Kingdom Come: Deliverance - From the Ashes

The first hour will try to talk you out of this one, and I almost let it. You play Henry, a blacksmith's son with no sword training, no reputation and no spellbook to fall back on, and the game opens by sending you around a village collecting a debt while a drunk wins a fistfight against you. Then Skalitz burns, you run, and you are still terrible at everything. Skill-by-doing progression means Henry cannot read, cannot fight, and cannot pick a lock without snapping it, while the save system asks you to sleep in a bed or drink Saviour Schnapps to keep your progress. That wall is deliberate. Push through four or five hours of it and Bohemia in 1403 stops feeling like a setting and starts feeling like a place with weather, gossip and consequences. The pitch is historical fiction with the fantasy surgically removed. No dragons, and I say that as someone who will happily lose a weekend to a dragon. What replaces them is a map of a real Czech region where every village has a mill, a tavern, a church and people on actual schedules, and where a contested crown drives the plot instead of a prophecy. Combat is directional: you aim strikes at specific angles, your opponent reads them, and the system revolves around learning master strikes, feints, and when to stop swinging and start stabbing. One-on-one against a trained soldier is a real duel. Two-on-one is usually a death sentence, and I respect a game honest enough to say so. Armour layers matter, weight matters, stamina matters, and a fully kitted Henry with a good longsword at hour forty feels earned in a way very few power curves manage. The writing is where it earns loyalty. The best quests are investigations rather than kill lists. You question witnesses, compare their stories, hunt for physical evidence, then decide what to report and to whom, and the game is perfectly comfortable letting you be wrong. Several quests run on timers, so leaving someone rotting in a cell while you go brew potions carries consequences the game will not warn you about twice. Henry's arc works because he stays a commoner in a world that constantly reminds him of it. He is not chosen, he is a hot-headed young man being taught manners, letters and swordsmanship by people mostly using him for their own ends. Hans Capon starts as an insufferable noble brat and ends up the best character in the cast, and the dialogue is dry enough to reward a second read. Now the disappointments, because there are several. This is a janky game and always has been. Expect stiff faces in cutscenes, the occasional guard clipping through a fence, and a lockpicking minigame that is meaningfully worse on a controller than on a mouse. The alchemy bench is charming for three brews and tedious by the twentieth. Reputation and haggling carry more depth than most players will ever need, while the settlement work at Pribyslavitz turns into a money and resource sink where you unlock buildings and then mostly walk past them. The skill grind is the real offender: some stats climb so slowly that players resort to reading skill books, chopping wood in loops or stabbing training dummies for an hour, which is exactly the padded busywork I would rather not find in an otherwise disciplined RPG. Hardcore mode, added after launch, strips the compass and position marker and is the honest way to play once the base difficulty stops biting. So who is this for. If you want a power fantasy where you walk into a bandit camp at level ten and leave with heads on your belt, look elsewhere. If you want an RPG where literacy is a skill, where a bad reputation follows you from town to town, and where a duel feels like two people genuinely trying not to die, it holds up better than most of what shipped alongside it. The player consensus sitting well above the critic average tells you the shape of the thing: rough on first contact, very hard to put down afterward. Bring patience, bring a spare sword, and bring a lot of schnapps.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

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