Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon Impressions

We should have our own review of Frayed Knights ready to go within the next day or two, but in the meantime you can head over to Bits n' Bytes Gaming for some initial impressions of Rampant Games' party-based RPG.
The game's drama star sys­tem has also had its intended effect on my play style. Drama stars are a sys­tem of points you receive for per­form­ing a vari­ety of tasks. The more points you build up, the cooler the pay off when you cash in. Only, the points start over when you load a game, thus encour­ag­ing the player to not use the age old method of sav­ing and load­ing until they get the best result from any giver sit­u­a­tion. And it really works! I actu­ally find myself sav­ing less, and not sweat­ing the details I tend to usu­ally worry about. In other words, I'm play­ing an RPG the way I assume they were always meant to be played, accept­ing things as they hap­pen, and not try­ing to cheat the system.

Other lit­tle fea­tures I liked were the lock pick­ing and trap mini-games. They're pretty sim­ple, and require a com­bi­na­tion of skill and luck, but have proven to be excit­ing when they come up. The music is also very nice, in some ways tra­di­tional sound­track music, with ele­ments of clas­sic PC gam­ing music, and occa­sion­ally going places you wouldn't expect in video games with more quirky (in a good way) bits here and there.