Recent reviews by Crionnowl

Recommending this depends heavily upon how much you care about the story for me. The writing, characterization, and setting are all excellent. This game already has an incredibly strong start, narratively, and I'd love to see where it goes. The graphics are also good, no complaints here.

I have three problems with this game that really kill its recommendation, however: the user interface, the pacing, and the character progression. The intro area has a ton of items marked as "loot" and some marked as "steal", sometimes people call me out as a thief for grabbing them the non-steal lootables, but the design of the early quests make me reasonably sure I'm supposed to be collecting every lootable I can get my grubby hands on.

In terms of pacing, in the first hour of the game, I got into two fights, one of which was optional and one of which was probably optional. I don't really have a problem with combat-light CRPGs, Planescape: Torment is a classic for a reason and Tides of Numenera is also excellent, but the emphasis on combat in the character attribute/skills here made me think it was going to have something closer to either Pathfinder CRPG or Baldur's Gate, where there was going to be some kind of combat early one, especially with how high-intensity the game's introduction scene was.

What really kills my recommend, however, is the character progression system- after an hourish of play, I hit level 2, which isn't really problem in terms of level pacing. But at level 2, I get to allocate 5 total ranks to an extremely wide variety of skills, in a system that rolls d100s vs your ranks. There's a variety of perks that seem to be available to be taken, possibly when leveling, but they seemed to mostly be +1 increases to single stats. Leveling just didn't feel very rewarding and that was when I was done.