Recent reviews by Oervoks

A finely crafted game! I think it appeals mostly to explorers and achievers (Bartles taxonomy of players).

What a deliciously hilariously annoyingly difficult little game.
Playtime for me: ½ hour
Shoutout to quintuple integrals!

Not my kind of game. Maybe you are like me? I'm a "doing and thinking and wondering" kinda guy. This game is a "simply follow along and relax", kinda game.

Things i prefer in games, that this game didn't offer (at least the first 4 hours of gameplay):
- Interesting choices with consequences.
- Anything for me to master. Mechanics that tests skill.
- Things to wonder about. Neither critically, nor creatively (problem solving, and mystery solving).

The game is about experiencing a story, its characters and a world. It's not about the player or their choices and skills, and there is not much for the player to think about. This game does have a lot of exploration and discovery, don't get me wrong. It just doesn't give you anything deep to wonder about. It basically either tells you what to think about everything, or gives you too few clues to work with.

I also think there's too much text. I feel obligated to read everything in games, but perhaps that's a me-thing. Either way I'm reading 3/4 of the time.

That's my experience. :)

Ronin has a very interesting and uniqe set of game mechanics, but the overall game design is not so good. There are many examples of the game being unfair, rather than callenging. What i mean, is when playing this game, you are going to get punished for making a mistake, that certainly is not yours, because the game is misleading, or because the mechanics are inconsitent.
You are going to waste a turn (and probably die afterwards), because the character didnt jump the way you aimed the jump. You are going to get spoted by an enemy who is standing on the opposite side of a wall. You think you are going to be able to jump down through a platform, since you could do just that with all the other platforms that looked just like it, just to find out that it didnt work, and that you are still standing on top of the it (and you wasted a turn, which probably caused your death).
The fact that this game is a turn based strategy game just makes this worse, because if you cant count on consistent mechanics in a strategy game, if the rules of the game just change in the middle of it, there is not really much strategy to it.
That being said, i really think that the core mechanics in this RONIN could make a pretty engaging game, it just does not feel like the game has been polished enough.
I could also make a long list of ideas for gameplay improvement, since i feel like the game needs a lot of changes made to the controls and gameplay. but i realize that this is not my game, and that this is not about my ideas, but the controls definately feel clumsy and just not right for a strategy game.
All in all, this game has potential, but it has a lot of holes, that a finished game should never have.