The Memory of Eldurim

I want to be honest with you about The Memory of Eldurim, because the bones here are genuinely interesting and the story of what happened to it is just as important as what it actually is. Liminal Games, a three-person indie studio, built this open-world action RPG on CryEngine and pitched it as a fusion of Elder Scrolls exploration and Dark Souls-style combat timing. For a micro-studio, the visual ambition was startling - forests, deserts, tundra, and submarine ruins spread across a freely explorable island. That is a real swing, and for a brief window around 2015, it actually looked like it might connect. The RPG systems underneath are worth noting because they take a classless approach: using a sword improves your sword skill, taking hits builds endurance, and spellcasting develops independently of your melee work. There are no character class gates. The combat design asks you to read enemy openings and time blocks and dodges rather than spam attacks, which in theory lands somewhere between Gothic and a lighter Souls rhythm. On paper, the faction-level consequences - saving or razing towns, funding civic buildings, pulling off political assassinations - point toward a genuinely choice-driven world with real moral weight. Here is the hard part. Steam flags that the developers have not communicated any updates for over a year, and the lifetime review score sits at roughly 32 percent positive across around 195 user reviews - a Mostly Negative rating. Community threads from as far back as 2017 flag features that were advertised but never shipped. The story campaign was always described as coming later, and "later" appears to have never fully arrived. What you get today is a playable but skeletal open island with enemies, loot, spells, and boss encounters - the scaffolding of something larger, without the architecture it was meant to support. There is a kind of melancholy in loading The Memory of Eldurim in 2025. The CryEngine vistas still carry a quiet, exploratory mood that most small studios cannot afford to attempt. The classless skill-by-doing progression system has an organic feel that rewards patience. If you are the type who finds archaeology in abandoned Early Access titles worthwhile - who wants to wander a beautiful, incomplete world and imagine what it was meant to be - this will give you something. If you need a narrative, faction politics that actually function, and a finished combat loop, you will hit the ceiling within a couple of hours and find mostly silence on the other side. Kai, Scout Team