Avadon: The Black Fortress review

So I just spent some time playing Avadon, the Black Fortress. 

This is one of the games I bought from Humble Indie Bundle: neat stuff!  The games are always DRM free, you pay what you decide to pay, and you decide how to split your payment between the game devs, a suite of charities, and Humble itself.  The games are cross platform, including Mac and Android, and recently integrated to your Steam account.   They offer a new bundle a couple times a year, please check them out!

Type of game: fantasy style computer RPG.  You control a main player and up to three companions, who you choose from a pool and who you largely control the development of.

Gameplay: combat is turn based, the controls are pretty easy to use.   I like how the turn based system makes combat less stressful.  There's a hard cap on character growth, so figuring out how to train and develop your characters can be important to get the best end result, although later in the game you get an option to rebuild (retrain) your characters.

World: The world is reasonably large and complex.  More areas open to exploration as you do different quests and develop the storyline.   In general, monsters do not respawn; that means that options to do experience point farming for character growth are limited.  There are more locked doors and chests then you'll be able to open, so save lockpicks for occasions where there's a plot consequence.  Also, it's easy to miss some hidden options or to just plain not find everything.  I recommend going back over areas a second time using one of the online maps.

Storyline: it feels like bait and switch, ending up more and more morally ambiguous.  The dialog options along the way offer hints of changing the outcome of events, but it seems like things happen nearly the same no matter what option you choose, especially early and mid game.  This makes the game feel very railroaded. 

It seems like only real effect of your choices is whether or not keeps loyalty of companions.  To do this means you have to take some pretty morally ambiguous choices yourself, such as slaughtering a clan who are the blood enemies of one companion, in vengeance of what they did to him.  Again, this feels railroaded. 

It turns out you can choose a couple of different end game options, and you really want to keep your companions loyalty to have certain choices be practical in the end game.


Summary:  good gameplay, but a little bit of a frustrating experience.   Still worth the time spent.

-- Pat