Gedonia

Gedonia is a one-person indie RPG that wears its ambitions openly. Developed and published solo by Kazakov Oleg, it drops you into a large open world with minimal hand-holding and a character-building system that quietly rewards the kind of obsessive theorycrafting that keeps you up past midnight cross-referencing stat tables. If you grew up on Morrowind or Gothic and have a soft spot for games where the seams show but the heart is genuine, Gedonia is going to hit somewhere specific. The character system is the centerpiece here. There are no rigid class locks - you distribute skill points across a wide range of trees covering melee combat, ranged weapons, magic schools, and survival abilities. Early on it feels loose to the point of confusion, but once a build clicks - say, a frost mage who also dips into archery for kiting, or a tank who layers physical and elemental resistances - the combat transforms from awkward button-pressing into something with actual mechanical texture. The build variety does hold up past the early hours, and experimenting with hybrid setups is legitimately encouraged by how the skill trees interact. That said, the combat itself is not going to impress anyone coming from action-RPGs with tight animation systems. It is functional, floaty in places, and occasionally janky. You are playing this for the numbers and the exploration, not for the feel of every sword swing. The open world is large for a solo-dev project, and it mostly delivers on the promise of discovery. Dungeons, caves, ruins, and hidden settlements are scattered across varied biomes, and stumbling onto a well-stocked dungeon before you are technically ready for it produces the kind of mild danger that makes exploration feel meaningful. Quests are present and some of them are genuinely interesting, but do not come in expecting Baldur's Gate levels of narrative craft. The writing is functional - it tells you where to go and why - but it is not going to reward re-reads or make you feel anything about the NPCs. If you are here primarily for story and dialogue, you will bounce off this pretty fast. If you are here for the loot loop and the quiet satisfaction of becoming an absurdly overpowered build by hour thirty, you will be fine. The honest conversation about Gedonia has to include its roughness. UI is utilitarian to the point of friction, some quest tracking is vague, and the production values are exactly what you would expect from a solo developer working without a major budget. Compared to contemporaries with full teams behind them, it looks and sounds modest. What keeps the Steam review score solidly in Very Positive territory is that Kazakov Oleg has iterated consistently on the game post-launch, and the core loop - explore, loot, build, repeat - simply works for the audience it is aimed at. There are no cynical live-service mechanics, no padded tutorial, and no hand that pushes you toward a specific playstyle. That absence of artificial friction is rarer than it should be. Gedonia is for the player who can look past rough presentation if the underlying systems have real depth. It is not for narrative-first RPG fans or anyone who needs polish to stay engaged. Think of it as a passion project from someone who clearly loves the genre and built the game they wanted to play - and that sincerity comes through in the design even when the execution has gaps.

Monika · Scout Team

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