Balrum

I pulled up Balrum expecting a budget old-school RPG to review quickly and move on. Four hours later I was still arguing with its hunger meter and debating whether to dump learning points into alchemy or push for that first swordsman combat skill. That tension - every level-up feeling like a board meeting over scarce resources - is both the game's best quality and its sharpest edge. What Balrum actually is: an isometric, turn-based open-world RPG fused with a survival and homestead layer that takes itself seriously. Character creation funnels you into one of three broad archetypes - archer, swordsman, or wizard - which is simple enough. But the skill economy underneath is anything but. Learning points trickle in slowly, and unlocking even a single new combat skill costs roughly ten of them, meaning you could sink close to nine hours of play before seeing your first new attack. Meanwhile, crafting disciplines like alchemy, smithing, and cooking are cheaper at entry level and genuinely useful from the start - a few points in alchemy gets you low-powered healing and mana potions immediately, which you will use constantly. The advice I'd give any new player: treat the opening hours as a management puzzle, not an action game. Budget your points, read every tooltip, and accept that running from enemies that outclass you is intended design, not a failure state. The world itself is the strongest argument for buying in. The game spreads across roughly ten large maps each taking multiple hours to clear, plus dozens of dungeons, caves, ruined towers, and ghostly castles tucked into the wilds. There are no quest markers forcing your path; you annotate your own map and piece together directions from NPC dialogue and scattered lore texts. It draws obvious comparisons to classic isometric CRPGs from the mid-90s, and that reference point is accurate rather than flattering spin. If the Ultima-era design philosophy of a living, systemic world over a curated one appeals to you, Balrum is going to resonate. Your homestead functions as a genuine base of operations - you cut timber, mine ore, farm crops, manage hunger and thirst, and craft named custom gear from smithing and alchemy benches. The developers at Balcony Softworks - a two-person team out of Budapest - subsequently issued major post-launch rebalancing patches that touched everything from enemy AI and loot placement to stat interactions and the survival mechanics, which were widely flagged as the roughest part of the original release. The honest problems: combat, for all the tactical turn-based framing, resolves too often into straightforward attrition rather than clever positioning. The animal companion system - you have a controllable pet that participates in fights - sounds great on paper but lacks the depth to make it a real strategic variable for most builds. The hunger and fatigue system is genuinely invasive and poorly documented; reading a community guide before your first session is not optional, it is damage prevention. Sound design is thin, with long stretches of near-silence, and the visuals are retro by necessity rather than artistry, with zoom levels that are unkind to the pixel work. For a strategy-minded player who can tolerate slow progression loops and a game that trusts you to figure out its systems through experimentation, Balrum rewards patience in a way very few indie RPGs attempt. The sandbox is wide and the decisions are real. Just do not go in expecting polish or pacing - this is a game that respects your time only after you have spent a lot of it.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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