The Bard's Tale IV: Barrows Deep Review
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Introduction
The first game in The Bard's Tale - or should I say Tales of the Unknown - series was a dungeon-crawling RPG created by Michael Cranford and the Brian Fargo-helmed Interplay team way back in 1985. And now, two direct sequels, a "construction set", an action-RPG spin-off, and more than 30 years later, Fargo's new studio, inXile Entertainment, decided to update the series' classic “first-person exploration, turn-based combat” formula for the modern audience. The result? The Bard's Tale IV: Barrows Deep.
As is usually the case with reinventing the wheel, things didn't go exactly as planned, and instead of a triumphant return of the dungeon crawler, we got a game with some great ideas and neat features but also a heap of issues and questionable design decisions.
Barrows Deep actually has very little in common with its predecessors despite a plethora of nods, references, and returning characters, but I do think that it can provide an enjoyable experience to anyone looking for 30-40 hours of dungeon-crawling action.
Story and Exploration
The game starts with you witnessing a public execution, running around the streets of Skara Brae for no apparent reason, and then going through an extended tutorial section where you get a chance to familiarize yourself with the game's controls and mechanics.
This intro section is not very well done in my opinion. It does very little to showcase the game's actual strengths, is kind of confusing and entirely pointless. Play through that intro, and you'll think that the game is all about holding W in dull linear corridors while following glowing quest markers and occasionally engaging in simplistic combat.
But even in those grey and gloomy tunnels, some of the game's positive qualities manage to shine through, like its more than decent level design.
Even those initial claustrophobic tunnels are designed in such a way to always show you something intriguing and cool just outside of your grasp. You find locked doors that you have no way to open, you activate hidden switches and levers that seemingly do nothing, you occasionally catch a glimpse of a blocked-off part of the area you will need to revisit later, you stumble onto mysterious signs and glyphs that clearly do something, you just don't know what that something is.
The game keeps dangling these little mysteries right before you, and you can't help but press onward just to find out what awaits you behind the next corner.
And later on, when you get to the first real dungeon that actually has some color in its cheeks and offers plenty of winding paths, puzzles, challenging encounters, and non-obvious ways to progress, this is where the game is at its best.
Going just by the opening sections, you wouldn't guess how varied the game's tilesets get or what weird, imposing, verdant, magical, glacial, or otherworldly environments your party of adventurers will visit on its heroic quest.
Speaking of that quest. The game's story goes something like this - the local church gets a bit overzealous with its prosecution of heretics, magic users, older races and unsanctioned adventurers, and starts executing everyone it doesn't like with enough enthusiasm to put even Warhammer's inquisitors to shame.
As one of those adventurers, you're not particularly fond of this new development, so you set out to try and find out why your kind is being so unfairly maligned. In the process, you stumble upon a mysterious sorcerer who goes around resurrecting ancient villains, all antagonists from the earlier Bard's Tale games, while also framing those with a chance to put a stop to their nefarious plans. And from that point onward, your main goal becomes just that.
The story won't be winning any awards, but it does its job and is quite engaging, especially for a dungeon crawler, a subgenre of RPGs not known for its intricate plots. It does fall apart somewhere at the end where it feels like the developers were in a rush to ship the game already, but prior to that, it's good enough to make you want to find out what happens next.
As a side note, something I have to mention here is how when you load the game, the bard on the menu screen comes to life and actually sings you a verse or two, recapping the latest story developments. I think it's a great touch and exactly the kind of unnecessary thing that can make a game go from merely good or bad, functional or broken, to an experience you can fondly remember twenty years later.
The game's dialogues are fairly simplistic and don't leave a lot of room for meaningful choices, but at the very least they're competently written and aren't overly verbose. Every conversation is voice-acted, which adds to the game's atmosphere and its overall Celtic aesthetic.
The sound effects and soundtrack are quite outstanding, further reinforcing the game's Celtic motifs and leaving you with numerous pleasant tunes to listen to on your journey.
Your party of adventurers that can include up to six characters and can consist of both story characters and custom mercenaries rarely stays silent and spices up the occasional backtracking sections with plenty of banter. The neat thing there, is that your custom mercenaries don't simply exist to smite evil and keep quiet, and instead participate in party banter as well.
And while I have nothing but good things to say about the game's sound, its visuals, on the other hand, are more uneven. You do get some nice vistas and good-looking dungeons, but most of the textures look blurry and washed out, and the game's humanoid NPCs don't look all that impressive either.
Still, if you don't play games for their fancy visuals, you'll find plenty to occupy yourself with while exploring Barrows Deep's world of Caith. The game offers a nice variety of outdoors areas and self-contained dungeons, and even though the main story path is strictly linear, most of the bigger hub areas will give you plenty of opportunities to stray from the beaten path and explore the game's robust optional content.
Oftentimes, in order to progress, you'll need to solve a puzzle or ten, and those are quite varied, to the point where you could remove all the quests and combat from the game and have it be a pretty competent puzzler.
You have your moving blocks, spinning cogs, flowing streams of energy, guidable fairies, mystical riddles, and everything in-between. And while with some of those, the developers took the quantity over quality approach, many of the puzzles are fairly inventive and satisfying even when they're not the most original.
For example, there was this one cog puzzle in a room with a moving stream of lava dripping from the ceiling. You had to solve the puzzle before you got a refreshing lava shower, which reminded me of that opening scene from Magnum, P.I. where Tom Selleck's titular character had to focus on picking a lock and not the dogs chasing him, which added a good amount of tension to the whole situation.
Apart from the puzzles, this being the bard's tale and all, you'll also have the bardic songs of exploration to help you on your journey. One of them deals with thorny vegetation blocking your way, another breaks cracked walls, and so on.
And on top of that, you have consumable items like grappling hooks, lockpicks, and acid bombs to help you get where you need to go. Not only can you find or buy those, you can also craft them, along with an assortment of potions, healing food, and even some weapons.
Another thing to mention, is that the game was designed around free movement. Usually, I prefer my dungeon crawlers to have tile-based movement, but I can't say that I was missing it in Barrows Deep. It feels nice to traverse the game's maps with the current movement setup. And the tile-based option will be added to the game later anyway as part of the Legacy Mode that will also allow you to draw your own maps, if that's your thing.
Now, unfortunately, the main quest was designed with quest markers in mind. But at the same time, some of the side quests are refreshingly cryptic and offer little clues as to what you need to do to complete them, so in that sense, Barrows Deeps strikes a decent balance between obtuse and obvious.
And overall, the game's pacing is more good than bad. Sure, the intro is pointless, the ending feels rushed, and some of the dungeons lean too heavily on either combat or puzzles, but generally you have a nice selection of activities before you, and they rarely manage to get stale before some variety comes your way.
Character System and Combat
In order to appreciate the game's combat and its underlying systems, you first have to come to terms with the fact that your character is not your character. Your party is your character.
Each individual adventurer can have up to four skills memorized, a usable trinket, and a mobility skill determined by their boots. Which leaves us with a total of six active abilities multiplied by up to six adventurers. And in order to use most of these abilities, you have to spend the so-called opportunity points that come from a shared pool. You start with three and as the game progresses, you get up to eight.
And while the game's spellcasting classes use mana for their spells instead of opportunity, for the most part in order to get mana, they still have to spend some opportunity first.
With such a setup, you shouldn't treat any individual character as your main and think of the rest as the backup crew. Instead, you should look at the encounter you're facing and consider how you can combine your party members' skills together for the best possible outcome.
If you think along these lines, having merely four spells or attacks on each individual character doesn't seem that bad. Which is why the decision to have you start the game with merely two characters and then slowly, over the course of roughly 10-15 hours, gather a full party seems counter-intuitive. Instead of learning to approach things as a well-oiled combat machine from the start, you go through the game's opening sections wondering why its skill and attribute systems feel so basic and overly simplistic.
What do I mean by simplistic? Well, there's a total of five attributes in the game. Strength governs damage across the board for both warriors and spellcasters, Constitution directly represents health, and Intelligence determines how good a character is at channeling spells. And then, for some reason, the game considers Armor Class and Spell Points to also be attributes. And that's that.
Now, when it comes to races, you have several flavors of human, dwarves, elves, and the trow that are like a mix of halflings and goblins. Each race comes with a single unique passive ability. Dwarves, for example, can't be moved by enemies and Baedish humans get additional skill points when leveling up.
The game's four classes are the Bard who drinks lots of booze and buffs the party, the Fighter who hits things with other things and moves other combatants around, the Rogue who exchanges opportunity points for damage, and the Practitioner who casts spells and wins you the game.
Each class has access to a few dozen skills. Each time a character levels up, they get a single skill point. Some skills raise attributes, others grant active abilities, and others yet give powerful passive bonuses to those active abilities.
The skills are divided into three tiers and are arranged into distinct skill trees, so that in order to get to the stronger skills, you have to specialize your characters in certain ways. On top of that, some of the skill trees are connected by dotted lines, which means that skills in that particular tree are mutually exclusive.
And on top of that, some skills, like the Rogue's Hide in Shadows or the Practitioner's Dragon Breath can also be used outside of combat. The former makes your party harder to spot, and the latter acts as a magic torch.
And after completing a certain quest, you'll be able to gain access to the Cleric skill tree that acts as a prestige class of sorts and gives access to a number of healing abilities and fairly strong combat passives.
All this gives you a fair degree of character-building freedom that you wouldn't expect this game to have after playing it for just an hour or two.
You are also free to mess things up, since you can't change your characters' skills after choosing them. Personally, I liked this feature because it made me feel like my choices when leveling up mattered and that I had to live with them and adjust to my sub-optimal decisions, instead of just figuring out how things worked and creating a min-maxed party that was good at everything.
But if you mess up too much, as you play through the game you'll find plenty of mercenary tokens that allow you to create new characters and use them to bolster your party.
The strangest quirk of Barrows Deep's skill system that needs to be mentioned is its weapon-specific skills. Contrary to what common sense may tell you, in Barrows Deep you don't need a bow to use bow skills or a sword to use sword skills. As long as you have a skill mastered and memorized, you can use it in combat regardless of what you have equipped. However, appropriate weapons usually grant significant bonuses to their skills, so in the end, you will want to use the right weapons with the right skills anyway.
The big exception are the elven puzzle weapons that require you to solve their puzzles in order to unlock their unique features, like stunning the entire enemy team for a round, or dropping a deadly avalanche of cabbages on an enemy.
Back when these weapons were first announced, I had high hopes for them, and the end result is kind of cool in a way, but they do disappoint a bit. First, unless you craft them yourself, their base stats will be much lower than those of normal late-game weapons. Then, the puzzles themselves are usually quite similar between weapons. And finally, the original announcement boasted that we'll be able to fail the puzzles and ruin the weapons. And I don't know if maybe I wasn't trying to fail hard enough, but during my playthrough, the weapons were only getting stronger.
Apart from the elven stuff, all the other gear is mostly randomized, with a few unique pieces here and there. The unique stuff is great and oftentimes grants you special active abilities, but the rest is sort-of just there. Or not there, since drops are also randomized. Which is at its worst when you spend a good fifteen minutes solving a tricky environmental puzzle only to get a few coins and an item that goes straight to the nearest vendor.
So, how do you use all those weapons? You take them into battle, of course.
The combat in Barrows Deep is turn-based and takes place on a 4x4 grid divided in half between the opposing parties. Your actions before a battle starts determine who gets to go first or how your enemies will be arranged on their side of the grid. Some of the battles have multiple waves of enemies, which allows you to face more than eight of them in a row. There are three damage types that interact with armor in different ways, and all the active abilities have unique areas of effect.
Your enemies all have their own abilities and tricks, like skeletons that you have to kill on the same turn or they'll keep resurrecting, or berserkers that retaliate when hit by melee attacks. All in all, there's a lot to consider when approaching the game's combat, and early on it offers a satisfying degree of challenge. The normal difficulty is perhaps a bit too easy, but hard will provide you with some neat encounters and tough boss battles.
That is until you find powerful gear and unlock some of the stronger skills. By then, you'll have figured out a winning strategy which you will use to win most encounters with little to no effort. And the most unfortunate part there is that you do all those things with a good chunk of the game left to go.
So, you have the early game when you feel weak and outclassed. You have the mid game where you become strong and exact your revenge on all the enemies that seemed tough and scary. And then you have the late game where combat becomes a mindless chore that just wastes your time.
The existing enemy and skill variety just can't support the game's length. I would have much preferred a shorter, more focused experience with fewer repeating puzzles and battles that exist solely to pad out the hour count, but as the bards said, you can't always get what you want.
Technical Information
Sadly, Barrows Deep was released in a sorry state where if you think of a possible issue, you could probably find it in the game.
The game crashed on me multiple times. It took over a minute to load its larger areas. It didn't run all that well and didn't look nearly good enough to justify such poor performance. I've also encountered quite a few bugs - I had items duplicate, I got stuck on the terrain, I saw flickering textures, and had skills not work as intended.
On top of it all, there were numerous typos here and there, and early on, some people encountered a game-breaking bug that made it impossible to complete the main quest.
The game's inventory is one of the clunkiest inventories ever, and you don't even get the benefit of a pause while trying to manage that mess of poorly sorted tabs and mounds of crafting garbage.
You can only save the game at certain locations, and as some cruel joke, you also get an option to break most of the checkpoints for some additional experience. Which is not a very smart thing to do when the game can crash at any moment. Luckily, these checkpoints are never too far apart, so if you save at every opportunity, you should never loose too much progress. Additionally, the game autosaves when you quit, so you don't even have to backtrack to the last checkpoint when you have to stop playing.
All these issues are exactly why, right after the game launched, inXile Entertainment promised to fix as many of them as possible in the coming weeks. I finished my playthrough before the second patch dropped, but even the first one fixed a good number of bugs and slightly improved the game's performance.
Because of that, I trust inXile to fix the game's technical issues in a timely fashion and don't really count them against the game. Still, if you consider picking it up, I would advise you to at least wait until the first three, already announced, patches are released.
Conclusion
In the end, I feel like The Bard's Tale IV: Barrows Deep suffers from something of an identity crisis and doesn't know exactly want it wants to be.
It manages to combine plentiful quest markers for the main quest with quite a few side quests, and some of the latter give you very little to go on and there is an expectation that you'll just figure them out eventually. It has a robust party-based combat system, but it doesn't give you a full party for a good dozen hours of play time. It hides plenty of well-hidden secrets and satisfying side areas, but its main story is as linear as it gets.
A lot of these design choices are frustrating, but despite that nagging feeling that things could have been a bit more satisfying, I had a lot of fun playing the game, exploring its areas, and solving its puzzles and riddles. We're not exactly swimming in dungeon crawlers these days, so I'd certainly recommend it to anyone interested in this particular subgenre of RPG. But do yourself a favor and wait until it's all patched up and has a few more coats of polish.
