Celestian Tales: Old North

I keep coming back to small studios making their first RPG, and Celestian Tales: Old North is exactly the kind of game I want to champion, while being honest about where it falls short. Ekuator Games, an Indonesian studio, built this around a premise that immediately earns goodwill: there is no chosen hero, no prophecy, no world-ending MacGuffin in a teenager's pocket. Instead you pick one of six young nobles heading into squire training in a cold, theocratic northern province called the Old North, and the story stays stubbornly human-scaled, asking you to sit with moral discomfort rather than offering the clean catharsis of saving everything. The six-perspective structure is the game's most genuinely clever idea. Each squire, from the imposter Isaac hiding a commoner background to the quietly driven Ylianne, carries story details the others will never reveal. Playing as Isaac is the only way to learn his real identity; only Cammile's route uncovers certain family secrets that recontextualise the wider cast. The overarching plot is largely shared, but those character-specific scenes give replays genuine purpose rather than just a reskin of the same beats. That said, reviewers across the board note that the six storylines diverge less than the premise promises, and the narrative feels cut short, almost like the prologue to a larger work, which, to be fair, it is, as a sequel called Realms Beyond did eventually release. Combat is classically turn-based: three of your six squires take the field at once, you cycle through attack, skills, defend, and items, and enemies appear as roaming shadows on the map rather than random encounters, so you can dodge fights you do not want. The standout mechanical choice is replacing mana with a stamina bar that builds through regular attacks and defensive moves, then gets spent on active skills. It removes the familiar headache of post-battle resource management entirely, since health and stamina reset between encounters. Each character can slot four active skills and two passive abilities, and weapons and armour can be upgraded using creature drops, though the economy is tight enough that selling materials carelessly will hurt you later when weapon upgrades come due. The difficulty curve is the one genuine frustration: the early game is almost too gentle, and then the final chapters, particularly the last boss fight with its party-wide attacks and self-healing, spike hard enough that reviewers reported needing emergency grinding. It feels tonally disconnected from the measured pace that precedes it. Where this game quietly earns its place is in the craft work that budget constraints could not touch. The hand-painted environments, eight-directional character sprites, and world map art are consistently lovely, with a visual identity that holds together from forest trails to throne rooms. The soundtrack is the real standout: area themes and character motifs are composed with genuine care, each one chosen to fit its specific moment, and the absence of voice acting is actually the right call given the archaic register of some of the dialogue. The music does the emotional heavy lifting the script sometimes cannot. The game knows it is small; it runs about six to eight hours on a first playthrough, and the backtracking in the mid-chapters is real padding, but the bones of the world and its people are drawn with enough intention that the short runtime feels more like a constraint than a failure of ambition. If you are a JRPG enthusiast who values atmosphere, hand-crafted aesthetics, and a story that skips the chosen-one template, this is worth your time. Go in knowing it is a first chapter, not a complete arc, and manage expectations around the late-game difficulty spike. The music alone will stay with you longer than most indie RPGs twice its size. Kai, Scout Team