Black Geyser: Couriers of Darkness

Fun CRPG of a classic bent, reminding me of Pathfinder: Kingmaker. Sadly no controller support and physically hard for this disabled person.

Enjoyable game for any who grew up in the nostalgia years of Baldur's Gate 1 & 2. Lots of loading screens but some nice QoL features like fast travelling to NPCs to hand in quests. Could do with some tighter writing in places and a bit more work filling out towns with more interesting people. Also hot keys for class features like sneak and steal would be very useful.

It's slightly below average, lacking mostly in graphics and writing but it's still an isometric RPG so I'd rate it 4/10. Thing is, all other similar games are simply better. I didn't expect great graphics but those were pretty poor. Character models are bad, animations are bad but some locations (wilderness, winter locations) are fine. City locations are poor. In general, I think it's similar to Arcanum graphics-wise. Writing is fine sometimes, and really bad often. Story is fine in general, but some dialogues are very, very cringe. Authors have bit of a habit of breaking fourth wall with funny options, but it doesn't fit with in general serious theme of a game. Also, tons of heavy railroading - I'm fine with it, but it ofter feels forced. Prologue is worst offender, gets slightly better later. In general, you won't feel like you wasted 30 hours, but if you're into isometric RPGs and have any other left, I'd suggest you to play it first.

TL; DR: a fair first effort from a rookie dev studio, but its basicness and frustrating rough edges makes this hard to recommend unless you're absolutely hard up for an old school cRPG. Pros: -well-built lore with an interesting world to explore and try to figure out what makes it tick -combat, while merely functional, is still fun and engaging, especially after you've leveled up your character and companions a fair bit -multiple outcomes for many quests based on your level of diligence and amount of actual thought put into resolving them, but... Cons: -the writing, story, and questing is...functional; it's not great, it's rarely outright bad, but it gets done what it needs to without much flair or ability to truly allow for roleplaying your character -the UX is terrible; while the UI (mostly) works, the UX is frustrating as mouse input regularly gets ignored...time after time after time during the entire game I'd click on an area to move to or an enemy to attack, and I would not be able to do so again to move to another area or attack another enemy as the input just. would. NOT. take for several moments -one main UI bug: if you hover over equipment to see comparisons or stats …

Not as epic as Baldur's Gate or Pillars of Eternity but it's decent for an indie game CRPG. Spellcasting can be clunky 3-4 clicks to cast 1 spell in the tiny favorites bar. No keyboard shortcuts makes casting spells too mouse heavy. Sometimes long load times. Real time with pause even if many CRPG's are using turn based but it's not really an issue, the game is easy-ish even on highest difficulty. Not really a fan of the greed system, here if you're a honest you'll be poor lol.

Watching loading screens Areas are very small, and you have to change the areas constantly. However, even with all tuning, loading screens are around 30 seconds. Two minutes on a map, and then half a minute loading time ...