Having spent many hours over the last month or so completing Dragon Quest III (Famicom), I decided to take a break from living room gaming, and am back to playing PC games. I felt like playing a dungeon crawler and, having completed The Bard's Tale 1-3 a year or so ago, I was in the mood to try out a couple of games heavily inspired by them:
Gates of Integrity
https://tarjan.itch.io/gates-of-integrity
HEAVILY inspired by the The Bard's Tale (specifically the first game), this is a very simple RPG that starts out a lot of fun, bet gets very frustrating, very quickly. It doesn't take too long to fully explore the small town and complete the first dungeon, and there's no grinding required to get to this point. That leaves you at around level 5 for most of your characters, which is way too weak to progress to the next dungeon. The second dungeon begins throwing massive groups of spellcasters at you, each of which is capable of doing 10+ damage to your entire party, each round. If all 10 Master Mages decide to cast spells, that's 100 damage per character in just the first round, which is a total party kill two times over for a typical level 5 party.
Even worse, once you reach level 5 or so, it becomes ridiculously expensive to make progress (both in terms of EXP and gold). Reviving a dead character costs 20,000 gold, which is what you would earn from around eight very tough encounters, so even a single character dying puts your entire party into a death spiral that's nearly impossible to get out of.
The game seems very poorly balanced, and because it's so linear, I think the only solution is to grind easy encounters for hours and level up several times. Disappointing.
Devil Whiskey
Also heavily inspied by the The Bard's Tale series, this game adds a bit more stuff, making it feel a bit like an alternate The Bard's Tale IV that is closer to the original trilogy. It has a very basic 3D engine for environments (still grid-based though), adds some interesting new classes and races, and (most importantly) adds class-specific skills characters earn at certain levels (mostly starting at level 13). I was feeling pretty good about this game.
Well, that good feeling stopped soon enough. At that point I could either continue the main quest (in a dungeon) or take on a side quest (in a dungeon). Unfortunately, the dungeons in this game are absolutely brutal. Rogues don't even develop a basic ability to detect/disarm traps until level 13 (never mind if you went with a ranger instead... they don't learn those skills until level 25), and traps are otherwise unavoidable and always triggered when you step on them. Every single trap you step on (again, unavoidable since they are at fixed locations in corridors) does 12+ damage to your entire party; at level 6, my characters had max HPs ranging from 22-55.
Then there are the encounters in the dungeons. These are roughly 10x as hard as anything in the town, consisting of groups of status-inflicting monsters up front, and poweful spellcasters and deadly accurate archers in the rear. Monsters with missile attacks always hit, so you are basically doomed. This seemed absolutely nuts, so I did some research and it turns out that this last issue is actually a bug with the latest official (beta) patch. In fact, enemy missile attacks completely ignore your armor class, which means they do indeed automatically hit every time.
With that in mind, I reinstalled the game and didn't appy the patch. Of course, my savegame isn't compatible, so I went back and recreated a (hopefully better) party, and played just for a bit. I confirmed that enemy missiles don't automatically hit anymore, which is a good sign. I plan on playing enough to get back to where I was with my previous party, and see how things go. I suspect that this game, like Gates of Integrity, is just gonna require lots and lots of grinding. If that's the case, I'll find something else to play.