Lawless Lands

This game is easy to spend all day playing; it's got a surprising amount of game customizations available, has fun quests and a solid (if not slightly generic) world to explore. I do wish that there was more color/less dreariness, but for the price you get a lot of hours of content to play through in multiple ways.

This was made in RPG Maker, which comes with a whole lot of baggage. It means some things that would be a UI selection are instead items you need to use to get said UI to pop up (see: using your Fame to upgrade things like "able to have more companions" and "get a few more stat points", which I found out quite a while in) but once you learn it, it just becomes an annoyance. That said, it's very well made and largely lets you do what you want, Skyrim-style. There's a main story that you'll need to follow at some point, but there's so much content, characters you can recruit, and stuff to do that will keep you entertained for quite a while. I spent a whole lot of time just wandering around and doing stuff before doing the storyline after a while, because I am an explorer. The combat is turn-based and kind of familiar to anyone who plays this stuff, but it's been changed enough to be both awesome and painful. Awesome in that there's a lot of ways to affect combat (bleeding, knocking someone off balance, stunning, arrows that do all kinds of status things. That said, it's all percentages, and I think it's a pretty raw percentage so there's an awful lot of RNGesus happening with t…

Like other Corrosive Studios games, Lawless Lands is a bit of a rough gem - the settings are usually grim, dialogue is serviceable, but where the games truly shine is the sense of slowly growing your character into someone more powerful and more able to navigate the grim world they inhabit. In that sense, Lawless Lands is no exception and stands out as in my view the best of what Corrosive Studios has to offer. This is IMO their best setting and with the best balance of progression in their games. The studio also still continues to add on to their games, even to this day. Easy recommend for me.

https://youtu.be/mBZd6gr8NOU Front loaded with massive lore drops and dozens of contextless choices players are thrust into a giant world without basic onboarding. A lot of good could be buried but players will have to dig.

A solid roleplaying experience that keeps situations tense without being too overly punishing; you can't save scum, and saving costs resources, but saving at a reasonable rate is doable. Plenty to watch for and be careful of. If you play at the baseline normal and expected way, this game is fine. Take heed if you play the Loner style (start your playthrough with the Loner modifier to reduce companion group size), you can wind up in a tough spot travelling on the world map and getting ambushed by an enemy group you can't flee from. A slight problem you can fine-tune with volume settings: overly noisy horror sting sound effects in the environment could alarm you into thinking something terrible just happened when really, that's just ambience. It could jar you into being attentive just to realize nothing happened. I question the choice of the horror sting effects is all, some of them are questionably much.

7/10 A little confusing at first but has an interesting plot