(Game Prieview) - Operencia: The Stolen Sun (Zen Studios)

 Operencia: The Stolen Sun

Zen Studios are famous for pretty much one thing... Zen Pinball... I always check up on their website when Xmas comes around to see if any cheap tables are available...and saw they have a RPG now. And not just any RPG one made is the classic dungeon crawler style of Eye of the Beholder.Might and Magic and Shadowgate... all games I loved. There was a recent series called Legend of Grimlock that I also really liked. My point is that this old school style of a grid based dungeon crawling is a style of game I really enjoy. It is also one that is criminally underdeveloped by the "retro" gaming boom that is going on at the moment. I suppose it is just the next sub-genre to get a crack after all the other retro revivals.

Anyway it is on sale at the mo on Epic so picked it up.

1st things 1st.... the game is gorgeous. The art is all awesome and colorful 3d renders, kinda like the old Myst games. The controls are classic as is the combat. This game is not doing anything new, I think they are just trying to do it well. Still the art is off the chain.

The combat is as you would expect. Some cool enemies but the imaginative stuff dose not come till you are deep in the dungeons. You fight in a 2x2 formation.. again, classic. The mechanisms of the combat is more modern though... more like a jRPG.. lots of buffs and shields and hastes and potion items and stuff. I think this is actually pretty cool and if you turn it all the way up, poses some challenge, at least in the early game. I suspect like all RPGs you end up godlike.

 True to form and a great nod to Shadowsgate and beyond, much of the game is puzzle design. Almost like Myst or a Point and Click adventure. Some of them are pretty cool, but nothing to hard. The hardest are the chest puzzles which are classic puzzle boxes and I also found one that was a legit cypher.. this puzzle woud be super hard if you did not recognise the encoding.

The voice acting is not the best, unfortunately, but all in all I am very happy with this one and enjoying it more than Legend of Grimlock 2. The start is a little wonky, but really it is just a long tutorial. So power through it, once you get past it the game begins to shine.

Verdict : Love it!