Torn Tales

I wanted this one to work. The setup is wonderfully offbeat: a villain called the Bookbinder has shredded the worlds of folklore and stitched them back together wrong, and it falls to Robin Hood, Snow White, and Dr. Jekyll to fight through the wreckage across five distinct realms. That is a premise with real personality, the kind of cheesy, cross-genre mash-up that a certain type of indie game wears like a badge of honor. The tone promises dark fairy-tale atmosphere, and for the first few minutes, the world-building genuinely earns your curiosity. The moment-to-moment play, though, is where Torn Tales loses the thread. This is a real-time squad-based hack-and-slash, and the core loop is almost aggressively passive. You guide your trio through mostly linear corridors, click on enemy groups, and watch the numbers sort themselves out. You can swap between characters mid-combat to manually trigger abilities - Snow White's healing spells and poison apple bomb, Hyde's rage mode, Robin Hood's ranged options - and keeping an eye on mana conservation matters more than it first appears. But three stance options per character (aggressive, guarded, evasive) are about as deep as the AI direction gets, and the enemies largely just rush you in undifferentiated waves. Boss encounters, marked by a ram's-head icon on the minimap, break up the monotony a little - the Huntsman in Sherwood Forest, the Big Bad Wolf - but they arrive without dialogue or context, which wastes the fiction they inhabit. The loot system promises thousands of rings and amulet combinations that modify your skills, and leveling each hero does unlock character-appropriate abilities with charm behind them. The skill trees have ideas. The problem is that the game's difficulty curve makes grinding side missions feel less like a choice and more like a toll booth - the main path routinely throws enemy levels well above your party, so optional content quietly becomes mandatory. When there is no skill expression in combat to compensate, that friction sits badly. The sound design compounds things: the ambient world is thin, and reviewers noted at launch that turning the music off revealed how little sonic texture the environments actually carry. Who is this for, honestly? Casual players who want something low-stakes to click through - something closer in feel to an idle brawler than a proper action-RPG - may find the fairy-tale dressing pleasant enough for a session or two. The arena mode adds an endless wave format with global leaderboards if you want a higher-stakes version of the same combat. But anyone who comes in hoping for the tactical depth the "squad RPG" label implies will find the gap between promise and delivery genuinely frustrating. The concept deserved bolder execution, and it is hard not to feel the small scope of the development holding back what could have been something memorably strange.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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