Testament: The Order of High Human Review

ign.com:

At a wedding I recently attended, I saw a scene likely familiar to many: a questionable guest drunkenly rose to give an ill-advised speech they hadn’t put any thought into, stringing together barely related anecdotes with no purpose besides fulfilling a perceived obligation. Testament: The Order of High Human reminds me a lot of that speech. This bizarre fantasy adventure is filled with bad ideas that are so poorly executed that the entire thing feels like what might happen if you explained Skyrim to someone who’d never played a video game and asked them to make one of their own from memory. The story is a convoluted, cliche bore, the combat is infuriating and repetitive, and there are so many bugs I struggled to continue on multiple occasions. That’s all bad enough after a handful of hours, but in a campaign that took me 40 hours to complete, that catastrophic dosage was downright agonizing.

The first missed opportunity for Testament to distinguish itself is its setting: it takes place in an all-too-familiar fantasy land called Tessara, complete with halflings, dragons, and people who can shoot fire out of their hands. You play as an utterly lifeless immortal god-king called Aran who’s been usurped by your brother, a greasy creep who has that surprisingly common bad guy affliction where he’s visibly being torn apart by purple energy and very clearly evil, but seems totally oblivious to the whole thing.

Hilariously, the story starts off with your character already dethroned and betrayed, and there’s barely any attempt at catching you up on any of that. This immediately removes any stakes that could have existed with the aid of some kind of preface or introductory cutscene (such as in something like Dishonored), and is