Operencia: The Stolen Sun

The studio that mostly makes pinball games jumped into the RPG genre head-on and came out with a pretty good game, surprisingly. It's not without its flaws, but they managed to make a classic dungeon crawler with a more modern look to it. As with typical "blobbers" you move on squares and you have an auto-map drawing everywhere you've set foot on before. However this is a full 3D game and the mouse allows you to look in any direction, so you don't always have that straight ahead vision that old dungeon crawlers used to have (ex: Dungeon Master or old Wizardry), this allows you to view the beautiful graphics of the game.

Most of the game works in turn based, but there are some real time elements like the enemies on the field. Once you encounter an enemy you will be battling them in classic turn based fashion, you have a variety of abilities available with all characters having both melee and range attacks (enemies are placed in front/mid/backline). As you progress in the game more systems are unveiled and more characters join your group, while you will eventually reach 8 party members, you can only take 4 at a time. Each has its own unique abilities and skill tree, although not the most complex system, it allows some versatility on what type of group you like to fight with. One of the major flaws however is that you don't really have any control on who gets attacked by the enemies, so your wizards will get destroyed a lot more than your warriors since you don't have any options to put them in a more distance position.

The game features 12 chapters that all have a lot of puzzles in them. On the first ones the puzzles aren't too hard and it's entirely possible to figure them out, but as you get into the 2nd part of the game they throw you alot of complex puzzles with absolutely no hints or logic behind them, making the game a rather frustrating experience in that aspect. I've used a guide to get through the 2nd half of the game, and even there I still had a hard time with many of the puzzles. The game is built in a linear way that you most absolutely succeed all puzzles to progress, which I don't mind, but they probably should have made them more approachable.

The battles are pretty good since I enjoy turn based RPG combat, but each chapter features only 2-3 different enemies (and usually a boss), so the battles get really repetitive. As you progress further, the battles get pretty grindy as the enemies are really strong and annoying, so it might take several minutes taking a group out. This does test out your battle skills, but I think every battle is manageable if you set up your party correctly. None of the game flaws are really apparent and I'd say the game plays incredibly well in the first 5-6 chapters, but then as no new systems gets introduced in the 2nd half of the game you do start noticing more of the errors in game design (then again, this is a flaw in so many RPGs).

The game is fully voice acted and does have some pretty good character interactions, your party throwing each other all types of sarcastic remarks, it does have many funny moments and it's pretty fun getting into the lore of the game too. The story does manage to present fantasy in a non-generic way, but for some reason they put an intro/tutorial chapter with characters you won't play with again and that feel so generic and have bad voice acting, I was really put off at first but once you start the real game it gets really good (at least for several hours).

I've had my ups and downs with this game but I'd say overall it's a favorable experience. There's much to like here, beautiful designs, classic dungeon-crawling, witty dialogue and much more. I put in 23 hours to get to the final boss (which I did not manage to defeat after 2 hours, one of those games that really up the challenge for its final moment), and it was a mostly fun ride getting here except for some of the tedious moments in the 2nd half. If you are looking for a modern dungeon crawler this is worth giving a shot, it probably won't end up as one of the greatest games from the genre, but I liked how they provided a bold approach to modernizing it with the unreal engine. For a studio's first RPG they did pretty well, and I hope to learn from this experience if they decide to make another one.