VED

My first instinct when I saw VED's combat setup was to pull up a notepad. The four-lane positional battle system - where Cyrus occupies one of four squares and his available abilities shift depending on which square he stands on - is legitimately clever design. You spend four action points per turn, and smart play means reading enemy attack telegraphs (red arrows on the lane tiles) and repositioning before committing to offense or defense. Enemies carry multiple health bars that do not always work the same way, and pre-fight you can opt into one of three optional buff or debuff modifiers on the enemy for bonus energy if you win. It is the kind of system where a few bad decisions in slot assignment back at base can quietly ruin a fight three encounters later. That base is the Troglodyte village in the magical floating-island world, and building structures there is VED's progression spine. New constructions unlock spells and passive abilities you slot into your four positional lanes, so the village-building feeds directly into combat loadout planning. The roguelite layer sits on top of this: you pick paths through island-to-island encounters, face random events, and occasionally roll a virtual D20 for stat checks that can turn a scene sideways regardless of your choices. Permanent curses and blessings picked up along the way can stick with Cyrus for the rest of a run, which adds some meaningful variance. The problem is that the path count is thin - usually two routes per run, with only a handful of encounters each - so the roguelite breadth feels shallow next to the mechanical promise of the combat itself. The dual-world structure splits time between the gritty, faction-ridden city of Micropolis and the dark, floating-island magic realm. Choices in both worlds branch into irreversible story beats, and a chapter-end summary screen greys out the scenes you missed, which is a smart way to signal the weight of decisions. The non-linear structure and multi-faction relationship system suggest genuine ambition from a three-person studio that spent twelve years reshaping this game from a Souls-like platformer into its current RPG form. That development history shows in the seams: the hand-drawn art is spectacular and the soundtrack mixes symphonic, folk, and hip-hop in a way that actually works, but the English translation is rough throughout. Dialogue runs on awkwardly, characters end conversations abruptly, and voice acting ranges from serviceable to distracting. Story Mode difficulty exists for players who want to prioritise narrative over combat challenge, which is a sensible concession, but the writing it exposes does not hold up well under that kind of focused attention. For players primarily drawn here by the tactical system, the ceiling is real but modest. There is no traditional XP or inventory management, and character progression is tied entirely to village building and energy collection from victories. That keeps the decision space narrow compared to a full-featured tactical RPG, and the death penalty is light enough (you respawn at the village and re-attempt the path) that tension from individual runs stays low. If you come in treating this more like an illustrated narrative game with a smart positional combat minigame rather than a deep tactics title, the expectations align better. The eight-chapter structure with prologue and epilogue keeps the runtime concise - this is not a 60-hour commitment.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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