Gordian Quest is a very special and lovely combination of several very exciting genres: RPG, deckbuilding, turn-based combat with elements of rogue-lite.
This game is made by the developer of Sairento VR and Hellsweeper VR, i.e. mixed realms, and its publishers for PC are mixed realms and coconut island games.
After two years of early access, Gordian Quest was released on June 23, 2022 for PC, and on October 26, 2023, for Nintendo Switch, and finally, on April 30, 2024, for PS5 and PS4.
The publisher of the console versions is Maximum Entertainment.
Now the question is, is this combination of genres done well?
STORY
When you start the game a lovely voice tells you the story of wrendia, a land that long ago was a great land with many resources where humans and vanai lived, the vanai consumed wrendia’s resources in search of knowledge And experimented powers that were beyond their understanding, the gods banished them and shattered the wrenida into pieces and enchanted each of them with a curse, the vanai vanished from history and Man was left to inherit punishment. centuries of chaos and fear gripped the land, but from the darkness heroes were forged, heroes who faced threats from each region to find a cure for the curses, you are one of these heroes who You start your adventure in Westmire.
After reaching westmire, you reach the garrison town and you realize that this town is attacked by the undead, so you go to help them and gradually life returns to this town by progressing in the story and you meet new people, while You are saving the city, you realize that this attack is related to the riftlord you are looking for and you try to find it, this was only the beginning of the game and the overall story continues and takes about 20 hours.
The story is good and okay, but it is a very simple story that is not very engaging.
GAMEPLAY
When you start the game for the first time, you have three modes to choose from: standard mode: you will revive in town upon being defeated in battle, rogue-lite mode: If your entire party is defeated in battle, your run ends, rogue-like mode: heroes cannot be resurrected at the sanctuary upon death. If your entire party is defeated in battle, your run ends.
And for each of these modes, there are five types of difficulty from easy to torment, and it gives you a lot of freedom in choosing the difficulty level and the type of gameplay.
The gameplay is great and fun and you can easily get immersed in it, at the beginning you have to choose from ten heroes to enter the game, each hero has its own diverse decks and makes the choice difficult, as you progress through the game You get all these ten heroes and you can choose your party of three from among them, and sometimes NPCs may be on your side and you have more than three heroes on your side, but only the three heroes you chose can be controlled.
The equipment of the heroes plays a big role and you can increase the stats of the heroes by wearing powerful armors, the armors add different stats to your hero and you have more options for personalizing the stats by buying or getting more armors.
Each hero can have two weapons that increase its stats or some of them give new cards to that hero, each hero can have two rings, an amulet and a belt and these are like Weapons and armor and will increase stats of the hero who uses them, these equipment are sometimes a reward for completing story mission and sometimes side-quests, and of course some of them can be bought.
Each hero has its own skill tree and can get new cards, more power, more HP, etc. by collecting and using skill points.
In the main hub of the game, Garrison, there are various characters, each of which has its own unique personality and job, in addition to selling the necessary equipment, they also give you quests.
There are many different quests in Gordian Quest, sometimes they are on your main path and you have to do them to reach your main goal, or sometimes they may be on side paths and you don’t have to do them, or sometimes You may have several different paths to reach the goal and each of those paths have various and different missions, one of these missions that caught my attention was the events, which are shown in the shape of a question mark on the map.
In these missions, you would face sudden events, such as seeing a ruin on the way, and leys you to decide if you want to search the ruin for loot or not. These events had different stories, and in some of them, according to your decision you had to take your chances and determine the outcome of the story by rolling the dice, these events are very enjoyable.
The fights are very enjoyable, each hero has a number of action points with which you can use the cards you have and each card consumes a certain number of your action points, you must have a strategy and try to defeat the enemy that you think is more dangerous or keep the hero who has less health away from the enemies, with different strategies, the time of the fights may vary, and even with the right strategy, you can finish harder fights faster than easy fights.
But this wonderful gameplay that we talked about has a problem, and that is that it becomes repetitive easily, and the player goes to the desired mission and returns to the garrison again to buy and fill health, and this loop can be very repetitive and get boring.
VISUALS
Gordian Quest has a very beautiful art style, the character design, the main hub, the background of the fights, the items that are used are all like a beautiful painting.
The resolution and performance are stable and have no problems.
SOUNDTRACKS
The soundtracks are excellent and are very relaxing when it’s calm and very epic when there is a fight going on and sometimes gives a curiosity sense.
CONCLUSION
This game managed to combine several genres in the best way, it has a good story but it is simple and not so engaging, a super fun gameplay that may become a bit repetitive because of its loop, overall Gordian Quest is a wonderful game. Which has so much content that it is definitely worth the $20.
