City of Chains

I went into City of Chains expecting a stock RPGMaker romp and came out genuinely surprised by a few of its mechanical decisions. Astronomic Games strips out the traditional experience-points loop entirely: your four characters, including engineer Holt, scientist Chloe, and assassin Lorelei, grow through skill points earned by making progress rather than farming encounters. That single design choice changes the tempo considerably. You are never incentivised to pick fights you could avoid, which keeps the dystopian city feeling dangerous rather than a grind corridor. The core loop sits at the intersection of light tactics and choice-driven adventure. Encounters can be handled through direct turn-based combat, bypassed via hacking, lockpicking, or charisma checks, or ended early with crafted grenades. The morale system feeds into this: keep your team's morale high and they perform better in combat and on skill checks, which means your dialogue decisions carry real mechanical weight, not just narrative flavour. Three difficulty modes (Casual, Hardy, and Dystopia) let you tune how punishing the tactical layer feels. The Dystopia setting will punish anyone who ignores the team build, while Casual makes the narrative-first experience accessible to players who are here for the story. From a strategy perspective, the skill trees are narrow enough that the ceiling is reachable in a single run, which is the most commonly cited criticism in the community, and a fair one. Visually the game sits comfortably in the RPGMaker bracket, though it trades the usual anime aesthetic for a darker, more grounded character portrait style that suits the bleak subject matter. The soundtrack has been consistently praised across player reviews, and the audio work is noticeably above the budget tier the game occupies. Play time lands somewhere between four and ten hours depending on difficulty and how much you explore alternate routes. Replay value exists because the choices-and-consequences structure produces different outcomes, including multiple endings, but do not expect the branching depth of a proper CRPG. The weaknesses are real. Some of the system interactions, particularly the health regeneration and the morale/morality tracking, feel undercooked, as if the team ran out of tuning time. A handful of higher-difficulty fights spike in ways that feel arbitrary rather than designed. And the lack of any post-launch patching or modding support means those rough edges have stayed rough. This is a small-studio indie from 2015 with a tiny active playerbase, so do not go in expecting community resources or ongoing balance fixes. That said, for someone who wants a short, self-contained sci-fi RPG with a skip-the-grind progression system and genuine moral decisions, City of Chains punches above its weight class. Treat it like a tightly scoped tactics-adventure with a respectable narrative and you will come away satisfied. Treat it like a deep CRPG with Paradox-level systems and you will be disappointed within the first two hours. Diego, Scout Team

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