After having long ignored this game‘s existence, as I’m not fond of difficulty for difficulty’s sake and don’t play games with the intention of dying/failing, I finally broke down and picked it up during the most recent sale.
The idea was that it might be tolerable if I went into it as an adventurer torture/death simulator rather than a conventional RPG. And, honestly, in that framework it delivers in spades; lost three of them on the second quest after the triple-threat of starvation, insane stress generation, and a hateful random number generator that thinks a 75% chance to hit should be more like 10%. It wasn’t anywhere near as frustrating as I thought it would be (as new adventurers are always arriving).
No, the frustrating thing is the provision/inventory system. Rather than a weight system or individual character inventories you just have a universal set of slots. Every type of item takes up a single slot, and the slots have strict stacking limits. So 1 Bandage and 1 Antidote take up exactly as much room as 8 Shovels and a 1-person party can carry just as much as a 4-person party. Gold takes up a slot (and can only stack to 1750), each individual type of gem takes up a slot, each individual resource type takes up a slot (there are 4), and… each journal page takes up a slot. Care to guess how many slots you get? A mere sixteen.
That, right there, is the most bullshit of bullshit examples of fake difficulty and honestly just makes me not want to bother continuing. What’s the point of dungeon delving if you can’t carry any loot?
Great review, especially towards the end.