Scenarios in Druidstone take place on an isometric grid. Each turn, each of your heroes gains 1 action point and a number of movement points equal to their speed. Each hero has a unique set of abilities that they can use their action on, the vast majority of which are limited to a certain number of uses per scenario. 1 movement point allows a hero to move 1 square in any direction (including diagonal), but heroes can’t move through each others’ squares, meaning you can get in your own way. Some heroes also have abilities that are free actions, which are usually limited on a per-scenario or per-turn basis.
Overall, pretty standard. But there are three points that make Druidstone what it is. First, in most RPGs each character is forced to take their entire turn at once, but in Druidstone you can freely swap between heroes at any point during your turn. This greatly expands the intricacy of what you can do. For instance, you could move your mage one square (if he were blocking a passage, for instance), let your warrior use all his movement to move up, attack an enemy with the mage, attack that enemy with the warrior (hopefully killing it), use the mage’s teleport ability to swap places with the warrior, and then use the mage’s remaining movement to retreat (allowing you to move up, attack the enemy and fall back, even though neither the warrior or the mage had enough movement points to do that directly on their own).
Second, you only have three (later four) heroes. In many SRPGs you control an entire army, meaning you need to manage an entire battlefield and can attempt to create strike forces to pick out and overwhelm stray enemy units. But you can’t do that with only a handful of heroes. You’re pretty much always going to be outnumbered and you only have a few actions per turn, so you need to figure out how you’re going to make the most of them.
Third, stats are very basic and generally don’t increase. There are only a handful of stats in the game: health is how much damage a unit can take before dying, speed is the number of movement points they get per turn, armor reduces each instance of damage that unit takes by its armor value, damage of an attack is how much damage the attack does, and piercing lets a unit or attack ignore that many points of damage. That’s it, and none of them increase naturally with levels.
When you level up, you choose a new skill… and that’s all. (Two new skills become available each level up, to a certain point, so it is possible to eventually get all of them if you become a high enough level, although you can only have 12 skills equipped at once.) The equipment available for purchase also expands as you progress in the game, but the numeric values are kept on a very tight leash. (2 damage for ranged weapons, 2-3 damage for one-handed melee weapons, and 3-4 damage for two-handed melee weapons, with basically zero exceptions.) Most RPGs involve a variety of stats that get higher and higher as the game progresses, but in Druidstone you just get new abilities. In other words, your strength comes not from raw numbers, but versatility.
As a result, Druidstone plays out much more like a puzzle than your typical SRPG. You only have a few units, meaning every action counts—a large part of the game is maneuvering yourself so that each of your units has a use for their action on each of your turns while the enemies don’t have a great use for theirs. (It’s surprisingly easy to leave a character in a position where they can’t reach any enemies, or can only do so if they leave themselves exposed to a large counterattack.) And since your units don’t get numerically stronger, you can’t just grind and power your way through the game; for each scenario you need to think about how and when to use the abilities at your disposal.
Even though there is a leveling system, the real strength boost comes from power gems. Many abilities (including pieces of equipment) have slots that can be filled with power gems you collect, increasing their power. For instance, you might be able to increase the number of times you can use an ability during a scenario, or increase the damage or the range, or add a secondary effect, or something else. These are noticeable improvements, and moving your power gems around can completely change how your units play. Power gems can be freely moved around, so you can play around with builds and tailor them to specific scenarios. You get power gems for completing scenarios and completing sub-goals, so there is a strict limit to the number you can have.
There are 35 scenarios in the game, which takes about 15 hours to beat, which is a pretty decent size. You can replay scenarios but you take a penalty to gold and experience earned each time you do, so grinding is really discouraged (and not really needed anyway). Scenarios in the first part of the game basically devolve to killing everything, and while the need to kill things never stops, as you gain more tools and become more comfortable with the game systems in the second half of the game scenarios with more unique win conditions become much more commons.
Each scenario also has a few sub-goals for extra rewards, which adds extra challenge if you attempt to satisfy them. Some of them are tricky, but you can always come back later so there isn’t much pressure. If it’s really an issue, you can also complete the sub-goals separately, rather than all in one run. (That being said, I was able to complete all sub-goals when I first encountered each scenario (on normal difficulty). Although I did need to look up hints for the first two scenarios. (In a sense those are the most difficult since that is when your party is at their weakest and you have the least amount of system mastery.))
The game loves to surprise you with reinforcements or new developments in the middle of a scenario (like most SRPGs), but I found that it generally did a great job of being fair. It’s helpful that Druidstone strikes a fair balance in letting you correct mistakes. In my Gloomhaven review, I talked about how save-scumming was my only recourse for minor mistakes that could have been easily corrected in the paper version, which started a slippery slope. In Druidstone you can undo any movement (including movement abilities!) as long as you don’t take an action or switch to another hero. This gives you a lot of leeway to play with positioning and ranges. Additionally, you can fully restart your turn once per scenario—a great balance where you can do it, but can’t rely on it. There were a few times where I made a mistake and had already used my restart, but I powered through and it usually worked out. There were really only a couple of times I was forced to fully restart a scenario because of a major mistake I made or because the mission threw a huge curveball that screwed everything up, which wasn’t great when it happened but didn’t happen enough to be a major annoyance. This is also helped by the fact that the scenarios aren’t particularly long, especially as I got more used to the gameplay and flow.
While the scenario design is varied and fun, that does create the potential for frustration. The issue with unique goals is that they can require unique skills—and if you haven’t picked them up, you’re basically out of luck, since grinding is so difficult. You need to either come back later or power through. For instance, there is one scenario where you need to protect a group of NPCs. Every round, lightning strikes the field. The squares the lightning hits are randomly determined, but shown at the start of each round. As a result, you need either ways to reposition other units (without damaging them) or area heals, neither of which are particularly common. If you haven’t picked enough up by the time you reach this scenario, it’ll probably feel frustrating and unfair.
The design of the final boss fight also felt bizarrely luck-dependent for a game that’s otherwise built around strategy. Whenever the final boss reaches a certain HP threshold, they shuffle around all units on the board and enter into a defensive stance that causes them to regain a bunch of health on their next turn. The issue comes from the fact that this is triggered whenever they reach the HP threshold. So if they teleport you to the other side of the map and you need to spend a turn moving up, they’ll spend their turn healing, and then when you reach them and attack them, they’ll shuffle everything and enter the defensive stance again. The only way to finally win is for the shuffle to deposit you in a place where you can finish off the boss without spending a full turn moving up, which is pure chance. If the boss only shuffled the field once or resources weren’t strictly gated on a per-scenario basis perhaps it could’ve worked, but as-is doesn’t quite work.
The plot is functional, and does a decent enough job of stringing together the scenarios in an entertaining way. I think this issue is that the story yearns to be both epic and compact, which is obviously a combo that’s difficult to pull off.
The game throws us right in, with our three heroes getting attacked while picking mushrooms in the forest: Oiko, a… small blue thing… who always has a silly remark or story to share and the party mage, Aava, a woman who grew up in the forest with (but not as a member of) the druids, and Leonard, a man whom Aava found in a cocoon right before the game began, and a warrior/tank. Leonard is the player stand-in, and the Warden, a special figure that the forest creates whenever it finds itself in danger, which is why he was birthed from a cocoon. Leonard’s issue is that he has no memories, so, while he believes that he’s the Warden, he doesn’t know what that means or what he’s supposed to do.
The group discovers a Cancer eating away at the forest which was created by an evil witch known as the Sorceress, who attacks the druids and kidnaps Aava’s father, the Archdruid. The party sets off to stop the Sorceress, clear out the Cancer, and rescue Aava’s father.
The cutscenes at the beginning of each scenario in Druidstone are refreshingly short and to-the-point. There’s not much subtlety, but that’s fine since I just want to know what’s going on and get to fighting stuff. The last SRPG I played was Triangle Strategy, where characters would go on and on and on and on between scenarios. Of course, Triangle Strategy was a political drama so the game needed to establish the politics and the drama, but Druidstone is a simple sword & sorcery story, and so can just plunge right in.
Except it isn’t just a simple sword & sorcery story. Without getting into spoilers or specifics, Druidstone does venture into ideas and concepts that are usually encountered in grander, more sprawling narratives. The issue is that Druidstone generally doesn’t provide its own worldbuilding and assumes you’re familiar with standard fantasy concepts. When the game tells you that you need to go ask the rangers to help the druids in the aftermath of the Sorceress’ attack, it doesn’t elaborate on who or what the rangers, druids, or Sorceress are. So while the game is able to maintain a decent pace throughout the entire runtime, the more ambitious elements of the story don’t have quite the emotional impact that I think the developers intended them to have.
The writing is fun, and provides a satisfying high fantasy story while also poking fun at some common tropes, but it’s not perfect. You get a fourth party member, but they never speak. I assume it’s so that they can seamlessly slot into earlier missions if you replay them, but it’s awkward to have three dynamic characters and a stuffed doll.
The graphics are bright and colorful, helping you immerse yourself into the vibrant fantasy world. Even when you need to venture into dungeons or graveyards the backgrounds will include whimsical details highlighted with spooky purples and greens, rather than resigning to a palette of drab grays and browns. As an isometric game we don’t get a ton of detail on the character models, but they have expressive and dynamic animations that convey action and personality in both battles and cutscenes. The music is fitting, with a heavy emphasis on strings and woodwinds (exactly what I want in my fantasy game), and mid-scenario changes depending on how well you’re doing.
Druidstone: The Secret of the Menhir Forest tries to carve its own niche in the SRPG field by having a small number of units with a large number of (per-scenario) abilities, creating an experience that feels more like a puzzle than anything else. There are plenty of equipment and abilities to try out along with freedom to modify your build, providing a surprising amount of tinkering for a game with zero numerical power growth. It may not be a grand epic, but Druidstone provides a fun fantasy story without getting bogged down or drawn out with tight challenging-but-fair gameplay.
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