The Bard's Tale: Remastered and Resnarkled

The Bard's Tale: Remastered and Resnarkled is one of the few action-RPGs that earns its reputation almost entirely on writing and performance rather than mechanical depth. You play as the Bard, a gloriously selfish rogue whose stated life goals are coin, cleavage, and avoiding responsibility at all costs. The world is a satirical take on every clichéd medieval fantasy setting you have ever endured, set across towns, forests, castles, haunted tombs, and snowy mountains, and it runs for somewhere between 20 and 30 hours depending on how aggressively you chase optional dungeons and stat-boosting token hunts. The engine is built on the same Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance foundation that powered a generation of bird's-eye action-RPGs, so the combat loop is familiar: real-time hack-and-slash with a dodge-or-die approach against over 50 enemy types and a dozen-plus boss encounters. Where the game carves out its own space is the summoning system. Through magical lute songs, the Bard calls up to 16 discoverable creature types to fight alongside him, ranging from front-line tank warriors to healers, archers, and light bearers. You start with a single sad summoned rat, and as the Rhythm stat grows and new songs unlock, the roster expands considerably. Summoning crystals, dropped by enemies and found in chests, power guardian summons with screen-clearing or full-party-healing effects, adding a light tactical layer to what is otherwise a competent but unremarkable brawler. Levelling distributes points across Strength, Vitality, Dexterity, Charisma, Luck, and Rhythm, and Talents like Critical Strike or companion upgrades for the dog are unlocked at odd-numbered levels. The system is slim by modern CRPG standards, and anyone expecting build variety past hour 15 will start to feel the walls close in. The thing that holds the whole package together, and the honest reason to play it, is Cary Elwes voicing the Bard with pitch-perfect insufferable charm, and the late Tony Jay delivering a narrator so dryly contemptuous of his own protagonist that the back-and-forth between them is a near-constant source of genuine laughs. The game starts by handing you a rat-infested cellar quest and then has the Bard loudly complain about being handed a rat-infested cellar quest. If that sentence made you smile, you are the target audience. The writing is a 700-page dialogue script worth of fourth-wall breaks, Monty Python-adjacent surrealism, musical numbers including a zombie dance-off, and NPCs who each carry their own comedic voice. It earns its reputation as one of the funniest games in the genre, full stop. The caveats are real. The remaster is a light touch, bringing widescreen support, 64-bit compatibility, Steam achievements, and performance improvements rather than any meaningful visual overhaul. Cutscenes remain at their original resolution. There is a persistent inventory glitch that strips weapons on cutscene transitions and dumps the Bard directly into combat unarmed, which is as annoying as it sounds. The combat loop grows repetitive well before the credits roll, enemy variety thins out in the back half, and the camera can work against you in tighter spaces. Players who want branching narrative choices that actually reshape the world, or a skill system that rewards theorycrafting past the midpoint, will find this one running low on fuel. Three endings exist, but the game helpfully saves before the final sequence so you can collect all three in one sitting, which tells you something about how seriously it takes its own story stakes. For an RPG fan with a soft spot for genre parody and a tolerance for old-school action-RPG mechanics, there is a genuinely enjoyable 20-hour experience buried here, propped up by a voice cast that outclasses the budget at every turn. Just know that the bonus package, the original Bard's Tale 1, 2, and 3 classic trilogy, is a separate and much more demanding dungeon-crawl experience that needs its own mental space to appreciate. Come for Cary Elwes snarking at a disembodied narrator, stay for the summoned dog you can teach to attack, and keep one eye on the equipment screen after every cutscene.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

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