Six Ages: Ride Like the Wind Reviews

Beautiful and immersive

One of my all time favorite games. It defies genre and instead asks you to play experience a world. A lot of the game is about learning the rules of the world and figuring out how to live your bet life in the world of Glorantha.

I had high hopes for the game as I really like the theme. However, the game feels rather underdeveloped. It is really opaque in terms of understanding what to do. I get it for the rituals, but for many decisions it feels like I should just play the game 1000 times and then I'll be good at it. But it's not fun enough to get to that point honestly. Sometimes seemingly minor decisions have immense consequences (lose a battle and lose 80 goods worth 80 herds), while you click your way through a lot of decisions which look important but have very minor consequences (+1 mood, a clan mocks you). The battle system feels way too RNG based, you clearly have the upper hand, but somehow the enemy while losing men left and right will gain two advantages and you lose. The system of obtaining lore is weird; it would be good if there was some guidance even if vaguely how to get that.

Played it some time ago, got bored and put it aside to revisit later. This time, I took the time to read the lore, get more invested in what I was doing, and enjoyed it more as a result. There is coherency behind the story, like an imagined culture not unlike those of ancient civilisations. All in all, it's an improvement to their first game. During rituals, it was a bit confusing as to why I'd follow the lore but would lose, so the feedback could have been a bit better around that. At some point I randomly started picking options more suited to the strengths of the quester and started ignoring the lore, and the rituals started going more smoothly after that. Maybe that's what Hyalor meant by choosing your own path? I played through aggressively three times, and ended up losing each time. The fourth time, I played a bit more diplomatically, and as a result managed to wed Beren to his love. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that is what led to a win. Each time I lost due to a Ram invasion from the south, they would say they'd learned to ride horses from some Rider I'd never heard of. When one of the options was for Beren to teach them how to ride, I realised that if I taught them...the invaders couldn't come! Excite. I'm looking forward to trying the sequel, now.