Drova - Forsaken Kin Steam Charts & Stats

I got 40 hours of gameplay for something I paid too little, which is rare thing nowadays. It was just my type of RPG, I never needed to look anything up online, and the game doesn't have obnoxious markers or arrows. The quest design, journal, puzzles just felt so natural, modern RPG games usually suck at doing a good job at that. Keep in mind this is a 2D game, but all the still it felt so engaging and I found myself immersed in the world of Drova. I really don't want to spoil anything, but it was a really cool RPG experience, without getting completely lost or handhelded.

In theory, this game feels like everything that I would want in a game. But it just misses the mark in so many ways that dull it down and make it not fun. You move way to slow and everything is a maze to get to. You can never just go to a place you have to take a detour up and around and zig zag all around. Even in towns. Being top down you can't get a great lay of the land. If your on an upper level you can only follow a winding path or use a designated jump down spot. There are a few things that make you go slightly faster but they are limited and run out too fast. Default speed should be like 30-50% faster. They did poorly add fast travel after I was like half done. You have to pay for it and it's only to major towns. They also take your money before you fast travel and don't give it back to you if you decide not to. It's feels like the devs are afraid you might enjoy something too much so you have to be punished instead of just letting something be convenient or nice. Combat feels like it's meant to be entirely cheesed. It's not super engaging and gets repetitive real quick. On that same note you'll get a lot of bad weapons that don't feel meaningfully stronger. A bandit will hit you super hard and you'll take their weapon to find out that it's worse than yours and has higher requirements to use it. But they hit you like a truck using it while you hit like a noodle. It's hard to experiment with different weapons because of how weak they are at first and how investment heavy they are to learn skills. Plus you need the actual trainers available. They did add a respec option but it's not a full respec. You don't get back what you put in strength dex or mind. Which again, like, why not. Let people play around. Continuing with balance. This hurts a lot actually, because normally in games I love the option to fight unarmed. And like they fucked it up here because it can be either abysmal or literally the best thing with no investment. There is a spiked cestus you can get right away that invalidates any weapon you pick up basically until you get end game stuff. It makes all unarmed attacks crit and crits do more damage and causes bleed. So you can stack a ton of bleed and crush most stuff easy. There aren't any skill trees for unarmed so it kinda felt like it shouldn't be this good. I kept getting new axes and swords and I'd save and test out the damages with skills in them and unarmed still won. Then I unlocked the option to buy the strongest sword in the game and finally weapons were stronger. You can also unlock this gear in the first chapter. It's just really weird power progression. No weapons were worth buying until you unlock the best weapons which you can also do in the first chapter if you explore or know how. The master blacksmith in town selling absolute trash. Now for the story and writing. A lot of this game feels really heavily loaded up in the beginning. Then drops off a lot. Lots of missions and dialog at first. Then it thins out a lot. Your choices aren't really that deep. A lot of times you can have person A or person B be mad at you or you can choose not to play the game. There is some interesting stuff like if you steal and then show the person they will be like uh thats mine and then be mad. It's pretty clearly tied to very specific quests and event triggers though. Most stuff you can just take if you want. I think a lot of the praise the game gets is from people very enamored with the first bit of the game and they didn't see or choose to ignore it where it started getting more shallow. I can see a path where you played it just the way the devs thought you would and thought it was amazing. But if you don't then it starts to grate on you. If you look at around a lot of people don't like what happens in chapter 3. It really railroads you into some grim outcomes. [spoiler] Like holy shit why are we burning this man alive. This is not how I thought he would be punished when I tried to help you guys. Please stop thanking me. I want to leave this faction but I've seen what you do to anyone that slights you. [/spoiler] it soured me on it and I like linear stuff. But this feels like a game letting you be vegan and then making you eat hamburgers anyway. Also, Mandragora shows a cog wheel interaction prompt. Any other time you actually examine something with a cog wheel but you just pull it out and die. It's not consistent gameplay. Yes, I know of ear plugs. It doesn't make sense that you can get a recipe that uses Mandragora but can't learn about it in game at the same time and instead have to go to the other side of the map to find a hidden guy in an optional side quest. But this is just another thing that is just a little off, a little less polished. Giving a instant death button is never cool. I put this in their discord and it was ignored. Maybe they will read it hear.

It was a very entertaining time I had with this game. Enjoyed nearly everything. Deutsche Wertarbeit ;)

It was really good, but then in act 3 the game decides to remove the players opinion and turns to shit if you have any interest in making your own choices

One of the best games I have played in a long time. It was much more than I expected. If it had been priced higher I would have never tried it, but after playing it I would have been willing to pay more for it. If you guys add a support the developer DLC I will buy it.

This game was an awesome representation of story, game play and puzzle solving! First game in a while where I felt that there wasn't such a major hiccup in any aspect that it took away from the story and ambiance. It had a compelling and interesting story line that was accentuated by plentiful and diverse NPC dialog. There is certainly no shortage of things to do with a moderate sized world to explore, lots of quests, skill building, crafting, ect... Like a lot of games, the initial phase is slow going while you figure out the mechanics and develop your combat skills. Seemingly everything can kill you and the tasks (especially combat related) can seem daunting. But the reward of developing your character and growing into the combat is definitely rewarding. There are multiple character builds and fighting styles. The game has a way of investing you on a task and then suddenly ripping you down a tangent one, but in the best way possible. The character development of the NPCs is superb and where ever you find yourself, it feels organic and never forced or out of place. I strongly recommend this game, it has been a while since I've played a game that had my attention held so tightly until I completed it

This is a tentative negative but still a negative. My main gripe with this game is how uninteresting the combat is despite being the focus. Before mechanics, though, I should mention some stuff that are clear errors or oversights to me: 1. Enemy hitboxes are wonky enough that coupled with the camera angle, stuff that you think you'll evade will hit you, 2. The active frames on some attacks are so long that you can get hit by walking in range even after the attack's momentum looks to have ended, 3. Lunge attacks (and this game looooves lunge attacks) push everything else away from the enemy, which means a lunging enemy can push away the two enemies you are fighting and end up right next to you OR lunge at the wall and then slide across it to hit you. As for stuff I didn't like and would not consider errors or oversights: 1. The combat is souls-like, don't be fooled by the "flow-based description". Enemies change attack direction if you dodge early, which forces you into timed dodges. You also have a stamina bar. So... yeah, it's a souls-like in terms of combat. 2. Equipment matters way too much for an open-world approach. A good chunk of what you can access will be blocked off in practice unless you want to spend 10m fighting even a basic enemy. 3. The progression is barebones. I like that you need to interact with the NPCs to level up or learn stuff but man is the "talent" list boring. I think it'd have been much much better if they put some of the abilities you can learn from specific NPCs into the talent list because as it is, you basically just get "you hit harder" or "you get more resources". 4. Seeing the skills you are taught on the NPCs is cool... except they are so common that it devalues the extra effort and immersion you go through (compared to other games) to learn skills and level up. I can see the appeal for this game, I really do, because Drova attempts to actually integrate a lot of the RPG elements we are used to into the world. The problem is that while the integration is mostly cool, the RPG elements themselves are too uninteresting to keep you (well, at least me) engaged.

just finished Drova and enjoyed it very much! QUESTS are interesting - funny or serious (from laughing to feeling sorry), hard or easy (from thinking and preparing to fight to autopiloting) - best thing about them is that you dont have any markers, and have to find everything by yourself (there were only 2, where it took some time to find places, but they were not main quests, so it's okay), because of that you feel very excited when you reached your goal pixel ART is nice, i really enjoyed a lot of scenes and made some screenshots for memories, great work! MUSIC and sounds in general are great too, from creepy ambient to cosy melodies, adds more atmposhere and immersion COMBAT is interesting, with a lof of possible builds depending on what gear, stats and abilities you have (but a bit lame with only one button for using skill, and swapping between others before activating), i used probably 20% of them though, but in some situations it helped me to overcome difficulties, also was very interesting to watch NPCs fighting, using everything they can (no jokes, seems like this game has nice PVP potential) EXPLORATION is awesome too, there is probably not a single empty place - your curiousity made you go somewhere? be sure, you'll find something interesting, or useful, or challenging, and you'd like to test yourself (my first worm fight took me an hour, as i did like 1% or less dmg and got oneshot, but i just wanted that unnecessary challenge, and i did it, and was proud of myself, lol), and it's not buggy, i'm one of those players who play RPGs like "ugh, you want me to go there? well, then that will be the last place i'll go", and NPCs really react on already killed mobs or other actions in different way, and it's funny it took me kinda 60 hours, but probably if you go through main quest it's much faster, as i double or even tripple checked places i couldn't reach or marked for future exploration in case something changed there were some annoying things, but you get used to them very fast, like torch always dropping when you enter combat stance (can be useful though to make fight more visable because of light), or those not obvious "road-mazes", when map shows you that there is a simple road, but there is not, but in "end-game" you just ignore as you get blink, and also because of exploration mentioned before is still exciting even without blink so if you want some NICE and FRESH EXPERIENCE and vibes, and you like games like Divinity OS or Pillars of Eternity (but dont wait too much, as Drova is more cozy) give it a try, as for me two main things are important and show if i enjoy a game - first is how long was first playing session (and it was long) and then if i want to launch it the next day (and i really wanted to) oh and thanks god this game doesn't have overload and you are free to gather and carry as many things as you want in your inventory (some would say that breaks immersion, but come on, who on earth likes overload in videogames)

Needs a neutral rating. I never played Gothic so I don't have any nostalgia coloring my experience. There is a lot of good on offer here. The story I liked. The exploration is sometimes surprising and interesting and the scope of the game expands further than you might expect at first glance. The things I dislike are the combat and the quest structure. The combat: slow and shallow. Enemies come in two varieties, dead in one hit, or kills you in one or two. You want to add a swing to your sword combo? Well time to scour the game looking for the 3 NPC's who know the mysterious art of stabbing. You might have to pay this person for the pleasure of learning, or you might have to do hours of quests and join their faction locking you off from half the content in the game. Oh and you didnt save enough of your learning points because you wanted to learn lock picking? Well screw you then player, you should have never considered leveling once these past few hours. There are also plenty of enemies that act like they are from an entirely different game with an entirely different combat system and dont seem to be restricted to the poor stamina system, just showing me how fun the game could have been. The quest structures: At first I didn't mind the vague af quest descriptions (ie head west until blah blah blah) because the world isnt THAT big and finding what you need typically isn't much of a hassle. That is until the devs decided to make large sections of the map into mazes with plenty of dead ends and ambush after ambush because you were stupid enough not to memorize the forrest/mine/cave layout. Adding even something as simple as a large circle on the map to designate that your objective is SOMEWHERE in this vicinity would have made this game a lot easier to come back to after a break. Instead you get nothing and are told its a feature. Smaller gripes: I can steal in front of most NPCS and they wont care at all, hell I can start a fight with almost anyone, beat them unconcious and just take their stuff with 0 repercussions. It just makes the world feel dead and dumb. Also everyone has the same laugh and laugh animation that takes too long and I cant skip. Smug laughers wasting my time. Positives: No carry weight limit.

Literally Gothic in 2D, has more of that Gothic magic than Elex. Loved every bit of it