A guild-management simulation where every league fixture is a procedurally generated dungeon and every
hero can die in it. You lead an adventuring guild through a six-tier pyramid of 72 rival houses: sign
delvers, train them, kit them, set the standing orders they will fight on, and send four of them into the
dark. You never click an attack. Heroes age, form friendships and grudges, are scarred by what they
survive, retire and die permanently, and the whole history of your guild is written back to you as prose
the simulation generated rather than an author wrote.
I played nearly 30 hours on the demo version and enjoyed every hour of it. The developer gets accused of using AI so Im writing this review in support of this game. The alternative would have been that projects like these never would have excisted in the first place. Its a passion project by one person. The use of AI isnt taking anyone their jobs. Its...
Quite discouraging at first glance, with the UI being a wall of text (such is the nature of FM-likes, after all) and the wordy tutorial, while being precise and complete, creating ANOTHER wall of text. Your first 30 minutes might not exactly be filled with pure enjoyment.
But despite the laborious introduction, the game becomes pleasant very quickly...
60 hours played during the demo/before EA and I'm still so hyped for this EA release and everything to come for the game.
I love the immersion and how it really feels like managing your own guild. And I love all the different play modes and settings and how you can combine them into vastly different runs and whatever experience you want out of the game...
Dev responses quickly to community and have good work ethic. The game is very familiar if you're used to the FM genre and DnD, with very nice storytelling touches.
It has little to offer on the visual side, being a pure management game with a simple tabletop style battlemap and autobattler combat. However it's quite enjoyable to setup the delvers' tactic...
it's a spreadsheet game trying to pretend to be a fun emergent storyteller. everything is AI written, so you can't even actually engage with it as a spreadsheet game. instead, you have to parse the worst AI-gen flavor text you've ever seen and make a guess as to what the fuck any of the choices means.
