We play as a random peasant who has strange dreams that appear to be omens. One day we set off in order to (literally) follow our dreams, and discover a castle submerged beneath a lake. In the castle we meet and team up with Joska, a wandering thief and our first party member. Joska has come to the castle to rescue nine maidens who have been kidnapped and are being held hostage. (To collect the reward promised by the neighboring king, naturally.) When we rescue the maidens and exit the castle… the sun is gone. A knight arrives to inform us that the Sun King has been kidnapped (or, one might even say, stolen!), and so we set off to rescue him.
To a certain extent, I would call it an excuse plot. The game does little more than plop us down in front of a level and give us a reason to get to the other side. But that’s all you really need in a dungeon crawler, isn’t it? The magic of Operencia is in the cast. The game is fully voice-acted, and the party members will consistently talk and banter—while walking around, in battle, and around the campfires (save points). And when I say “banter,” I mean it. There is a ton of levity and jokes—Operencia is not stuffy high fantasy. But it also knows how and when to balance the comedy with drama. The cast has great chemistry, and they’re probably the best part of the game. There's real depth, nuance and development to the party members and their relationships throughout the game.
The game is based on Central/Eastern European mythology (the developers are Hungarian). I'm a mythology buff but never explored Eastern European mythology much, so a lot of plot elements felt familiar, but different. For instance, there is a sun god who rides a chariot across the sky, but he’s not Apollo. There’s a world tree, but it’s not Yggdrasil. This created an interesting effect where I could recognize tropes and references, but they still felt fresh and foreign.
I've said my piece on the story (it's passable, the characters are great), so let's move onto combat and dungeoneering.
Operencia has first-person grid-based exploration. Movement is done with the keyboard, although you can look around (and turn) with the mouse. There are puzzles, but they aren’t as involved as Grimrock’s. Over the course of the adventure you find artifacts that interact with the environment in different ways (such as a feather that allows you to move heavy objects), so a lot of “puzzles” are just using an artifact on an object it’s deigned to be used on. There are still some neat puzzles that go beyond a key/keyhole design, though.
Combat is turn-based and takes place on a separate screen, rather than in real-time on the grid. Enemies are arranged in three rows, from near, to medium, to far. Many attacks have varying effectiveness depending on range—for instance, melee attacks are stronger on closer enemies, while ranged attacks are stronger on farther enemies. Each character has three basic abilities—melee attack, ranged attack, and guard (which recovers energy used for special abilities)—together with their special abilities. Combat otherwise functions largely as you’d expect.
The graphics are nice, with full 3D graphics for the world and enemies. A bit cartoony, perhaps, but there’s a consistent aesthetic. Because you’re traversing larger and open areas, the levels of Operencia feel like real places and not just tilesets. (While I love Grimrock, it is very clearly is just the same dungeon wall copy-pasted ad infinitum.)
But now we get to the issues. There are lots of little annoyances and grievances, but a consistent theme among them is that it seems in many instances a part was selected or designed without regard for the whole.
For instance, back to the story and characters. The protagonist is a wisecracking snarker. Which is well-written and enormously entertaining… but doesn’t really fit with the backstory of “sheltered farmboy (or farmgirl) venturing out into the wider world for the first time.” After clearing the first level we are requested to save the Sun King because of our reputation, but who the heck was talking about us while we were in the castle? (The answer, I assume, is the maidens we rescued, but still, jumping from rescuing a few maidens to rescuing the Sun King seems like a bit of a leap.) The big bad kind of comes out of nowhere, and and while there were some interesting ideas in his personality and motive it didn't feel like the developers gave themselves enough space to explore them.
My biggest complaint with the story, though, is that the game can’t seem to decide how prevalent magic is. Is Operencia a relatively realistic world with magic almost secretly tucked away in the corners, or a fairytale with magic at every turn? Based on the characters’ reactions to all the weird stuff they encounter you’d think the former, and yet every location we visit is suffused with the magical. And yes, part of that is self-selection, because we’re playing a game about a group of heroes so they’re going to encounter more magic than the average person and we’re only going to see the exciting bits. But the game still gives us nothing “ordinary” to contrast the magic against. When Joska and the hero explore the first level, they’re amazed by the existence of an underwater castle and freaked out by the monsters within. But we later learn that Joska fought a dragon in his youth… Once you know dragons exist, are overgrown frogs really so crazy? We also discover that the castle used to belong to the king of the kingdom, but was sunk a few decades ago due to a curse cast by his brother. If the king’s castle sunk into a lake, shouldn’t that be common knowledge in the area? (After all, wouldn’t they need to instill a new ruler?) Even if the average person doesn’t encounter magic in their everyday life, I feel like magical occurrences seem regular enough in Operencia that its residents should be aware of its existence, and not freak out over something as trifling as an underwater castle.
Naturally, the wonkiness extends to the combat as well. The combat has a weird issue of providing both too much and too little information. The characters have five core attributes (strength, dexterity, intelligence, wisdom, and fortitude) which in turn influence a bunch of statistics, and the game makes clear which attributes influence which statistics, but… a lot beyond that isn’t clear at all. For instance, how exactly does range affect different skills? (Yes, some skills are “less effective” at certain ranges, but what does that mean specifically?) How exactly do the various attributes affect your damage?
While combat seems fine at first, as the game progresses it can feel like your characters aren’t actually growing and getting stronger. It’s just not clear where progression comes from. In many games the primary source of your stats is equipment, with numerical progression provided by finding better equipment as you proceed farther in the game—but equipment in Operencia barely scales. The final dungeon has weapons with single-digit damage numbers! How are you supposed to approach the game? If your power doesn’t come from equipment, where does it come from?
Again, it feels like parts were chosen without regard for the whole. Which, for the battle system, translates into the game appearing to push you towards a certain strategy, but then punishing you for it or reducing its effectiveness. For instance, even if base damage numbers don’t scale much, there are four additional statistics—counter chance, double attack chance, critical chance, and critical damage—that can multiplicatively scale up your damage. So you just boost these numbers to keep up with your damage, right? The issue is that when you trigger a double attack, each hit can trigger a counter from the enemy—so trying to scale up your damage increases the enemy’s damage as well. (Similarly, AOE attacks can trigger a reaction from each individual enemy.)
For regular enemies the game tells you their weaknesses and resistances… but not for bosses, which are probably the fights where it’s most important to know. So bosses require some trial and error to determine what they’re weak or resistant to. But even then it can be difficult to tell, because when you attack all results will pop up at once, so even if you seen an "IMMUNE" you might not know exactly which part of the attack the boss was immune to. There’s no text log you can go back and check, either.
The lack of a text log can prove annoying in other instances as well. Some enemies can cause your characters to move randomly and automatically. It can be difficult to tell exactly what your characters do in those cases (they don’t have the same visual cues as on-screen enemies), so there’s no way to specifically go back and check.
The game has armor sets, which give special bonuses the more pieces you wear. The issue is that of the three lategame armor sets, two of them involve fire damage—which most lategame enemies are resistant or immune to. So the game gives you these cool item sets, but they're ineffective in the only spot in the game you can use them. Consideration of the part but not the whole.
I wasn’t a huge fan of how the status conditions are handled, especially lategame. I already mentioned there’s a status condition that causes your characters to be controlled by the enemy, but did I mention that lategame enemies can apply it for four turns? To your entire party? With no way to cure it early? It just feels random and unfun, without any counterplay.
Oh, and don’t think about turning the strategy around and trying to use these status effects on enemies, because they’re all immune by the end.
The game also has a weird distinction between things like “buffs” and “statuses” (and there might be one other category, it’s hard to tell because the game isn’t clear on this). This means effects that clear “debuffs” from your characters or “buffs” from the enemies don’t always work the way you’d expect them to because they aren’t the right “type” of effect. (For instance, an ability that removes a “buff” from an enemy will do nothing if they’re actually affected by a beneficial “status.” Or maybe it did nothing because there’s a chance of failure for the skill to work. Or maybe the enemy had resistance to your skill. Who knows? The game isn’t clear and doesn’t tell you.)
Eventually you'll encounter enemies that can zap your energy (which you use for skills), which feels weird, because up until that point it seemed like skills were how the game expected you to deal damage. (Lategame weapons have single-digit damage numbers, remember?) If your regular attacks deal minimal damage and you don’t have energy for skills… what are you supposed to do?
Enemies appear in the dungeon grid, and if you run into one from behind, you get an ambush attack. You think that’s a good thing, right? Nope! Every character moves every round, but the order within each round is determined by each character’s “initiative” statistic. However, what an ambush means is that every character in the ambushing side will move before anyone on the ambushed side in the first round… and by lategame, enemy initiative will always outscale your own. As a result, when you ambush, the enemies get to move twice in a row: at the end of the first round and then again at the beginning of the second round. And with lategame damage and statuses, an enemy double-move can easily be a death sentence. I’m sure the developers intended ambushes to be useful, but the game systems interact in a way to make them risky and dangerous. (If only they had considered the whole and not the part.)
Despite everything, the battle system is somehow manageable. It doesn’t always feel good, but I always found a way to make it. And individual battles typically don’t actually take too long. There’s just… a lot of wonkiness to them.
And it doesn't mean that everything is flawed. I thought the way the game handles “consumable” potions was fun and clever. Rather than getting potions directly, you get recipes for potions, which are actually logic puzzles you need to complete. Once you’ve unlocked a potion, you then gain a certain amount in your inventory, which refreshes every time you rest. That’s it. So you maintain the intended short-term resource management of most consumable item systems without running into the problem of refusing to use one of your 85 ethers in the final battle because you can’t buy them in stores.
Potions are particularly important since party healing is limited. Fully healing your party requires a consumable called firewood. There is enough firewood in the game (I finished with over 40 in my inventory—I suppose the “85 ether” problem isn’t completely absent from the game), but the fear of running out is always there. You have healing abilities and guarding in battle regenerates energy, so theoretically you can sustain yourself back up that way, but obviously enemies will be attacking you as you do that, and enemies don’t respawn so you can’t just go back to earlier levels and weaker enemies. Each character fully heals when they level up, so a large portion of the game is figuring out how to manage you resources between level-ups to avoid using firework and, to a lesser extent, potions. (Although I did find the attrition-based gameplay odd. It's not bad, and can be fun, but seems better suited to a gritty survival game than a light-hearted fantasy adventure.)
You can fully respec your characters at any time without any penalty, which is fantastic for trying out different builds and approaches, or coming up with a strategy for a specific boss or level. There are seven characters (of which you can bring four into battle at a time) and each has a unique skill tree, so there are plenty of builds and party compositions to try. The number of clicks it takes to reallocate your stats and abilities at higher levels gets a bit annoying, but it’s a minor price to pay for build flexibility.
Despite the many, many paragraphs I wrote about Operencia’s flaws, I had a lot of fun with the game. If you like the genre, it’s a neat entry with absolutely phenomenal character writing. Like I said over and over again, Operencia’s issue isn’t that the individual parts are bad, but that they don’t quite work with each other. You can see the thought, care, and attention that went into the game—I think the developers just lacked the experience to understand how everything would come together. (If you look at Zen Studio’s list of games, you can see that Operencia is the first of its kind that they developed. In fact, it's basically their only non-pinball game.) In fact, that list actually makes me a bit sad, because I’d love to see a sequel or another dungeon crawler from Zen Studios, but the more time passes the more it seems like they're going to just keep pumping out pinball games. Although I do have an idea for something that might prompt them into a sequel... Anyone want to help me steal the moon?
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