ARISEN - Chronicles of Var'Nagal

I gravitate toward the games that slip past the algorithm, and ARISEN - Chronicles of Var'Nagal is exactly that kind of quiet underdog. It comes from Maratus, a small Belgian indie studio, and its central idea is genuinely unusual: instead of picking dialogue options from a menu, you play emotion cards from a deck to navigate every conversation. The five emotions on offer, Joy, Anger, Fear, Sorrow, and Disgust, are not just flavour. They shape which cards unlock over time, which means the personality you perform in act one quietly rewires the options available to you later. It is a smart, lateral take on narrative agency that rewards players who are willing to think about how they feel rather than just what they want. The world of Var'Nagal is built around an island called Maccialatt, whose visual and cultural DNA draws from ancient Persia and the wider Mediterranean basin. Your character arrives in chains, sold into slavery after a violent uprooting, and the story that unfolds from that bleak opening is one of survival, identity, and the complicated business of trusting people when trust is a liability. Six key characters orbit you throughout, each capable of becoming a lover, a close friend, an enemy, or even a nemesis depending on which emotional registers you lean into. The relationship system has real texture: choosing Anger to push someone away carries consequences several scenes down the line, and the game does not hurry to resolve those threads. First-act content alone sits above 200,000 words across multiple branching paths, so there is genuine density here for readers who want it. The presentation is where Maratus shows its craft most clearly. The artwork pulls from the Franco-Belgian comics tradition, with a bold, illustrative style that makes every new character introduction feel like a panel reveal rather than a stat screen. The soundtrack, composed by Yann Rayon under the alias Kayji, runs to over thirty original pieces. It earns the word atmospheric: low, patient, occasionally unsettling in exactly the right places. If you play through with headphones, the score alone carries a lot of the tonal weight the text sets up. The honest caveat is that ARISEN entered Steam Early Access in September 2021 with a planned three-act structure, and as of writing it remains in that state longer than originally projected. The community that has engaged with it sits at a modest but mostly positive reception on Steam, which suggests the foundation is solid, but patience for the full vision is genuinely required here. The emotion card system also demands a certain buy-in: players who want mechanical feedback loops or combat will find nothing for them. This is a gamebook with a deck, and it moves at a gamebook's pace. For the right reader, that is exactly the appeal.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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