Frayed Knights: More Previews, Reviews, and First Impressions

Posted by Rampant Coyote on September 28, 2011

It’s been a pretty surreal 24 hours for me, as you can probably imagine.  While I’ve been dealing with the various release-based issues, there have been some more great articles about Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon I wanted to share.

First off, there’s GameBanshee’s Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon Preview, by Brother None. An excerpt:

“The drama stars are a fun little concept used in this game. Every time you take any significant new action (opening doors into new areas, finishing fights, have Arianna drink from a dodgy pool of water, turning a lever) one of eight points in one of three stars is filled. When you reload a game, the stars are cleared and you’ll have to start filling them again. You can fill up the three stars, first to bronze, then to silver, then to gold. As you upgrade them, you can spend them for ever-increasing one-time fall-back options, able to lift negative effects or awaken knocked out characters. The intent is to encourage you to play through dungeons rather than rely on constant saving and reloading, and it works fairly well, I find myself saving with a much lower frequency in this game than in others, and rarely reloading at all.”

Next up – our first reviews! RPG Watch’s Frayed Knights Review. This is basically two reviews in once. Both Skavenhorde and Corwin started playing beta versions, and I think both have played through the game about three times. I fear they might know more about playing the game than I do. I really want to include excerpts from both sides of the review. Corwin in part one:

“Hopefully, at some point you will have a party wipe. Why? One of the funniest dialogue sequences in the entire game occurs when everyone in your party is incapacitated. Make sure you read it all the way through at least once.”

And from part two, from Skavenhorde:

“I loved this game. It’s what I’ve been waiting for since Wizardry 8 or even the end of the Quest for Glory series. It’s a turn-based “blob” RPG set in a quirky setting where adventuring is a lifestyle choice. Even if you don’t like games that aren’t serious in nature there is still a wonderful “blob” combat RPG here. “

They both invoked Wizardry 8 in comparison to Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon, which is pretty high honor in my book. Not that I am so full of myself to even imagine that my little low-budget indie game can hold a candle to Wizardry 8. Or Wizardry 7. I think I’d be willing to take on Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord, maybe.

I should be noted that Skavenhorde has posted as a guest writer for this blog. It’s up to you to decide if that would influence his review.

Finally, there’s Bits n Bytes’ The Indie Fix: Frayed Knights First Impressions. Armand K. offers his thoughts after a few hours, not getting too far past the point where the demo version ends:

“The mod­ern indie gam­ing scene to me really reflects the atmos­phere of the ‘80s and ‘90s PC game devel­op­ment scene, with ded­i­cated peo­ple mak­ing the games they wanted to make and loved. So per­haps it is no sur­prise that we’re see­ing more and more of this sort of RPG com­ing around. The developer’s pas­sion for his craft shines through Frayed Knights, a fea­ture that isn’t so com­mon in games requir­ing hun­dreds of work­ers devel­op­ing small parts sep­a­rately from each other. It’s refresh­ing to see this sort of thing sur­face lately, and this game would have prob­a­bly been remem­bered as a clas­sic should it have been released in the first half of the ‘90s (of course, this is assum­ing it keeps the steam it’s built up in the first few hours).”

Enjoy!

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