Heads Will Roll: Reforged

My first run through Heads Will Roll: Reforged ended in the mud, somewhere in France, swinging an axe I had no business wielding against an enemy whose shield I could not crack. I restarted almost immediately, and that restart instinct is the clearest signal I can give you about what kind of game this is. It sits at the intersection of text-heavy visual novel, turn-based tactical RPG, and roguelite survival loop, and if that cluster of genres excites you, there is a lot here to sink into. The structure is non-linear in the ways that actually matter. Your virtue stat quietly reshapes which dialogue branches open up, which NPCs decide to tolerate you, and which events even trigger. Playing a self-serving mercenary and then a genuinely honourable knight are mechanically distinct experiences, not just cosmetically different ones. At high virtue, blessings can start augmenting your combat performance; at low virtue, the world reflects that back at you. The branching is broad enough that the game claims over 30 possible endings, and the random generation of starting stats, items, and enemy compositions means two playthroughs rarely rhyme exactly. That replayability is real, not just a bullet-point promise. Combat is where opinions split. The system tracks weapon length, fatigue, specific traumas and injuries, stamina costs for missed attacks, and weapon-versus-weapon counters across a roster that runs from short swords and two-handers to throwing knives and crossbows with craftable ammunition types. On the signature hardest difficulty, also called Heads Will Roll, that depth becomes the whole point: planning each exchange carefully, managing a companion like Bartholomew as either a tactical asset or a disposable distraction, and accepting that a statistically improbable miss can end a run. The community is clear that this top difficulty is the intended experience, and it rewards the patient min-maxer. The flipside is that the combat interface has earned legitimate criticism for being opaque, and hit-probability displays have frustrated players who found that stated numbers do not always match felt outcomes. That tension between depth and transparency is real and worth knowing about before you commit. The crafting loop deserves a mention because it integrates more tightly than expected: over 200 lootable items, multiple poison types, medical supplies, and crossbow bolt variants can all be combined, and resource conservation actively shapes how aggressively you can fight. The virtue system also bleeds into economy, with a Prestige mode tying shop prices and available stock to your reputation. 1917 Studios has supported the game with multiple major DLC releases since launch, each expanding the geographic and political scope, from the Hundred Years' War into Venetian intrigue and beyond, with free base-game patches accompanying each expansion. That ongoing development is a genuine sign of health for this kind of niche title. What it is not: a narrative RPG with Disco Elysium-tier prose or a combat system as legible as Into the Breach. The writing is functional and the UI has rough edges. Players expecting polished production values from a small Kazakhstani indie will need to recalibrate expectations. But if you find games like A Legionary's Life or Choice of Games titles too shallow on the mechanical side, this fills a gap that very few titles even attempt. It will kill you, expect you to learn from it, and offer enough branching paths and weapon builds to make the next run feel genuinely different.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

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