Vendir: Plague of Lies

I have a soft spot for games that don't apologize for their genre, and Vendir: Plague of Lies wears its CRPG influences on its sleeve without flinching. You start as a lower-class peasant under the boot of a tyrannical king named Elrik, and before the tutorial even settles, you're exiled, broke, and dragging your sister Mellia across a miserable dark-fantasy landscape that keeps quietly expanding. The setup is familiar, but the worldbuilding has real texture to it, conversations with NPCs carry lore that feels lived-in rather than recited, and the game's choice to mix thoroughly modern vernacular with its grim medieval setting creates a dialogue voice that is genuinely distinctive. It is blunt, occasionally crude, and frequently funnier than you expect from a game this dark in theme. The combat is where most of your time goes, and it holds up better than the price tag suggests. Battles are 4v4, turn-order-flexible (no locked queue, you pick who acts when), and built around stacking debuffs before landing a finishing blow that benefits from your earlier setup. Classes like Necromancer, Pyromancer, Plague Doctor, Tinkerer, Stalker, and Vodouist each bring a distinct toolkit to the table, and the multiclassing system lets you poach abilities from adjacent branches, which is where the real build creativity lives. A Tinkerer hurling their two-handed weapon for massive burst damage at the cost of fighting barehanded for the rest of the fight is exactly the kind of absurd high-risk option this genre needs. Respec is available, which matters more than it sounds, enemy scaling gets genuinely punishing in the late game, and Hard difficulty will test even veterans of the genre. Here is where the honest accounting starts, though. Vendir began life as a mobile game, and the PC port does not fully disguise that. The UI was not redesigned for mouse and keyboard, and small irritants, a missing load button, menus that feel like they were built for thumbs, add friction that a dedicated PC RPG would never ask of you. Graphics are lo-fi in most departments. The dialogue reportedly used AI-assisted translation, which occasionally shows. Completionists clocking everything in around 38 hours will find limited incentive to replay, since the narrative is largely linear despite its branching dialogue windows. If replayability is your metric, that is a real limitation, though a single thorough run packed with hidden bosses, unmarked quests, and multi-outcome side missions is still a solid proposition. For fans of party-based RPGs who can tolerate some rough edges around the port, Early Morning Studio has delivered something more coherent and more charming than its budget implies. The writing rewards attention, the class synergies reward experimentation, and the story, prophesied peasant versus corrupt king, lands its beats without outstaying its welcome. It is not pushing the genre forward, and it knows it. What it is doing is executing the fundamentals of old-school turn-based CRPG design competently and, in its best moments, with genuine heart. Just check the stamina bar before you commit to a big skill, or you will be punching air for three turns while a Plague Doctor laughs at you.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

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