Greedventory

I have a soft spot for small studios making bold, strange decisions, and Black Tower Basement - a team working out of Kharkiv, Ukraine - made one of the boldest: build an action RPG where a controller is not only unsupported but would genuinely ruin the game. Every strike, parry, spell cast, and frantic inventory swap runs through the mouse. Left-click to swing, right-click to parry, hold for a charged hit. It sounds reductive until the rhythm clicks and you realize the cursor is doing the job a second thumbstick would normally handle, just with more intention and a lot more personal accountability when you miss. The combat is a side-scrolling dance rooted loosely in Souls pacing: enemies stay dead after encounters, farming is off the table, and encounters scale in ways that demand you actually learn the patterns rather than grind past them. Save points come in the form of broken hatchets scattered through levels, with bent swords serving double duty as level-up stations and fast-travel back to town. It is a clean, linear structure that respects your time by not drowning you in open-world fat. The inventory itself evokes Diablo-style loot grids - weapons, armor, and rings slot in and out, and the rings genuinely shift how attacks behave, adding a thin but real layer of build expression to what could otherwise feel one-note. Where Greedventory loses me, at least partially, is the durability system. Most gear degrades and breaks, sometimes mid-fight, and while there is a mechanic where an item teeters on the edge of destruction and might level up instead of shattering, the whole thing leans too punishing too often. A legendary boss drop crumbling on you because the RNG decided otherwise stings in a way that feels unintentional rather than designed. Combine that with some reported bugs and a difficulty curve that spikes unevenly in sections like the Halfling Labs - where enemies throw projectiles in packs and demand near-perfect cursor reflexes - and the game earns the frustrated threads you can find in its community. But here is what keeps me advocating for it anyway: the craft. The pixel art has a warmth and wit that reviewers have compared to Discworld and Monkey Island, and those are not small compliments. The soundtrack fits its tone without overpowering it, sitting in the background like incidental music in a well-written graphic novel. The story - a reluctant nephew shoved out the door to dismantle a tyrannical Brotherhood that hoovers up all magical loot - lands its dark-humor notes consistently. Voice acting in cutscenes elevates scenes that lesser budget games would have left as text boxes. For a linear experience from a small studio operating under difficult circumstances, the level of polish is genuinely surprising. Steam sits at around 77% positive across roughly 230 reviews, which is fair. The people who bounce off it cite the mouse-only controls and gear fragility. The people who stay tend to get evangelical about it.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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