The world of The Iron Oath is grim, full of bloodshed and betrayal. I am leading a company of mercenaries, seeking revenge after a mission went bad and a man I trusted left me to die. I have practical concerns to deal with, like maintaining my influx of gold and supplies. But I also have a much slower, more dreadful resource to manage: the passage of time, and with it, the terrible toll it takes on my mercenaries. I’ve already learned the best way to adapt, though — by just being the absolute worst person, all of the time.
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The Iron Oath will be, in some ways, very familiar to fans of strategy games and RPGs. You take a pinch of Darkest Dungeon, throw in some XCOM, and sprinkle in some Divinity: Original Sin. Cook it all in a pan with some gorgeous pixel animations, an epic musical score, a fantasy world constantly on the cusp of an apocalypse, and inventive demonic enemy designs, and baby, you’ve got a stew going.
As I adventure around the fantasy realm of Caelum, I have to navigate between the open world, cities and towns, dungeons, and individual battles. It would be easy for these things to blur together into an indistinguishable mush of numbers and goals, but developer Curious Panda Games introduces each layer of complexity gradually throughout a well-paced tutorial and the early hours of the campaign. There are also some wonderfully granular difficulty settings, so
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