Of Blades & Tails

My first pass at Of Blades & Tails had me gritting my teeth and second-guessing the purchase within the opening hour. That opening stretch is legitimately rough: you control Reik, a lone fox warrior on an open-world grid, and every move you make also moves every enemy on screen. Wander into a plains zone slightly underlevelled, pull one enemy, and three of its friends arrive to demolish you. Reviewers flagged this exact problem across the board, and they are not wrong. The early-game slog is a real filter. Pass it and something genuinely interesting starts assembling itself. The core mechanics sit firmly in the tradition of Tales of Maj'Eyal and Stoneshard: top-down, tile-by-tile movement, turn-based combat where positioning and action economy matter more than reflexes. There are no fixed classes. Instead, you invest points into weapon-focused skill paths, swords, staves, crossbows, unarmed, magic, and the game lets you re-spec at a campfire for a small fee, which also functions as your save point. That flexibility is the design's biggest selling point. You can run a sword-and-board fighter, pivot mid-campaign into a crossbow specialist, or experiment with stacking magic abilities on top of a melee kit. Legendary items found in dungeons or dropped by optional bosses can shift the feel of combat substantially, so there is genuine incentive to explore every ruin. The dual-weapon slot system, where you carry two loadouts and swap between them in combat, adds a layer of adaptability that partially compensates for playing solo with no party to cover your weaknesses. The loot loop follows a Diablo-style structure, which means you will accumulate a lot of vendor trash. The good news is that the game lets you strip enchantment bonuses from one item and transfer them to a preferred piece, so build-crafting stays clean once you understand it. The bad news is that the talent tree has real blind spots: some weapon type combinations lock each other out at higher investment levels, which caught players off guard and created some frustration in the community. Level scaling across zones also attracted criticism, with certain areas feeling harder than their intended difficulty band and others feeling trivially easy. The treasure map puzzle clues were called out as cryptic to the point of being misleading. None of these are fatal issues, but they are the kind of friction a solo developer patch cycle would need to address to push this from 'solid' to 'great'. Steam sits at Mostly Positive with around 76% approval on several hundred reviews, which tracks with the overall read: people who pushed through found a worthwhile 20-plus hour RPG; people who expected smooth onboarding did not. For strategy and RPG players who grew up on Mystery Dungeon systems or early CRPGs, this is a comfortable homecoming dressed in charming pixel-art animal-tribe aesthetics. The world is hand-crafted rather than fully procedural, so exploration has a sense of authored discovery rather than random room shuffling. The writing is serviceable rather than memorable, but the worldbuilding hook, humans vanished, animals inherited their medieval infrastructure, insectoid threats are now using magic, gives the setting a quiet personality that holds up across a full playthrough. If you want a low-cost solo grid-RPG with a build system that rewards patience and a world that earns exploration once the early hours are behind you, this delivers. Just do not expect a smooth tutorial experience, and do not sleep on reading the skill descriptions before you commit points.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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