Drova - Forsaken Kin

ronne

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Just moving it all here cause the search feature has been broken since Covid:


This games fuckin sick. It's a pretty old-school RPG setup, think old Gothics sorta, with a huge open map and no waypoints or direction finding - just paper maps and exploration and getting to know your way around.

Pixel art is like 10/10 throughout, music is excellent, and the world/themes are really heavily underutilized area imo. It's very old Germanic, like pre-Roman Germanic more or less, with accompanying mysticism and culture.

Combat is pretty precise with active dodge iframes, parry's, etc. It's almost brutally hard at the beginning and you're really barely scraping buy until you get your feet under you in terms of equipment, allies, skills etc.

It's even got a demo!
 
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Soygen

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I picked this up a couple weeks ago and really enjoying it. About 25 hours in and near the end I think. I've been enjoying indie games far more than the recent triple A slop, save for a few exceptions(ie: Elden Ring, etc).
 

Hateyou

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I’m around 25 hours in and felt like I was towards the end with the stuff that was going on, but chapter 4 started and just got new armor and access to magic. Not sure how much more is left. A lot bigger and seemingly a lot more complex story- wise than I thought.

Great game really. Anyone pushing this off due to the pixel graphics is doing themselves a disservice.
 

ronne

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Yea this game is like the size of Skyrim - it's pretty crazy how big the map is once you get to later chapters, and how dense it is with hidden areas/encounters etc.

It's got a lot of similarity with Elden Ring in that sense where if you just go wander off in to the wilderness you'll find stuff to do, and it's all actually hand-built instead of some generative/randomized slop.
 

Soygen

The Dirty Dozen For the Price of One
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Yea this game is like the size of Skyrim - it's pretty crazy how big the map is once you get to later chapters, and how dense it is with hidden areas/encounters etc.

It's got a lot of similarity with Elden Ring in that sense where if you just go wander off in to the wilderness you'll find stuff to do, and it's all actually hand-built instead of some generative/randomized slop.
Yup, very Elden Ring in that exploring actually pays off with good rewards, sometimes even getting a nice OP weapon/spell etc. No mob scaling is also nice.
 

Hateyou

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Yup, very Elden Ring in that exploring actually pays off with good rewards, sometimes even getting a nice OP weapon/spell etc. No mob scaling is also nice.
No mob respawn is also a plus, traveling back and forth would be so tedious if these dickbag ripper dogs were coming back all the time.
 
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ronne

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I thought it was a pretty nice touch that the corpses of all the slain beasts you leave everywhere have actual states of decay they progress through as you get later in to the chapters.
 

Hateyou

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Regarding the weapon thief in Nemeton

Anyone else burn the dude alive? Wasn’t expecting that! Lmao
 

ronne

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Regarding the weapon thief in Nemeton

Anyone else burn the dude alive? Wasn’t expecting that! Lmao

Kinda glad act 3 played out the way it did with killing the forest and Nameton kinda being a huge cult

The first two acts of the game I was pretty worried that Nameton was just gonna be the super good guys and the Remnants were just a generic 'evil' option, but it's a bit more nuanced than that thankfully
 

Chimney

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Bought and beat this over the last couple of days on the Steamdeck. Was really enjoyable and very rewarding just exploring. Played completely blind and ended at like 35ish out of 50ish achievements which I assume is based on picking the other faction/hardest difficulty as I explored pretty everywhere and could find no other quests or items. The only fault I'd say is the game becomes insanely easy once you find the legendary weapons/armor though I saw they added an insane difficulty. Was axe/bow for most of play through but swapped to sword/shield near the final chapters.

screenshot.jpeg
 
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ronne

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Yea the weapons you can buy for collecting all the little doodads kinda ruin the rest of the game. You can get them pretty early, and they are so far out of bounds compared to anything else you find for the rest of the game you lose a lot of impetus for exploring.
 

Hateyou

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Yea the weapons you can buy for collecting all the little doodads kinda ruin the rest of the game. You can get them pretty early, and they are so far out of bounds compared to anything else you find for the rest of the game you lose a lot of impetus for exploring.
I think I completely missed this. Not sure what you’re talking about.

Sounds like maybe my playthrough was the better for it though.
 

ronne

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I think I completely missed this. Not sure what you’re talking about.

Sounds like maybe my playthrough was the better for it though.

There's a set of 9 (?) shards or artifacts or something you can collect and hand in to the secret agent dudes in the cave behind the inn. Once you get enough of them they sell you a set of weapons and armors that are completely out of bounds with the rest of the game:

1735493174235.png
 

Chimney

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Yea the weapons you can buy for collecting all the little doodads kinda ruin the rest of the game. You can get them pretty early, and they are so far out of bounds compared to anything else you find for the rest of the game you lose a lot of impetus for exploring.

I found an epic axe like 1 hour in and it drove me to level high enough to equip it asap so I went on a murder spree of everything that could give me exp and was like level 16 by the time I chose a faction .

Then I found that sword in stone and swapped. Then got all the other crap shortly after and it was easy mode. Basically face tank everything in the legendary armor/shield set up.


I think I completely missed this. Not sure what you’re talking about.

Sounds like maybe my playthrough was the better for it though.

Yeah there are a ton of game changing gear/trinkets that don't require deep progress into the game (basically up to when you get misty step) and then you're pretty much godly since all but a few things die in 2-3 hits and what I assume should have been hard encounters were face roll.