Gift of Parthax

1/ The "mostly negative" rating is not unearned. 2/ I've finished the game, and still have no idea what the hell Parthax's gift is. 3/ Come for the bugs, stay for the grind, forget about the story: the script and the monologues fit on a small sheet of paper. Oh, and it does not even make much sense. 4/ Even NPCs are bored by this game: it's all about fighting in an arena and "pleasing the crowd", but... you won't see a single spectator! The only time you'll hear them is upon casting some special, powerful spells (which are not very useful, actually). 5/ If you're a completionist, be aware that two achievements are bugged and impossible to unlock, unless using a third-party hack.

Gift of Parthax is a top-down arena action game developed by Foldergeist Studios and published by Fulqrum Publishing, built around spellcasting combat, character progression, and a narrative framed by gladiatorial trials. Set in a dark fantasy world, the game follows Arif, a mage who willingly enters a brutal colosseum in pursuit of a legendary reward known as the Gift of Parthax. His motivation is deeply personal, as he seeks the power necessary to save a gravely injured friend. This narrative backdrop gives emotional context to what might otherwise be a purely combat-driven experience, grounding the arena battles in a story of sacrifice and determination. At its core, the gameplay revolves around surviving waves of enemies within enclosed arenas. Combat is fast-paced and heavily dependent on positioning, timing, and efficient mana management. Arif begins with a modest arsenal of spells but gradually unlocks a wide array of magical abilities as he progresses. The spell system is one of the game’s defining features, offering numerous base spells that can be modified through the use of runes. These runes alter properties such as damage type, area of effect, casting behavior, and se…

[h1]A badly optimized, buggy mess[/h1] You can't even begin the game without doing some workaround first. That should tell you everything you need to know right there. UI is terrible and unresponsive, the buttons don't work properly most of the time. Sound settings don't work at all from the main menu. From inside the game, they do but then everything gets muted instead of just reducing volume. During the gameplay itself, the movement and attacks feel slow and clunky, not fluid. It feels like a project from a beginner dev, which is fine if that's what it is - It just shouldn't have a price tag on Steam, not in its current state. The game has a lot of negative reviews and leaving it without an update is not a good look for the dev. Some of these problems should be pretty fixable.

The game is 100 % functional AFTER you delete the GiftOfParthax_Data/StreamingAssets directory. After that the game will create properly formatted files and you can progress beyond the difficulty selection. It would take the developer five seconds to fix this issue. The game is not really "abandoned" seeing that it has all of the content to complete the story. The only dysfunctional feature is the inability to change the arch spell or to manually add runes to it. The game is not long, though it is 5 "seasons" x (4+1) stages of the same arena gameplay. Luckily the game is only about 3.0 hours long when played on Easy and ends with a credits roll after beating Parthax. The game seems have gotten fixes after the old reviews and a lot of the old glitches such as the spell switching glitch seem to be no longer present. The next "big" fix the developer should do is simply deleting the TXT files in the StreamingAssets directory so that the game can finally run out of the box. Do that, make a patch fix post about and the game will instantly stop being as bad as the the negative ratings imply. I have been told that this platform allows quick patch go-throughs without slow curation steps, …

COMPLETLY NOT RECCOMENDED. I don't think it's either the right price or the quality to be in the steam shop. Im pretty sure that if you need to dowload an old version of the game to get the achievements, something is not right. And once i launch it they have the balls to suggest me their launcher? I wish i realized once i bought it, since i can't refund it right now, thanks :) It's incredible how many games went to sale without passing the tiniest filter to check if they even ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ work.

i cant even start the game without having to myself go and delete some files, and having a price tag above free, its just a CON that make me rather play something else,