I’ll be the first person to admit that I don’t typically enjoy survival/ real time strategy RPGs. Bellwright is different. Something about this game really clicked with me. Creating your character, building your settlement, establishing yourself with other villages, hiring new workers who specialize in specific roles, you even have the option to choose what tasks you want prioritized. The depth that the settlement system has was something I frankly wasn’t expecting.
A Game Full of Options
Before starting the game you’ll need to create your character. The options in the creation menu at first glance feel in depth, but upon closer inspection they are actually rather shallow. Unlike other games the sliders feel more like presets and it makes fine tuning your character nearly impossible. It doesn’t help that in general Bellwrights character models give me an uncanny valley effect. Overall it isn’t the worst character creator. I’d probably give that to the division, but it also falls short of great character creators like saints row. Whatever faults that series had it has a killer character creator.
The Choices Don’t Stop at Character Creation
Once I was done making my character look stylish, I was ready to start the adventure. After seeing an admittedly interesting if not cliche introduction, the game loads in with your character near some ruins. A piece of paper explaining some lore about the nearest town activates the first quest. The quest tells you to go to the nearest town Haerndean. Once you arrive in town you’ll be instructed to meet with the elder, if you don’t meet with the elder the rest of the towns citizens will behave rather coldly toward you.
Helping the Elder and Other Townsfolk
After speaking with the elder he’ll want you to help out a hunter by the name of Lubomir. Lubomir, is the introduction to the companion system as well as the NPC who teaches you how to build and craft items for your settlement. This first quest is a pseudo tutorial mission, teaching you how building works, but also showing that when you help someone in a specific village by completing quests for them, you gain a reputation in that village. The higher your reputation the more workers you can hire to move to your own town.
Surprisingly in Depth Tech Tree and Selection Anxiety
One thing that makes me drop a game is when there are too many skills. Imagine my surprise when I open up the tech tree and see possibly hundreds of locked items. I get bad selection anxiety and it makes the game feel daunting and massive far too much for me. Luckily for me the tutorial helped ease me into the games mechanics and I actually found it relaxing to build and unlock new items.
A Closer Look at the Crafting System
To build housing, or other commodities like a fireplace or an outhouse, you need to place down a construction area. You then need to gather the materials. Materials take up room so in order to fix that you can place whatever materials you find at the construction site. This frees up your inventory so you can collect go and collect more materials. Don’t worry though you can automate these tasks later in the game by having citizens in your village become workers.
You can set these workers to prioritize certain tasks over others, you can even set more general priorities for the whole camp. I’m sure that I’ve mentioned it before but this part of the game feels much more in depth than I was expecting.
Workers and Guards
there are two options for the citizens of your settlement. you can turn them into workers, people who are there to make your life easier through automating tedious tasks, or guards to guard all the hard work you put into building. One thing I’m not sure how I feel about is the raid system. If you and your villagers die to raiders, they’ll start to dismantle your camp. If you don’t kill them when you respawn you can lose all the loot they take from you. I was lucky enough not to lose all my progress and get my stuff back but I can imagine how demotivated I would feel if I lost everything.
Raiders and Raider settlements
Similar to the friendly villages and towns in game. There are inversely hostile settlements sprinkled across the map that you can clear out. They have a difficulty teir system with 1 daimond being the easiest and 4 daimonds being the hardest. These settlements once cleared out will have chests full of unique loot. If you can handle the mediocre combat then it might be worth doing some of these in the early game. If you are more like me though it might be better to make your companions stronger first.
With Pros Comes Cons
No game is perfect and this game has its share of flaws. Time moves far too fast for one, there are times where it feels like I just started scavenging for resources and it will already be night. You’ll want to make sure you’ve talked to whoever you wanted to talk to because NPCs all go to sleep at the same time of night and in early game you won’t have the option to fast travel. The combat is by far my least favorite part of the game. I see the vision they were going for but it didn’t stick the landing. It was going for a similar combat system as for honor, where you move the analog stick in the direction you want to attack or block.
In Conclusion
This game has really good bones, with 12 or 13 hours in the game I feel I’ve barely scratched the surface. The good far outweigh the bad in my eyes and the game feels oddly relaxing. It gives me the vibes of those old mobile games like clash of clans. If you enjoyed the settlement system in the fallout games you’ll more than likely like this game as well. I would highly recommend this game.
