Recent reviews by Carnedouce

It's a recommendation motivated by nostalgia and faith in the future.
It's a recommendation I make in support of Grimlore Games trying to revive this franchise.

I've finished the prologue and pushed into the first chapter a little bit.
There's some good stuff there, but some problems too.

Firstly, I would say that the general pace of combat could stay close to this and it wouldn't be a problem. It's slower than Last Epoch, but less brutal and tedious than PoE 2. It has some old-school vibe to it that feels satisfying. It's actually quite close to PoE1's early game with a tad more "oomph" to the base attacks.

The game is quite pretty, and I think the art direction succeeds in modernizing the IP. The UX is not super refined yet, but is already OK, and some QoL features like inventory auto-sorting are really welcome.

The map design already feels quite cool in the prologue and is promising.

I encountered some frustrating FPS drop issues. I'm running the game on a GeForce RTX 5080, so it's not a hardware problem. I wouldn't worry too much though, UE5 is notorious for bad optimization, and Grimlore has proven to deliver gorgeous games running perfectly well in the past.

I do have questions about the direction they want the game to take though, especially in the current ARPG space. Where do they aim to land? What do they want to achieve with this game?

I think there's a place to take in between PoE 2 and Last Epoch.

GGG’s design philosophy with PoE2 still has to find its exact expression, but I don't ever see them being challenged on system depth, production value, and content. PoE1 and 2 require extreme commitments though, and the friction they bring can sometimes feel discouraging. Last Epoch is a more casual answer to the extreme time investments both GGG games require. But to me, LE is also too easy, their artistic direction heavily lacks a "charm factor," and their IP is weaker than Titan Quest.

What worries me here is that LE has excellent design baselines, and their build options and skills are extremely accessible and immediately fun to toy with.

From what I'm seeing, it's Titan Quest in 2025. But that also means it has a lot of the Titan Quest and Grim Dawn defaults. It's a core design problem: the skills are not that fun or impressive to use from the get-go. And a lot of the modifiers you can put on them are actually stat modifiers like "+x% damage" or "+y% chance of this or that effect."

For a modern ARPG, this is not great. And it should be the very first thing Grimlore aims to fix. Points put in X or Y direction on your tree should be felt. And basic skills should already be generous and cool to use.

From the skills I've tested, some were already cool, like Warfare Leap doing what it should if you take the proper point. But the synergy in the modifiers should come from creating skills that feel unique to your playstyle, not from stacking passive effects. This is not 2006 anymore.

Without that, I think the game will miss the mark of being a true revival of the IP. It'll end up being played for its nostalgia factor, but it won't carve a spot in the ARPG genre.

This is my main beef with this current proposition. And it's based on a very-early game experience. I might come back and modify this take later once I have more experience with the game.

Incredible game with an incredible balance between immediate fun and depth. Only played 3 hours but one can tell this game has LEGS. Everything feels just good there. I think it's a future hit in the making. Congrats to the team, awesome job!

This game is a hidden gem. I rarely discover games just by browsing the Steam Store, but this one intrigued me enough to give it a shot. And I have not been disappointed. It's smart, well-designed, and brilliantly written. After just a few hours of play, it’s the kind of game that makes you long for a rainy weekend where you can do nothing but dive in and lose yourself completely.

It’s a love letter to a style of RPG that seemed to vanish years ago. The beauty of games like Gothic was that they made you feel like you were exploring a living, breathing world. You weren’t the chosen one; you were just a gritty, clever individual trying to carve out a place for yourself. This game captures that same magic.

Everything in it has soul. The combat engine is simple yet incredibly effective, with enough subtlety to keep you engaged. The world feels mysterious and dangerous, and the characters—right from the first few quests—feel like real people, telling a meaningful story. Every action you take has purpose, and the act of playing is its own reward. Even fighting off mosquitoes with a stick somehow feels cool.

The team behind it, Just2D, is definitely one to watch. It took me only three hours to see that these developers are true craftsmen, pouring love and care into every detail.

If you haven’t already, buy this game. Leave a review, spread the word. We need more passion projects like this, and we need them to reach the eyes of unsuspecting players who’ll appreciate them.

This game truly lets you escape. I already want to go back. I want to walk through a dense forest and stumble upon a moss-covered ruin. I want to grit my teeth in a tense fight with two wolves guarding that ruin. I want to feel the thrill when I beat that challenge using the tools and skills I’ve learned. And I can’t wait to explore the ruins, find a treasure map, a strange crystal, or a unique weapon that’ll stay with me for the next ten hours of play.

I can’t wait for my next session.

One can only love such tribute to the corporate hellscape.
"Middle manager must pretend to review some work but they can't do it if it's not stapled."
Felt that one in my young yet weary bones...

Gamewise it's like Portal met Stanley Parable met Neon White or something. If you like arcadey games with cool writing and thematic, give it a try!

It's a great game in the making, but currently, the balance is way too hardcore.

You never reach a plateau.

You're always tense, constantly outgrowing yourself. There are tools to mitigate immigration, but they are counterintuitive: it's either terror or paying to discourage travelers. Additionally, you don't really want to reduce immigration since your goal is to grow. However, when you let it happen organically, you really have no breathing space.

Rutabaga is not satisfying, and then rutabaga fever arrives. Depending on the map, your options for growing rye and transforming it into flour are really limited. Plus, moonshine is also unsatisfying, so you must divide your rye production between brewing beer and producing flour. You can pig farm to produce meat with rutabaga, but the ratios are really brutal all around. Meanwhile, you need an army, books, and a chancellery pretty quickly once you reach around 70 citizens because your lords have to not only give instructions but also entertain themselves, lead armies, conduct diplomacy, have sex, have their desires fulfilled, etc., etc.

There's no safety net. If one of your lords dies too early, you're spiraling, and buildings are decaying, while even a single cutthroat can blind your lord. You can avoid this, but then soldiers are needed, and you need to maintain them and pay for their equipment, which also degrades. Etc., etc., etc.

It's a great loop. It's mainly a matter of tweaking, in my opinion. It's just too tight for now. Things pile up, and you can't really engage with the subtleties as you're always running behind the curve.

But they know. They know, they know. Let them cook. It's EA for a reason. The first two patches already show they are conscious of their own "expert" bias.

It needs more space for creativity and expressivity. But I bet you $20 it'll come, and when it reaches 1.0, it's going to sit at 85%+ review scores.

Bravo to the dev team <3

I thought I wasn't gonna like this game.

Not a huge fan of cozy type games. But my my this one is sooooo satisfying. 20mn in and I'm giggling when placing my little tiles and watching my villagers go around their merry way.

Would recommend. Piiipoooopiiiii +20 points

What a waaaaste. It's not hopeless, but the amount of work it needs to become what it should is dreadful. I wanted to test the game for myself after watching hours of stream.

1. Gameplay is cool. Not groundbreaking but has all it needs to be built on and become excellent.
2. I had 0 performance issue. And I'm running it with an RTX 2070.
3. Durability systems should never resurface in this type of game. It's quite staggering to see such idea be implemented. Like how did this pass design meetings? I get that they're going with some kind of survival/soulslike/hack'n'slash mix. But Moon Studio should pick their battles. Not all systems of all those genres can fit together. Punishing players for dying with a durability loss calling for farm in some pointless areas is a BLUNDER. This is not an incentive to play the game and create engagement, it's just a dagger on the throat. It's stupid cause it could have been done 10 different ways, that already exists in this type of games, without being so vain and annoying.
4. The souless aspect of the general design philosophy in relationship to the stunning art style and mood really creates one of the most disagreeable contrast I've ever felt in a video game. I feel like I'm being baited in playing something deep and engaging when in the end I'm getting some kind of strange live-service/rust-vrising type survival kind of loop. Which I have nothing against, but their loop is clear, fun and engaging. Here it really doesn't feel the promise will be kept.

Want a roadmap Moon Studios?

a. Farming should be incentived with rewards, not the dread of being stuck in a deadlock.
b. If I pay 30+ box for your EA, I intend to be able to play as I like. And if this involves breaking my head against a boss 400 times in a row, so be it. I don't want you to come and force me to do ♥♥♥♥♥♥ grindy stuff each 5-8 attempts.
c. You already have blueprints for engagement in games of the genre. And it seems you already have a procedurally generated system to generate dungeons with loot and engagement? Why seek to pump those numbers with disrespectful mechanics? Grinding is not the problem.
d. Respect players time. Like for real. Let your game carry itself. If the combat is good (and it isn't bad), then I'll grind for loot and for my housing naturally. This isn't a fckin mmo, nobody needs your artifical "gametime" ♥♥♥♥.

Good luck Moon Studio, and HUGE congratz to the Art team there. Game is one of the most impressive and beautiful AD I've seen in the past 5 years.

Game is playable online even with long loading screens and 100% playable offline.

Devs are pouring their heart in this and it shows. Mechanics are great, gamefeel is crisp, this is the skeleton of a game that has the potential to become a huge experience for arpg players.

Worth your money for sure if you're into the genre. You’re only hurting yourself by leaving negative reviews. Stop hurting yourself.

Ayoooo you can be a Pirate now. DLC is lit, if you loved games like Sid Meier's Pirates, The Vampire Coast of TWW3 or Pillars of Eternity II it's made for you!

It's elegantly integrated and brings a lot of little things above the main selling points of the DLC.

Regarding the price you can put it like this :

It costs something close to one pizza. Is it worth the price?
If the answer is "I would prefer to be a pirate for hours than to eat one single pepperonni with a coke" don't think twice.

And we're gonna get free stuff for it later along the road. IYKYK.
They already prove to care a great deal for the game and the community.
You gotta acknowledge the true love they put into this game.

Let them cook! Ahoy!

This game is a game I wish I made.