Alaloth: Champions of The Four Kingdoms

I went in expecting a Diablo clone with Souls window dressing. What I got was something stranger and more ambitious: an isometric action RPG from Italian developer Gamera Interactive that spent two years in Early Access and came out the other side with a version 1.2 already shipped and a DLC campaign in the works. That backstory matters, because the game feels like a project that genuinely listened to its community rather than one that treated early access as a marketing phase. The world is called Plamen, and it is divided among four kingdoms, each belonging to one of the four playable races: humans, elves, dwarves, and orcs. Picking your race is not just a cosmetic choice. Elves lean into spellcasting at the cost of physical resilience, dwarves are durable brawlers, and humans split the difference without excelling at anything. From there, character progression ditches experience points entirely. You level up by completing combat zones, and each level lets you push one primary stat, invest heritage points into masteries or talents, or pick up weapon skills and elemental spells. The cap sits at level 20, a knowing nod to tabletop tradition. There are also twelve companions available to recruit or fight, depending on your alignment, which means a second playthrough with a different race and different companion choices is a genuinely different game. Combat is where Alaloth earns its Souls-like label honestly. Stamina management governs every attack, dodge, and block. One bad read on an enemy's timing and a fight you were winning turns into a checkpoint reload. The game offers two main modes: a Solo Campaign with a more measured pace that gives newcomers room to learn, and a Competitive Campaign where three AI champions race you to the same goal and punish any wasted time. The competitive mode is where the design philosophy really snaps into focus. The world gives you a single overarching objective and then steps back entirely. No quest markers nagging you toward the critical path. Forums filled with players asking what they were supposed to do next, until they figured it out and respected the game for it. The rough edges are real. Some reviewers flagged the writing as dry in places, and combat can tip into repetition during longer dungeon stretches. The freedom of the open world is genuinely double-edged: the same sandbox that rewards curiosity will happily let an under-leveled player walk into a fight they cannot survive. Boss encounters are a highlight, and the world is dense with lore and secondary locations, but the game asks for patience before it gives back. Chris Avellone contributed to the worldbuilding, and the depth of the setting shows even when the prose delivering it does not always land. This is a game for players who liked the idea of Pillars of Eternity but wanted faster, riskier combat, or for anyone who finds pure Souls games too narrow in scope. It is not a smooth ride, and it does not pretend to be. But the build variety, the race-and-alignment replayability, and a developer that has kept updating since launch make it one of the more substantive indie RPGs to come out of the 2024 cycle.

Alex · Scout Team

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