Vagrus - The Riven Realms

What a fantastic game. I bought it originally in 2021 I guess, played it, and gave up. I picked it back up recently and I'm hooked. I've read other reviews and I disagree with a lot of the negative ones. In my current run of about 30 hours, I've only had to go back to a save once or twice due to incredibly poor luck. Most of the difficulty in this game is in proper preparation and making good choices before you even set out traveling. The worldbuilding in this is great. The characters aren't particularly deep or complex all the time, but there are enough interesting NPCs to find and interact with. Exploration is genuinely engaging, and finding anything from a secret shop, to a new quest hub, to engaging with the world via the factions you choose to support are all awesome. Combat, both companion combat and mass combat, is functional and what I would call fun enough. It's nothing mind-blowing, but it serves its purpose well. The options available to you at every stage of the game can be overwhelming to start with, but having so many different levers to pull is very satisfying when you succeed. The music is also great for what it is. It's mostly simple and ambient, but I rea…

The premise is interesting enough and the world seems worth exploring, but the combat system killed it for me. I think the gamer would work better with either the combat being entirely automatic (maybe with general orders by the vagrus here or there) or being more "strategy game". As it is, the combat system sits in the uncanny valley for me.

This game has a super cool idea and a fun game play loop but has ZERO respect for player time. You need to save scum so much because an unavoidable OR unmitigatable event will happen that literally destroys hours of your work. It's not a matter of "get good newb", it's just dumb randomness that makes the difficulty of the game artificial. The companion combat is HORRIBLE. It's a slog of misses, dragging battles, and spam. This game wants to be "gritty" but it's just an unpolished and unbalanced mess. Oh and 20+ dollar DLC for basically nothing....dude...-_-

Great game. Kind of reminds me of the Sunless Sea, but with an actual working economy & much more coherent writing. Interesting setting & characters, decent difficulty and overall fun & deep enough gameplay. This game deserves more recognition for sure.

meh

Best caravanner style game I have played, can't wait for the world to be expanded to the whole map, keep going!