping in the hub between missions (aptly called The Nest) that prevented me from transferring items from the character inventory to the storage, or stacks of ammunition suddenly disappearing. I could navigate around these minor issues, but the game really began to fall apart at the seams in the last few missions.

In two separate late-game missions, I hit significant progression bugs. One instance was because an existing key item vanished from my inventory, and another was because the objective would not advance despite having already been completed. Both of these bugs happened at the very end of long missions (over an hour of progress each time), and neither loading old saves nor relaunching the game solved the problem. I was forced to choose the “abort mission” option, which resets all your progress and puts you back at the mission hub. It reminded me of playing Baldur’s Gate III at launch, where the first two acts were littered with small annoyance glitches, but then the third act was almost fundamentally broken. Vultures was already delayed once from its original late April release date to mid-May, but honestly, the developers should’ve taken even more time to iron out the issues. I am sympathetic to the fact that this is a small team (only two developers), but having to repeat so many long missions destroyed the tension and unease that the game spent so much time cultivating in its early hours.

Vultures – Scavengers of Death proves that strategy and horror can coexist and even thrive when paired together. The uncertainty derived from hit percentages and fog of war complements the tense exploration and foreboding atmosphere of the carefully crafted horror locations. I’d love to give a firm recommendation to survival horror fans and turn-based strategy veterans alike, but only under the condition that you wait for the technical issues to be ironed out. There is a real diamond in the rough here, but only if you wait for the cleanup crew to wipe away the blood and viscera first.

Already considered a modern CRPG classic (and responsible for an underrated sequel and gorgeous spin-off), Pillars of Eternity has been freshened up once more with a new turn-based patch. Almost from the beginning, a decent portion of fans called for such a feature. Given the success of the turn-based approach across all manner of RPG subgenres recently, it’s gratifying to see the developers take on such a project for a decade-old game. Indeed, Obsidian Entertainment ran the entire thing as an extended beta, welcoming player feedback and refining the complex real-time systems into a more ordered approach through players’ class combinations and combat feedback. After ten years, most grizzled warriors would be ready to take it steady at the local tavern, but with these new systems, Pillars of Eternity steps out with a new lease on life. One turn at a time.

As the opening text crawl begins—accompanied by a deep-voiced narrator—the game reveals the detailed sprites and backgrounds of the Dyrwood, along with ancient Engwithan Adra formations. Nothing has changed, yet the hand-drawn environments remain expansive, and the thrill of uncovering darkened areas of the map still holds strong, even when many encounters feel familiar and memories more than a quarter-century old tug at the heartstrings. Even the interface, with its wide dialogue box and brass-embossed buttons, reinforces the warm sense of comfort. It feels timeless, helped in part because modern games have continued to adopt and refine similar designs.

Pillars of Eternity‘s writing is richly novelistic. What begins as a simple tale of survival after a botched ritual quickly spirals into something far stranger and more unsettling. The player, marked as a Watcher with the ability to peer into past lives, is drawn into the hollowborn crisis—an epidemic of children born without souls that has left the Dyrwood fractured and fearful. What follows is less a straightforward quest and more a slow unravelling of truth, as ancient secrets, the manipulation of faith, and the carefully constructed illusions of the gods begin to surface. At the centre of it all stands the Leaden Key, a shadowy organisation devoted to maintaining these deceptions, and its ageless master, Thaos, whose designs stretch back through countless lifetimes. As revelations mount, the story leans heavily into questions of identity, belief, and control, ultimately forcing a confrontation with not only Thaos himself, but with the very foundations of the world’s understanding of souls and divinity.

The story and characterization matches the best in the genre, standing comfortably alongside Baldur’s Gate II and Disco Elysium, and the dense, layered narrative demands focus, often rewarding a second reading of key passages or even entire conversations. Returning to the game after a prolonged break reinforces a key point: to fully appreciate it, you have to commit to it. This isn’t a story that lends itself to casual play alongside other RPGs—Pillars of Eternity demands your full attention, and rewards it in kind.

The sense of depth only intensifies through the companions, who arrive faster than I remembered and rarely feel like simple additions to a party. Each carries a dense mix of flaws and private burdens, and their constant interjections—along with their own quest lines—pull focus in a way that feels deliberate rather than distracting. The Grieving Mother stands out among them, as her fractured psyche overlays present moments with echoes of her work as a midwife, hinting at a tragedy that gradually comes into focus.

Elsewhere, Durance rants and wrestles with his fervent devotion to his merciless goddess, exposing a faith that feels as corrosive as it is sustaining; Edér masks his unease with dry humour, though his brother’s fate and his shaken beliefs constantly threaten to surface; and Sagani presses on with quiet determination, having spent years away from her family in search of a lost soul, her optimism tinged with the creeping fear of being forgotten even by her own family. Taken together, they don’t just accompany the journey. They complicate it, enrich it, and demand as much emotional investment as the central narrative itself.

For all its narrative confidence, reworked combat is the true draw when replaying, and it proves a natural fit. Pillars of Eternity originally framed its encounters through real-time-with-pause systems governed by action speed (Slow, Fast, and the like). This turn-based adaptation smartly preserves the underlying logic. Rather than handing each character a fixed action per round or tying abilities to rigid point costs, the system pivots on speed: of the character, of their weapon, of the action itself. The result feels fluid rather than constrained. Faster weapons and lighter builds can act multiple times within a single round, while heavier options demand more patience. It gives combat a rhythm that rewards positioning and timing without losing the tactical clarity of turns.

In practice, that balance plays out cleanly across the party. Kana Rua, lugging his massive rifle around the map, delivers devastating shots but rarely fires more than once per round thanks to long reload times, each attack feeling deliberate and weighty. By contrast, Sagani’s wolf companion Itumaak darts across the battlefield, acting repeatedly: harrying enemies, blocking paths, and creating space. It’s an elegant translation of the original system, one that doesn’t just replicate the old pace, but reinterprets it into something more readable while retaining its depth.

This philosophy carries cleanly into abilities and spellcasting, where the revised system builds on familiar foundations without overcomplicating them. In Pillars of Eternity, spells still demand time, measured now in turns and rounds, to cast and resolve. Abilities retain their “per encounter” or “per rest” limits, echoing the original real-time design. The difference is clarity. With everything now visible and predictable, the guesswork falls away and the system encourages more deliberate, tactical play.

That shift makes crowd control and trap-based abilities far more appealing than before. Where real-time combat often muddied positioning and activation timing, especially when kiting enemies around the battlefield, the turn-based structure invites precision. Spells like Warding Seal finally come into their own: once awkward to deploy effectively, you can now place them exactly as needed, with a clear sense of when they trigger. The same applies across a wide range of similar abilities, many of which feel newly viable as a result. Stealth and backstabs benefit just as much. Instead of hurried clicks and uncertain outcomes, the system lets you judge distance, timing, and detection with confidence, turning what was once a slightly clumsy interaction into something far more controlled—and, crucially, far more satisfying.

On the other hand, the absence of real-time exploits, like kiting enemies endlessly or trapping them in broken pathfinding loops, does raise the difficulty in certain encounters. In real time, it’s entirely viable to funnel enemies into narrow doorways or wedge them against scenery to gain the upper hand. The turn-based system strips much of that away, forcing a more honest engagement with each fight.

There are moments where the turn-based mode reveals its origins as an adaptation layered onto a real-time system. In Pillars of Eternity, I ran into the occasional hiccup—combat locking up with frozen character selection, or combat logs suddenly flooding with what looked like real-time data. They were disruptive, if brief. A reload or restart usually cleared things, and I never encountered a fight that felt completely broken as a result. The overall experience remains impressive for a decade-old game, and likely owes this to the game’s long-term community support as much as its original design. Still, given the sheer scale of the action, a little roughness here and there feels almost inevitable. Both expansions benefit from the same mechanics, and there’s plenty to do across the main story, side quests, and companion stories.

Beyond its expansions and years of patching, Pillars of Eternity remains fundamentally the same game. I still hold it and its sequel in equal regard, for very different reasons. Here, the story stays tightly focused on the “chosen” figure, with a clear throughline built around your awakening and the long shadow of Thaos’s designs. In many ways, it feels like both an homage to—and a continuation of—the kind of narrative Baldur’s Gate helped define, sidestepping the overt faction systems that many modern RPGs (including Deadfire) lean on. The result is a purer, more focused experience.

That same purity, though, carries some of the genre’s older rough edges. Voice acting remains partial, sometimes shifting within a single conversation. Fetch quests and backtracking between areas are common, even with fast animation options. Crafting, too, can feel fiddly rather than intuitive. They’re minor frustrations in the broader context, but clear reminders that this is a game shaped as much by its influences as by its ambitions.

Like any long-running debate, purists will hold their ground on both sides of the real-time versus turn-based divide in Pillars of Eternity. But if this new approach opens the game’s hidden paths, buried secrets, and hard-won rewards to a broader audience, it’s hard to see it as anything but a success. After all, this old warrior still has plenty of stories left to (re)tell, if you’re willing to follow, one turn at a time.

Simplicity is a virtue, and one that’s easy to overlook in games where upgrade systems, complex enemy AI, and intricate level design often steal the spotlight. Yet the best games prove that, even stripped of their bells and whistles, strong cores can carry the entire experience. Death by Scrolling is an admirable attempt to follow this philosophy, throwing its hat into the roguelite ring with clear inspiration from Vampire Survivors. Unfortunately, it doesn’t stick the landing. Instead of trimming the fat to keep itself grounded, it overcorrects, trading meaningful depth for a gameplay loop that feels overly bare. 

Death by Scrolling skips narrative and throws you straight into the gameplay loop. After picking a character, run and gun through various levels until you collect enough gold to pay the ferryman to escape the afterlife. Weapon and gem pickups for minor upgrades along the way do their best to help you, but success ultimately comes down to your endurance and ability to read the chaos on screen. 

Unlike Vampire Survivors, where the entire map is open to you, in Death by Scrolling you’re constantly racing upwards as the hellfire rises from below, threatening to swallow you and end your run. Checkpoints at the top of each level offer a momentary reprieve, but they’re fleeting—mere pitstops before the game pushes you back into the upward scramble.

Grim Reapers occasionally appear as invincible, insta-killing enemies to keep you from mindlessly sprinting upwards, but are easy to ignore thanks to their habit of getting stuck on level geometry, undermining whatever danger they posed to the player. 

Sadly, most of Death by Scrolling‘s enemies aren’t nearly as memorable as the Reaper unless it’s for all the wrong reasons (though in fairness, the Reaper is accompanied by a screenwide overlay and a hilariously corny “YOU WILL DIE” voiceline). Engaging with enemies can feel more punishing than rewarding, whether it’s massive, incurable damage over time from a venomous snake bite or a tumbleweed clobbering you with a dash attack that was charged offscreen.

But perhaps the bigger sin here is the lack of real player agency in well… everything. You have no actions beyond basic movement and a sprint  (which is also gated by a minuscule stamina bar). Though power-ups occupy different colored inventory slots, ostensibly suggesting build variety, the lack of interaction renders the core loop painfully flat. Passive effects you pick up at the end of each level feel minimal or overly restrictive. There are no game-winning synergies to chase in Death by Scrolling, no smart outs you can build toward, nothing that lets you meaningfully shape a run. Just run to the top and pray you don’t get clobbered.

Further reinforcing this is how fleeting most power-ups feel. Many barely last more than a single level, preventing any real sense of build continuity. Some restrictions make sense: defensive blue power-ups, for instance, offer potent effects like temporary invulnerability or invisibility, but applying the same limitations to weapons (orange), their modest synergies (purple), and other offensive options (red) strips the core loop of depth. Instead of encouraging meaningful decisions on the fly, these systems feel overly constrained, lacking the fast-paced, reactive gameplay seen in games with similar mechanics such as Dead Cells.

Your only real incentive to keep playing Death by Scrolling is to unlock permanent bonuses by picking up gems during your runs. While the sheer number of unlocks initially seems impressive, the steep costs relative to how few gems you earn per run, and the rather tepid bonuses to overall gameplay, quickly kill any desire to engage with them.

Death by Scrolling‘s Audiovisuals also unfortunately lack depth, though I did get a good laugh out of the default sound mix; the first time I heard the “KACHING” from collecting gold had me jumping out of my seat like a horror jump scare. The music is stuck in a never-ending 30-second loop, while the sound effects lack any real punch.

Individual biomes are visually distinct and well crafted, but their layouts repeat quickly, to the point where you’ll start recognizing entire sections within just a few runs. Enemy spritework is detailed and varied, but stiff animations, such as charging enemies simply sliding toward you at higher speeds, keep them from standing out.

Death by Scrolling is a functional game. It controls well, is feature complete, and is mostly bug-free, but it lacks the spark needed to make it truly compelling. Recent updates have added new content and breathed some life into the experience, but the core remaining so bare still makes it a difficult game to recommend, unless you’re specifically looking for a stripped-down, low-commitment take on the genre.

Cooking and RPGs aren’t something I’d usually pair, but Dosa Divas, a smaller JRPG from Outerloop Games, has tried to change my usual diet. The story of three sisters trying to come to terms with their pasts and their futures attempts to combine deep revelations with irreverent humour and whimsy. Unfortunately, the final mix of this JRPG doesn’t quite come together: the bland world design, and the sometimes-infuriating combat and recipe systems get in the way of this dosa going down smoothly.

Dosa Divas tries to tell a heartfelt story blending elements of sci-fi adventure with themes of food, culture, and family. The plot follows sisters Samara and Amani as they reunite and travel across a fractured world in a sentient food mech, working to undo the damage caused by their estranged sister Lina, whose powerful fast-food corporation, Linaworks, has erased traditional cooking and cultural identity. Along the way, the sisters battle corporate forces, cook meals for communities, and rebuild connections with others while confronting their own complicated past.

Despite its ambitions, Dosa Divas’ story struggles to land. It’s cool that the story tries to use food not just as a gameplay mechanic but as a symbol of memory, identity, and resistance, even if the sci-fi elements involving the food mechs and their history feels tacked on for the sake of a more mythical bent. The script and dialogue never quite reconcile the sisters’ emotional core—particularly the reasons behind their original departure and Amani’s subsequent return—with the game’s more irreverent humour. Scenes often clash in tone: light, playful banter with a boastful elder can sit awkwardly alongside a genuinely tragic situation involving a villager’s family.

Some characters make this worse. The recurring shopkeeper, for example, leans heavily on innuendo and flirtation, and his constant come-ons toward the sisters feel more questionable than charming. He comes across as unsympathetic, despite Dosa Divas seemingly positioning him as comic relief. When the robotic Diva characters take on a larger role, their narrative becomes even more muddled, adding but never fully integrating ideas.

Even the presentation struggles to lift things. Key dialogue receives voice acting, but the uneven script undercuts most performances, making it difficult for any real emotional depth to emerge. The music hints at a more distinct cultural identity in its opening moments, but the soundtrack settles into a loop of light, bouncy rhythms and plucked guitar that rarely enhances the atmosphere.

Exploring the world aboard Goddess—the sisters’ food-themed mech—gives the game’s cartoonish art style plenty of room to shine, but the results feel uneven. Characters lean into exaggerated designs, with oversized limbs and unusual facial features, while the wide, often clashing colour palette makes it surprisingly hard to distinguish one NPC from another. The style is certainly distinctive and may appeal to some, but it often undermines the emotional weight the story tries to build.

The environments in Dosa Divas don’t do much to compensate. You move through a small set of familiar locations—a cliffside village, an underground tree root settlement, and a lakeside area—without much variation or sense of scale. The absence of more expansive wilderness spaces makes exploration feel repetitive, even within the game’s relatively short runtime. As you progress, Goddess unlocks traversal abilities like a hookshot and a drill to open new paths, but these additions rarely lead anywhere surprising. Instead, they loop you back through the same environments, adding utility without meaningfully expanding the sense of discovery.

When the sisters and Goddess face enemies from Linaworks, Dosa Divas shifts into a turn-based JRPG system—with a few added twists. You still select standard attacks and skills, but both offense and defense add timed button inputs. Land these correctly, and you boost your attacks or block incoming damage more effectively. Combat ties directly into the game’s food-based elemental system. Each attack carries a flavour type—Spicy, Sweet, and so on—and enemies show weaknesses to specific combinations.

When you identify and exploit those weaknesses, you deal increased damage and begin to break down an enemy’s shield. Once that shield drops, the enemy enters a “Stuffed” state, dramatically increasing the damage they take. Combat carries a strong sense of pace and visual flair. Watching Amani charge up oversized fireballs or Samara bounce attacks around the battlefield looks great in motion, and the system has a clear sense of rhythm.

Unfortunately, the rhythm quickly gives way to frustration. The constant QTE inputs wear thin, and with no option to automate them, every encounter demands the same level of precision. Some prompts—especially when blocking rapid, multi-hit attacks—are difficult to read or perfect, making success feel inconsistent. I also struggled to initiate fights on my own terms, often taking the first hit before gaining control, though that may come down to unclear input or feedback.

On Dosa Divas’ normal difficulty, missing a block or mistiming a boost can have severe consequences, and the limited healing options only amplify the problem. Recovering small amounts of health from the odd food item means that a couple of mistakes can quickly spiral into a game over, regardless of preparation. Over time, the system starts to feel less like a test of skill and more like a battle against unclear timing windows and underdeveloped feedback. A more readable interface or more generous input cues would go a long way toward smoothing this out. Easier modes soothe the difficulty somewhat, but not the timing frustrations or sense of skill gap.

Dosa Divas’ standard enemies come from Linaworks’ ranks—lawyers, laptop-toting admins, and security staff—which gives encounters a playful edge. Their animations carry a lot of personality, and they consistently raised a smile when they appeared. That said, even these goons can prove awkward to handle, especially when full enemy groups combine with the game’s inconsistent QTE demands.

Boss Divas push the system further. These fights test your ability to break shields, exploit weaknesses, and manage resources with an even smaller margin for error. They introduce more complex and demanding real-time inputs, particularly when it comes to blocking. Unblockable attacks and status effects add further pressure, forcing you to rely more heavily on items and prepared food to stay alive.

Ah yes, the food. As Samara et al. travel around the world of Dosa Divas, they constantly find and stock up on different loot components, from produce such as bananas and caught fish, to flavourings such as red onions or rock salt. Once they collect these, Samara and Amani can access Goddess’ dosa-making facilities, presented as a sort of cooking mini-game dimension. Here, produce can be combined with flavours and seasoning to prepare and experiment with different meals, both to fulfil orders for NPCs and to create items to enhance stats in battle or replenish lost hit points and the like.

Much like combat, the actual cooking in Dosa Divas is represented in a series of QTE activities, such as rapidly hitting buttons for shaking salt, or rotating the thumbstick at a given speed for smearing oil over a dosa pancake. More difficult ingredients demand tighter timing, or the UI could fade away, forcing you to memorize the correct timing. Achieving a higher rating produces more of the thing you’re making, so there’s an obvious motivation to trying your best each time.

It’s nice to see how some of the actual recipes, mostly focused on dosas (surprise!), aren’t too far removed from what you’d expect to eat in each dish. As an eater mostly unfamiliar with dosas, or any sort of similar cuisine, I felt at least a little more educated.

The problem remains in the QTEs, which although not as consequential as those in combat, are still quite basic, and creating the same foods, multiple times for quests or items, does become a slog. It’s a pity it’s not more refined, as the actual recipe-building and the degree of customization does show promise.

The Dosa Divas crew boosts their attack, health, and skill potency by defeating enemies and levelling up in a standard manner. However, their core skills and Ultimate abilities remain locked behind village affection. You can raise this level by destroying Linaworks’ propaganda, defeating enemies, or cooking for villagers. Because both powerful abilities and story progression depend on this system, these tasks are somewhat mandatory—and the repetitive cooking to order feels like a chore by the endgame given the issues described above.

Furthermore, the game offers almost no character customization; skills unlock at fixed points and cannot be modified or swapped. Goddess can collect various skins for her mech parts, and these can be swapped in and out individually, but it’s a minor cosmetic.

There are minimal diversions in Dosa Divas. Apart from finding and creating different recipe orders, and completing all objectives for maximum village benefits, the only other options are exploring each area for new pathways once Goddess’ transport options open up. Even this is often done in service of the goals above, although most of these paths contain Legendary scrap boxes for loot too which is needed for unlocking better upgrades.

Unlike the full-fat, meaty behemoths of the JRPG and item-crafting genre, Dosa Divas provides a lighter bite, but in mixing so many different flavours together, it doesn’t quite offer a meaningful memory. The story has real thematic potential, but an uneven implementation sours this aspect. Combat and recipe systems can be infuriating, and given so much of the short run-time is these systems, the frustration never fully disappears. Art and sound direction are mixed, and will be off-putting and samey for some.

Ultimately, Dosa Divas is aiming to be a snack-sized delight, but like an amuse-bouche, it still needs to offer enough flavour and texture for you to come back for more. You may find yourself leaving this one on the plate.

A dark, stormy night. An old plantation house sequestered in a dark swamp. A wheelchair bound colonel sitting on a fortune and hosting a visiting family of opportunistic gamblers, alcoholics, and profligates. Though this could very well be the setup to an Agatha Christie novel, this is how the classic murder-mystery graphic adventure The Colonel’s Bequest opens. And based on that premise, it’s likely that whatever bequest the colonel is bequeathing will not be of his own accord.

As a person who was not yet alive for the 1989 release of Sierra On-Line’s The Colonel’s Bequest and the point-and-click adventure boom surrounding it, I’ve been having a blast learning about games from the likes of Sierra and LucasArts—and, erm, having a slightly less explosive blast actually playing many of them.

At the top, I’ll say that The Colonel’s Bequest fits in that category; the way it fulfils the puzzle, narrative, and conceptual promise introduced in director-designer (and underappreciated auteur) Roberta Williams’ 1980 debut Mystery House is very impressive. It surprised me with its clever and detailed design even thirty-six years on. However, the way the game’s plot progresses, or, more accurately, grinds to halting stops, tested my patience rather than my deduction skills.

Players control Laura Bow, a twenty-year-old detective and journalist in training. Laura is a guest of her friend Lillian, niece to the curmudgeonly colonel (because who wouldn’t invite their college buddy for the reading of their uncle’s will?). Laura has nearly free rein to explore the mansion and its surrounding grounds, interacting with and eavesdropping on the colonel’s relatives and, soon thereafter, witnessing them mysteriously die one by one.

What surprised me was the clock-based structure of The Colonel’s Bequest. Finding clues and having or witnessing certain conversations trigger the clock to move forward in fifteen-minute spurts, occasionally progressing to the next act, wherein another body is likely to turn up and the cast of characters will shift around locations. In this way, the world and characters of The Colonel’s Bequest felt shockingly alive. Everyone seems absorbed in their own agendas, be it conniving, surviving, or *bites pinky* murdering, perhaps.

There are a handful of frustrating combinations of time progressions that may softlock progression towards getting certain items and clues, such as my endlessly frustrating attempts to befriend the cook to get a bloody carrot (bloody in the cursing sense, mind you). Ultimately, nothing will lock you out of the two possible endings, either of which comes down to a split-second decision involving a loaded gun.

My main gripe with The Colonel’s Bequest’s structure is that much of the game requires semi-aimless wandering and retreading of the mansion and its secret passages, at first thrilling and soon tiresome. There’s no sense of pathing when you click a spot for Laura to move to. She’ll move straight towards her destination and get stuck on the smallest of furniture or foliage, requiring lots of clicking and repositioning in order to interact with items or navigate screens.

Though there is a certain logic to some of the characters’ movements between acts, The Colonel’s Bequest‘s trim three-hours-or-so runtime can become bloated due to slow, choppy navigation. Sure, you may laugh the first time you get a silly and mostly random Sierra death scene like falling through a rickety balustrade or getting snapped up by an alligator, but as soon as you realize you forgot to save for the past fifteen minutes, hoo boy.

To interact with characters, items, and the environment, players must type verb-dependent phrases like “talk colonel,” “ask ethel about colonel,” and sometimes even “smell colonel.” In a way, I wish these text-parser commands (a remnant of text-adventures) could be used for easier navigation. Half the time, typing “open door” earns a a sassy “Do it yourself!” response, and yet at other times it’s required, provided you’re in the pixel-perfect correct spot.

Generally, though, the logical text parsing was my favourite aspect of The Colonel’s Bequest, with plenty of detail and funny rewards for verbal exploration. Insisting on taking a shower late in the game is met with a death scene referencing the iconic shower scene in Psycho. Then, there are lots of “Chekhov’s Gun” moments of setup and eventual payoff for those who keenly scan each room. Then, too, there are some slightly randomized elements, like multiple possible locations to find certain mutilated bodies. Fun!

The graphics also still impress today, thanks to a colourful palette of greens, purples, and oranges. Small touches, like mysterious silhouettes passing through background windows, add to the chilling atmosphere, and the various screens in and outside the plantation skillfully establish scale and location. Audio touches like bug chirruping, ticking clocks, and thunderclaps maintain the eerie tone, and the soundtrack (however farty-sounding) is used sparingly but effectively to enhance key discoveries. A part of me wishes I could have been a twelve-year-old terrified by this ominous and at first glance impenetrable game.

For those willing to stick through the dated and often aimless pace, The Colonel’s Bequest offers a delightfully hackneyed 1920s murder mystery that continually impresses with its deep interactivity. Rolling credits and seeing the game hint towards its yet unfound “Super Sleuth” requirements really made me appreciate the experience’s longevity. Whether you pick up the magnifying glass yourself or watch someone else’s playthrough, The Colonel’s Bequest is a significant keystone in PC adventure game history that deserves preservation and play.

Sometimes, all a game needs to work is confidence in its scope and vision. That’s the highest praise I’d shower on “15th-century Slovakia JRPG” Felvidek. Sure, it’s another turn-based RPG made with RPG Maker. It’s fairly short and doesn’t bring anything new to the genre mechanically. But what it does manage, I think, is just as special. It knows exactly what kind of world it wants to paint and knowingly plays with its engine’s possibilities and limitations to bring about that world with as much personality and charm as the developers can muster.

You ever hear about the conflicts between the Hussites and Ottomans in Central Europe and wonder: “What was that all about?” Well, Felvidek is the best answer you can get in turn-based RPG form. Not that historical accuracy is the main goal of the plot. The developer duo of Jozef Pavelka and Vlado Ganaj channel this period into a distinct low fantasy aesthetic using cultural panache and creative flourishes that make for a refreshing and memorable experience. What more can you ask from an RPG Maker passion project?

Felvidek’s main selling point is evident in screenshots. The game has an exquisite presentation that blends a handful of retro aesthetics into a look you perhaps wouldn’t think the RPG Maker engine capable of. The isometric viewpoint and character renders you see when exploring feel more akin to old Infinity Engine RPGs or a medieval-themed Hylics than anime-inspired pixel art.

The visuals are saturated in contrasting monochromes of yellows, greens, and purples that make the medieval setting feel slightly surreal and appropriately gloomy. Similarly, the OST’s raw instrumentals move between wacky electronic arrangements and somber guitar melodies. I can’t say I was expecting the game’s music to sound like this, as it certainly isn’t period-appropriate, but it’s a constant reminder that Felvidek is a fever dream variant of historical fiction—like Kingdom Come: Deliverance meets EarthBound.

The tone Felvidek establishes is a joy to be part of. The writing fuses crude humor and dark bluntness seamlessly and with purpose. Dialogue blends verbose—sometimes even poetic—medieval dialect with a stylistically modern sense of comedic timing for often hilarious results. Its portrayal of a semi-fictionalized 15th-century Slovakia is one where peasants try to live their banal lives as religious zealots and mysterious cultists vie for power around them.

Felvidek’s world is unforgiving, exploitive, and violent in the local and larger political conflicts it is absorbed in. But the game never indulges in tragic drama or historical lore dumping. The realities of the period are presented wryly, matter-of-factly. The horror of monstrous rituals and relentless oppression is softened by farcical convolutions involving coffee beans and horny priests.

There aren’t many cinematic cutscenes, but the ones present are essential inclusions. They embrace a low-poly PSX aesthetic that melds perfectly with the gameplay’s 2D art. The opening cinematic shows our protagonist—the alcoholic and recently divorced knight, Pavol—sitting at a desk while rocking a wine bottle back and forth until he notices a fire blazing at a nearby ruin. It’s only a few seconds long and lacks dialogue, but it’s such a pleasant and focused mood-setter that initiates the plot’s mystery. These cutscenes don’t need to be anything more than they are. They are visually nostalgic without being referential, and they feel perfectly suited to Felvidek’s scope and atmosphere.

This is to say that Felvidek‘s scope is modest and the atmosphere is focused. It only takes around 5-6 hours to complete the campaign, but every moment feels purposeful. Each quest segment, NPC dialogue, and combat encounter is an important part of the worldbuilding, which even some top-tier RPG Maker games don’t quite pull off. The use of game space is smartly economical, made up of only 5 locations divided by a small overworld.

Multiple events occur in each of these areas throughout the journey, which helps bring the banal rural setting to life. You’ll revisit the roadside tavern multiple times for progression hint “rumors,” the starting castle to keep your lord updated on happenings, and the town to see how events continually affect the peasantry. There’s also a surprising number of optional events to uncover if you revisit areas more often than you’re directed. These satisfying discoveries can lead to alternative ways of completing a quest and can even result in variations to the game’s ending.  

While the party size has room for four, the story mostly revolves around a core duo. The dynamic between the chaotic Pavol and the mostly straight-laced priest, Matej, immediately brings to mind Disco Elysium’s Harry Du Bois and Kim Kitsuragi. Pavol even seems to rock “The Expression” in his character portrait in what I took to be a knowing wink to newfound demand for stories about divorced middle-aged men with alcohol problems. Pavol and Matej’s verbal exchanges are always amusing and sometimes touching as the bromance develops. Aside from them, your lord will occasionally join the party or at least lend Pavol some soldiers, while other guests will come and go for particular plot beats.

This being an RPGMaker game, naturally, there are turn-based battles. The welcome difference is that encounters are finite, and most are naturally woven into the story progression. There is no leveling, either, with character growth relegated to new equipment and the occasional stat-boosting item (such as Jam, naturally). Finite battles mean finite funds and items to purchase, so digging through crates and whatnot around the world is important to obtain loose cash and goods. Personally, I love pushing against and mashing A around assets. And the lack of leveling did not at all interfere with a solid sense of progression.

This theme of scarcity supports the game world well and keeps the difficulty right where it needs to be. Felvidek is not a mechanically deep game by any means, but its systems convey the character of the game world. You have HP and Tools, the latter of which works as MP for skills you learn that are tied to equipment. There’s a handful of skills you can gain through equipment and consumable items to use, offering just enough strategic potential to experiment with throughout the relatively short playtime.

You can stun enemies with a Shield Bash, let off a powerful gunshot that takes a whole turn to reload, drink a bottle of Frndžalica and spit fire upon your foes, while Matej possesses an essential Prayer skill that provides group healing and buffs. I died a few times due to a lack of preparation, and there wasn’t a single battle that padded out the experience. I’ll say that again because it’s downright miraculous: this is a turn-based RPG without a superfluous encounter.

Although Felvidek’s design and storytelling are impressively focused, its writing doesn’t clearly communicate next steps. There were occasions where I had to meet with a character name I didn’t recognize or go to an inexact location, only to backtrack through a few areas until stumbling upon the necessary quest trigger. It’s possible the game—or even just the English localization—didn’t get enough QA testing for this. You should also be prepared for a fair amount of typos and a tendency towards proper noun drops that were somewhat impenetrable as someone barely versed in Czech or Slovakian history. And while none of the humor felt mean-spirited, some jokes border on racially insensitive and misogynistic.

As much as I admire Felvidek’s consistency across concept and execution, I do wish it took bigger swings in its design. It’s an RPG for players who appreciate the genre as a basis for vibes over mechanical evolution. This makes it an easy recommendation for such players and a tougher sell for anyone seeking a meatier game. As for me, I knocked it back like a bottle of plum wine, savored the distinct taste, and will look back upon its intoxicating experience fondly.

Despite how deliciously macabre and heart-wrenching noir can be, we see so few in the gaming landscape. Rich with rain-soaked, harsh realities, a down-on-their-luck detective battles their troubled past when a dame clad in fire-red walks through their door (dames—always dames). Well, have no fear, because Aether & Iron intends to contribute to the genre, though departing from the formula in meaningful ways.

We play as Gia Randazzo, a smuggler struggling to find work after she engaged in a truly heinous act that shot up her reputation like a Tommy gun. As fortune would have it, a notorious yet secretive fixer finds her a cake job: escort a young damsel from the Uppers to the Lowers. How hard could it be? What ensues is a tale of revolution, deceit, conspiracy, and a reshaping of New York City’s past-future.

“Past-future?” What am I even talking about? Aether & Iron takes place in the 1930s, but with groundbreaking technology in the form of a resource called “aether.” Much of New York is flying high up in the sky, and that’s thanks to the Well, a floating ball of tech that consumes aether. Aside from that, much of the setting feels like cliche 1930s fare, from the clothing to the accents. That’s not a bad thing, mind.

Yes, we have a female lead in a noir, which, while not the first time it has happened by any means, is certainly not the standard. Gia and her voice actor absolutely knock the story out of the park, too. Aether & Iron is primarily driven by its strong cast, significantly comprised of females. One has to wonder why we don’t see this more often, or why it’s even noteworthy for me to mention it. The story here breathes new life into the gaming landscape.

Without spoiling too much, soon after meeting her escortee, Gia realizes that there’s more to this helpless walking brain clad in white than meets the eye. In fact, so much more that a mysterious bounty hunter in black finds the need to relentlessly pursue her and her research papers. What could possibly be so important? Her client’s nebulous research aside, Gia eventually finds herself working odd jobs for a rebel group to overthrow barons: tyrants who rule the city in the worst possible ways. These two story arcs, combined with Gia battling her own demons, make for a narrative that pivots seamlessly in a delicate dance until its thirty or so hours are up.

The voice actors enhance a script saturated in metaphors, analogies, and poetic descriptions of thoughts, feelings, environments, and observations. Somehow dense, yet accessible, Aether & Iron is one of the most well-written games I’ve played in a long time. Every line bears weight, yet the script never drags. Players’ time is respected, but Aether & Iron makes sure to welcome us into a world worth exploring. Relatable and human, its tragedies make us reflect on our own world. We root for the heroes not just because this is a well-written and acted story, but because we feel the pain of the oppressed.

Gia’s voice actor isn’t the only star, though. Almost every character, primary, secondary, or tertiary, enjoys powerful acting that oftentimes made me just want to sit back and listen endlessly. While the varying plots and drivers make Aether & Iron an adventure worth fighting for, some of my favorite moments are when the crew has downtime and all of the beautiful personalities come together at a bar to engage in low-stakes nonsense. If the personalities weren’t powerful and unique, this wouldn’t be so fun.

The music’s no slouch, either. Composed by two-time Grammy-winning composer Christopher Tin, as well as Grammy-nominee Alex Williamson, expect to be enthralled with music reminiscent of noir—lots of strings, horns, and light percussion. Performed by a live orchestra, Aether & Iron’s music would bring one to tears if the gripping narrative didn’t draw so much attention. Unfortunately, not everything meets the standard set by the story, music, and acting.

Buildings whip by during the the visually impressive combat, which uses cars as units on a battlefield-road that must be the longest straight-away in history. The cars are no gimmick: expect to run into passersby just trying to get from A to B during your reckless combat. Not only that, but accelerating takes way more action points than decelerating to the back of the large, grid-based rectangle.

Each car can be outfitted with an engine, repulsor, guns, storage, and armor, as long as you mind the weight limit. Light, small cars have limited cargo space and health, but make up for it with a variety of weaponry and the ability to zip around the field. Tow trucks offer firepower and support abilities, while vans and their ilk tank and dish out collision damage.

So, what’s the problem? As novel and engrossing as this battle system is, it can feel half-baked. Some battles are an absolute pleasure to puzzle out, while one or two offer strange difficulty spikes, and several can be cheesed pretty easily. I also saw little incentive on Normal difficulty to change the gear on my cars. Theoretically, players can buy new cars, but I never saw much of a reason to do this. Money’s tight for the most part, which is great, but I’d rather purchase dialogue rerolls and repair kits than buy minimal improvements or completely re-tool my strategy just to add a point or two of damage to my clunker.

Other gameplay mechanics, like hiding illicit cargo from safety checks, only really come up in the first few hours, and quickly don’t matter. Heat is a mechanically neat stat players build for engaging in loud, risky behavior, but it doesn’t have a substantial impact on gameplay. A storage system exists, but I saw little point in saving anything for later. Aether & Iron‘s gameplay is filled with interesting ideas that ultimately don’t go anywhere or feel tossed at the wayside early on.

Character dialogue frequently requires skill checks, which can be built for each character on a variety of skill trees intertwined with combat abilities, and while it’s fun to roll the dice and see what success or failure results in, I rarely found successes substantially important. Mind, this is all from a gameplay perspective—the joy of seeing what a character says in response to a failure or success is always exhilarating, because the writing and voice acting always impresses.

One last quibble about the controls and technical issues. First, targeting with a mouse and keyboard feels most intuitive, but the various menus get in the way, giving me my fair share of misclicks. Momentarily frustrating, this is where the control woes end. Now, the technical issues—hoo boy. Aether & Iron is certainly playable, but it’s rough. This list is not exhaustive, but expect: incredibly slow load times, black screens, a bizarre save system that doesn’t actually save your most recent progress, actors misreading lines and then repeating the line with the correct take, and dialogue loops. My hope is that they hammer out these kinks soon after release, but those averse to these initial hiccups should be forewarned.

Aether & Iron rises above its quirks with sheer creativity and artistic expression. I love the hand-drawn world, the characters I wish I could engage with far beyond the credits, and the struggle Gia and New York City’s citizens engaged in. A story worth telling, it’s a cliche noir tale told from an entirely different angle and elevated by a cast that stands above most others. My hope is that we see more tactical RPGs with imaginative systems like this, with their creative visions better realized.