Passageway of the Ancients

Passageway of the Ancients is a unique game, but not for the right reasons. It claims to draw inspiration from classic titles of the 90s and early 2000s, yet I find myself questioning which elements in this game truly reflect those eras. It's unfortunate, as the story and world show potential and are well-written. However, the game fails to create an engaging experience, with many design choices falling flat. Ultimately, you'll spend the majority of your time navigating vast dungeons in search of the exit while resisting the urge to loot every single container. Full review: https://rpghq.org/forums/viewtopic.php?p=164571-passageway-of-the-ancients

Where do I start with this one? I'll go back to the beginning, a few years ago when I first heard about this on RPG Codex and shortly after seeing a facebook ad for it. The story behind the development of "Passageway" is really interesting, a couple of gentlemen in their 70's taking their lifelong love of fantasy and RPG's and making a game that hearkens back to the glory days of CRPG's (you know, late 90's...). And while the screenshots and short videos paint the picture of a game in the veins of Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights, the gameplay is a whole different situation. The game starts off well with the character creator. You can spend quite a while making your character look the way you want and have several different races/professions to choose from. You only create one character as the rest of the team you meet shortly into playing the game. It doesn't take long to start seeing the issues, as the pathfinding and combat issues show up during the tutorial. I actually had to skip part of the tutorial as my character refused to go into one of the rooms to do the next task, and this specific issue will keep rearing it's ugly head throughout the game....there has been at lea…

So far, the game is fun and hits that nostalgic note that many newer games miss. It seems to be well crafted and different from other CRPGs to be interesting. The combat for example allows for tailoring that other games do not. Recommended.

A solid oldschool RPG with all the elements you'd expect in a party-based RPG and a classic graphical style. If you like playing the classics such as Neverwinter Nights, Baldur's Gate, or Dungeon Siege, you'll probably enjoy this game. For me, the real time with pause combat hit the right balance of tactics and action. There's a lot of room for optimizing your attacks with positioning and choosing the best attack type and AoE spells, but you can also fight fairly quickly when you want, for clearing trash mobs. You've got all the standard character archetypes (warrior, mages, healer, etc.) you'd expect in this kind of RPG and a number of interesting spells and targetable abilities you can specialize your characters with. Loot and enemy variety are up to par and there are various enchantments and potions you can use as well. I'm about 7 hours in and from the levels gained and amount of areas I haven't unlocked so far, the game definitely has plenty of content. Pros +good real time with pause combat system with auto-pause when encountering a new enemy unit +helpful tutorial videos that you can re-watch later if needed +haven't encountered any bugs or crashes so far +The runestone un…

Lots of work left to do for the devs on this, but it's absolutely full of promise and is obviously a child of love. Very much looking forward to seeing where this goes!

TLDR: Save yourself the tedium and play a different game. So I started this game, got hit with an intro "video" consisting of a page or 2 of exposition text riddled with words of the day stacked next to each other with nothing else, then got into one of the worst character creation screens I've seen, then got into a 'tutorial' area of sorts. Halfway through I noticed the UI only partially scales with resolution leaving overhead text and right click menu unscaled and illegible so I quit, set to windowed on lower resolution and fired up lossless scaling. Tried loading my save, but due to some glitch it was unusable. Recreated my character, opted to skip the tutorial and start the game and was treated with another intro 'video' consisting of nothing but expository text, this time at least 5 pages worth of it, none of which was good and my eyes were starting to glaze over already... After that was finally done, I was in a house and some girl started talking at me with more exposition. At this point I was done, so after the second page I just skipped the rest and off I went to follow the vague quest objective (really? THIS is where you chose to save on the word count?!). I started …