The Bard's Tale IV: Barrows Deep

The Bard's Tale IV: Barrows Deep is inXile's Kickstarter-funded revival of a PC RPG series that went dark for thirty years, and it carries both the ambition and the uneven execution that tag usually implies. You play in first-person across maze-like dungeons and the layered streets of Skara Brae, a city now under the boot of a fanatical church called the Fatherites who are rounding up magic users, adventurers, and non-humans alike. The setup has genuine political texture, with persecuted dwarves, elves, and trow sheltering in the ruins beneath the city while paladins scour the surface. Mechanically, though, the narrative momentum stalls fast. The writing rarely rewards close attention the way you want it to, and by hour ten most players will stop caring who Bishop Henred answers to and start caring very much about whether their Rogue can reach the back row before round two. Combat is the game's best argument for itself. Battles play out on a 4x4 grid: your party of up to six occupies one half, enemies the other, and every action draws from a shared pool of opportunity points per turn. Positioning is everything. Moving a Fighter to absorb a cleave, then burning the remaining points on a Practitioner's area mental attack to chain into a Bard's song buff, then watching the whole thing cascade into a single-round wipe feels genuinely satisfying when it clicks. The four classes, Bard, Fighter, Rogue, and Practitioner, each interact with the grid in distinct ways, and the seven playable cultures (races) add enough modifier variety to make party composition a worthwhile puzzle in itself. Characters can be respecced, and inXile added a save-anywhere option post-launch, both of which sand down the roughest legacy-mode edges considerably. The bigger surprise is how puzzle-heavy the game is. Block-pushers and gear sliders show up early, but the game escalates to line puzzles, color-match mechanisms, and elaborate environmental riddles that can chain four or five deep before you see another fight. The final dungeon is essentially one long puzzle gauntlet. If that sounds like your kind of evening, great. If you load up a dungeon crawler expecting wall-to-wall tactical combat and get a cog-rotation puzzle instead, the mismatch will frustrate. The world structure has a faint Metroidvania quality too, with exploration songs unlocking previously blocked routes as you progress, which at least makes backtracking feel purposeful rather than punishing. Where Barrows Deep falls short is everywhere it is not combat or puzzles. The narrative, despite a punchy opening gallows scene, loses the thread and never quite recovers. NPC models are stiff, the inventory system has no filtering or sorting to speak of, and the launch version was notoriously buggy. A lot of that has been patched, and the Director's Cut released later further polished the experience, so players coming to it now are in a better state than reviewers were. Still, quest tracking can be vague and certain undead enemy types that regenerate health essentially force specific combo solutions rather than rewarding creative play. The game is at its best when it trusts you to improvise; it is at its worst when it secretly has one answer and makes you find it. The soundtrack is, without qualification, exceptional. Gaelic vocal tracks from collaborators including Julie Fowlis and compositions by Mark Morgan give Skara Brae a texture no other RPG on the market has. I caught myself sitting in the Adventurer's Guild longer than necessary just to let a song finish. That atmospheric specificity is real craft, and it carries scenes the writing cannot. Barrows Deep is a game for mechanics-first players who can tolerate a thin story and a puzzle density that occasionally tips into overload. Series newcomers can jump in without prior knowledge, and the tactical combat has enough depth to hold up past the forty-hour mark. Just do not come expecting the narrative payoff of the genre's heavier hitters. Monika, Scout Team