The Awakener: Forgotten Oath

My first few runs through Forgotten Oath left me genuinely surprised at how good it feels to throw an enemy into the air, chain a shadow-dagger volley, then slam them back into the dirt with a Thunderhammer. For an indie action roguelite from a small studio, the moment-to-moment combat is the real draw here, and it earns that distinction honestly. Controls are snappy, each class archetype comes with its own moveset and ground-slash or air-skill loadouts, and the parry window, when you nail it, rewards you with a boosted counterattack that feels earned. Discovering relic synergies that transform a class's rhythm mid-run is genuinely satisfying, at least for the first handful of hours. The structural problems arrive right on schedule, though. You are fighting through small, self-contained arena rooms rather than sprawling interconnected floors, and after a few runs you have mentally catalogued most of what the game can throw at you. The three biomes and three boss fights available do not stretch very far. The first boss, the Skull Knight, has some personality; the others are mostly HP sponges with limited movesets. Reaching the end of the story requires multiple complete playthroughs to collect narrative items, which means you will see the same corridors many more times than they can sustain interest. Post-launch updates added skins and additional weapons, but community feedback noted the unlock grind for those cosmetics is steep enough to feel punishing rather than rewarding. As an RPG specialist I want to care about the world of Sylvalond and the Twelve Gods of Therad. The premise, a dimension called the Nothingness where chosen Awakeners wage endless war against demonic chaos, has genuine atmosphere on paper. In practice, the lore is delivered as two blocks of static text and a handful of lines around each boss encounter. The localization is rough in places, characters lack meaningful arcs, and the narrative gives you no real reason to care which Awakener you bring into the Nothingness beyond their moveset. If you come from games where story and worldbuilding do heavy lifting, this one will feel like a skeleton wearing a mythology costume. What saves Forgotten Oath from the discard pile is that the combat skeleton underneath is solid. Five playable characters each bring distinct combo strings and specials. The Talents hub lets you bank permanent stat upgrades between runs using Void Crystals, while Soul Echoes unlock class skills and additional characters, though the drop rates on the latter make the grind visible and slightly tedious. The run-to-run RNG can swing wildly: some runs shower you with complementary relics and the whole thing sings; others leave you underpowered walking into late floors. That variance is baked into the genre, but the narrow content pool amplifies it. Sound design is the final weak link: the background music loops short enough to feel like a timer drilling into your skull rather than anything resembling atmosphere. This is a game that works best if you treat it like a compact combo-trainer with roguelite dressing, not a narrative experience or a build-variety sandbox on the level of bigger genre entries. Action roguelite fans who can take it at face value and do not need biome diversity or story payoff will find a competent, sometimes fun indie with a real combat highlight reel. Everyone else should calibrate expectations hard before committing. Monika, Scout Team