Game Review: Vagrus - The Riven Realms

Platform: Nintendo Switch

Release Date: March, 31, 2025 (US)

Rating: 1/5 stars - would strongly not recommend

I ran across a trailer for this game on social media. It was touted as a turn-based combat RPG. Turn-based RPGs are my favorites so I was intrigued enough to watch the trailer. The trailer showed the game having a lot of story elements while managing party combat, troop movements, and an “open-world map”. In all honestly, it felt like a cross between Oregon Trial exploration and survival mechanics mixed with old-school turn-based combat with a dash of Marvel Strike Force party management.

Games with a lot of story driven exploration or dialogue heavy interactions aren’t my thing. I can appreciate a game’s story and lore but I’m more interested in gameplay and combat than story. But usually even story heavy games allow me to bypass the trudge of the story to enjoy more of the aspects of the game I want to experience. With the appeal of turn-based combat and party management, I opted to check out the game.

The Nintendo eStore had the game listed with a multitude of purchase options. The base game was priced at $29.99 but there were tons of DLCs and add-ons available including a season pass. That seemed odd to have so many variations and options given the limited, small scale development the game utilized based on the trailer. It definitely looked like an Indie game and not a top-tier game that you might expect would have so much content, especially at launch.

Intrigued but not sold on the game, I purchased the base game only for the $29.99 price. The 3GB download took a few minutes to download and install on my connection so I was able to dive into the game within minutes of my purchase. From the get go there were concerns.

As with most new games, I jumped into the game options before starting the game. I usually like to check out things like subtitle options, text speed (especially for games I know will have a lot of text/dialogue), controller layouts, graphic settings, and more. I found the options menu on the opening screen to be difficult to navigate and not very intuitive. At one point, I even felt the menu had bugged on me and forced a restart of the game only to discover that menu navigation used obscure controls that felt illogical compared to other games. Likewise, just the layout of the menu seemed out of sorts. It just didn’t flow naturally compared to what I was familiar with. Is that a knock on the developers for choosing to do something different and having poor implementation or just me not being able to adjust to the developer’s design choices? Perhaps it’s a little bit of both? Either way, this was just a first impression of the game and not enough to decide the game’s ultimate fate.

Base menu aside, once I had fumbled through the settings put things to my perceived liking, I started the game. Immediately I was given a choice. This was essentially the standard difficulty choice that so many games like to offer. Do you want the standard game play mode or do you want an easier gameplay experience that focuses more on the story and less on combat, party management, etc. were the two choices I was given. Since I’m not a big story player, naturally I selected the standard game mode. Sure, I’d still get all of the story but I could skip through that in favor of the other features that I wanted to experience whereas the other option offered me the complete opposite.

The game opened and then gave me another option. Play the tutorial mission or skip it. Well, since this is the first time I’ve played this game the tutorial mission would likely provide a good introduction into the game’s mechanics. It would be a good opportunity for me to see how combat, party mechanics, menu navigation, map exploration, and more would work. After my opening experience with the game menu I had my concerns about the game but hoped the tutorial would give me the practice with the game’s menus and features to feel more connected and aligned with the designer’s vision for the game.

Boy, was I wrong!

The tutorial mission was for you to lead a small party of people to a nearby town, collect some goods from an old friend, take those goods to the next town, and sell them for a tidy profit. Along the way I would learn about how to “march” my caravan between pre-set waypoints. Each waypoint represented a number of “movement” points required. The caravan had a limited number of movement points that could only be restored by resting at a waypoint. Each time you rested, a variety of background events and processes could be done. Options to pay today or pay later for issuing payments to your caravan crew. Hunting and/or foraging for supplies could be ordered. Caravan defenses could be defined. Even rationing of supplies. Depending on a variety of conditions, including but not limited to, the various things described above determined how many movement points were restored during that rest, if the caravan was attacked while resting, and more. The tutorial window did a fair job of explaining the window and its multitude of functions but being a tutorial mission, not all functions were enabled. It would have been nice had that been included in the descriptions or part of a tooltip so it was a little frustrating trying to use the game’s mechanics only for them not to work, presumably by design.

As I worked my way along the map to each waypoint, more and more tutorial windows appeared with various bits of game instructions. Some just described functions and features while others required me to perform a specific action before it would allow the game to continue. While this is to be expected for a tutorial mission, I found the layout and interaction of some of these windows to be confusing and poorly described or executed. It wasn’t just a single window that had the information in it but layers of windows in some cases. The left side of the screen would show a game interface while the right side was tutorial information and then another window that partially covered the game interface provided required actions for the mission to progress. Sometimes it would be open a menu, to navigate somewhere on the game interface, or to select text in the tutorial window that would open yet another screen. It just seemed to be very cluttered on the screen and did not feel like an intuitive or user-friendly way to convey information while letting players get familiar with the interfaces described. Oftentimes I would not be able to find which control had focus and see that my trying to change focus or select other options were being registered. One several occasions it just seemed that the menus described in the tutorial windows weren’t enabled for player interaction, which to me defeated the purpose of the tutorial. Why tell me how something works if I can’t use it? 

I muddled through the cacophony of menus and pop-ups and was eventually able to engage in combat. One of my rests at a waypoint triggered an ambush/assault on my caravan. There was little in the way of combat tutorial offered. A pop up talked about character initiative (INI) that determined combat order. There was message about the two 3x2 grids that made up the combat areas with the left grid being for friendly players and the right grid being for my opponents. That was it really. Some basic instructions regarding combat range and targeting requirements but that was it. I was left to sort out combat skills, party member abilities, and more all on my own. For a tutorial mission’s first combat experience, the explanations offered were very lackluster and underwhelming. The amount of information available in the party management screens on the map and rest menu was so elaborate and detailed that the combat interface and options seemed incomplete and almost like an afterthought.

Moreover, it didn’t seem as if the combat controls were well developed or tested. I found it difficult, impossible at times, to change targets, choose available spots to move on the grid, and more. There were multiple occurrences where I was forced to execute a skill against one target because the game would not allow me to change to another valid target. I could chalk this up to being part of a tutorial combat limitation but there was nothing on the screen to suggest that the game was forcing my actions. Rather it just seemed that the game’s programming was incomplete or simply inferior when it came to the combat system. Had I run into these issues only in combat sequences that included tutorial information then I might think it was all by design, albeit poor design, but over the course of my experience with the title I entered the combat system multiple times, each with similar results. When I repeatedly choose the “Move” skill during a character’s turn and can’t choose which open square to move to it is an issue. When I repeatedly choose an attack skill but can’t choose between two valid targets it is an issue.

The combat visuals were poor to begin with and the animations were laughable compared to other games with similar combat systems. For a $30 game I was willing to overlook the poor combat graphics and animations as long as the combat system was fun. I did not find anything about the combat to be fun. It was a basic turn-based combat system with characters possessing very limited skill sets, not much interaction, and combat breaking bugs. The more engagements I participated in, the less I wanted to experience combat.

Being a RPG aficionado, I know it is imperative to save frequently, even in games that offer auto-save features. Unfortunately, I attempted to navigate through the menu to manually save my game before the developers thought any sane person might. As a result of my thoroughness, I accessed a menu that I wasn’t intended to access yet but because I had reached that screen before the developers thought I might, there was no button interaction enabled on the screen which meant I was unable to exit the menu. I had found a game-breaking bug within the first 15 minutes of gameplay. I was stuck in an empty menu screen with no way to return to the game. I had no choice but to close the game from the Switch Home Screen, doing so caused me to lose my game progress, and then I was forced to repeat the tutorial mission from the beginning again to get back to that point in the game. The same combat issues persisted as I repeated the previously experienced tutorial sequences with no method to skip or speed through them. Once past the point where I had abandon the game to get out of the bugged menu, my experiences continued to be less than stellar.

I had found some new party members, bought supplies in towns, equipped a few items, increased party skills, etc but I constantly found the menus to be clumsy to navigate. So many screens, sub-screens, and panes squeezed into an unintuitive menu just made it difficult to follow, difficult to understand, difficult to manage, and just confusing a times. When upgrading party members there didn’t seem to be a clear indicator of how many points I had to spend, what I could spend them on, or anything. I found myself just clicking on things to see which upgrades would take and which wouldn’t. That was how I managed my party’s growth, just what will the game let me do since I can’t determine what my options are to strategically do anything.

Exploring towns and interacting with NPCs were just as clumsy. Everything was text based. You “explored” a town by clicking on text prompts and then clicking on the various text prompts to advance any dialogue or interaction with the selected point of interest whether it be a shop, a character, or any other location. Buy new equipment did not prompt me to equip it to anyone in my party. It just dropped it in my inventory and then I had to manually equipment in a later menu. Vendors showed prices for goods but I didn’t see an easily referenced value for how much money I had available to spend, something I would think would be a critical value in a vendor experience. It didn’t always seem clear, even in the tutorial mission, of what I needed to do in any town to advance any of the quests I had selected. In fact, there was one part of the tutorial mission that wanted me to buy so many “supplies” for my inventory but between the 2 different windows full of tutorial text I couldn’t see what was in my inventory to know how much I needed to actually purchase. Luckily, I just kept buying until I reached the tutorial conditions and the windows closed automatically. Had it not been for that, I might have continued buying until I was financially destitute and unable to complete other required tasks because the layout of that particular tutorial was so bad. How are you going to design an inventory based tutorial step that doesn’t let the player adequately see their inventory?

After about an hour of frustrating and irritating gameplay, I quit playing this turd of a game. It was built using the Unity engine which is a great engine but the developers did not appear to put in the effort to bug test this game well or to consider the player experience. Some games want to be super detailed and involved, and this is one of those games considering the many aspects to be managed, but while some developers favor player experience over technical implementations, this developer, like others before them, mistakenly thought that their comprehensive and detailed management system would overcome the shortcomings of their UI designs and substandard programming. That mistake made for what I feel is an unplayable and unenjoyable product. I won’t even go so far as to call this product a game because “game” implies that it’s something you can play and have fun with. My experience was that I couldn’t do either with this product.

So what was the clincher for me to shut the game off and come to this conclusion? Well, the game makes no secret that every interaction and choice can have negative consequences, some quite severe. For me, I was in a town and trying to advance a quest that suggested I go talk to a specific NPC but when I did it seemed the NPC did not appreciate me sharing the information option I picked, which seemed like the only relevant conversation choice for the given quest. That NPC killed me. Or at least I assume the NPC killed me. There was NO DEATH screen. No Game Over message. Instead, the right side of the screen where the game text appeared scrolled but was immediately overlayed by the game’s main menu for me to load a game or start a new game. Considering I was in a dialogue prompt with an NPC and then suddenly my only options were to load a previously saved game file or start a new game I was left to conclude that my conversation had gone poorly and the NPC slaughtered me but the game did nothing to confirm that aside from forcing the menu screen that only gave me those limited options. I’m fine dying in a game but at least let me know I’m dead! This was just one last confirmation that the developers/producers made this game on while wearing blinders that prevented them from seeing just how poorly designed and constructed this game was. If the opening sequences of the game were this poor then there was almost no chance that the quality would improve as I pushed deeper into the game. If the developers were so careless to make a tutorial process that was so poorly built and buggy then there chances of running into more of these annoying issues deeper into the game’s development were HIGH, too high to reasonably continue playing.

Summary: Even at $29.99 this game is overpriced. It is nothing but a poorly designed text adventure game with a mediocre turn-based combat system meant to dupe RPG players into wasting their money on this title. The game feels cheap. Not cheap because the purchase price was $30 but cheap because everything in the game seems poorly implemented and not well thought out. This gives the impression of a studio outsourcing the game’s development to a group of junior programmers with no video game development experience and who implemented exactly what they were told by the game’s producers without any thought or concern to the player experience. A seasoned game programmer would have recognized these shortcomings and made suggestions to improve the content but the finished product doesn’t give me the sense that such a person or group was involved with this title’s development. Likewise, the producers behind the title seem more interested in creating something unique with their combination of various game mechanics into a comprehensive “exploration” RPG without understanding the vast amount of complexity and design considerations for the UI such an ambitious endeavor demands. This title smacks of someone having a vision for a game and being either completely blind to the ignorance of their decisions or so closed off to feedback that they forced the developers to create something that’s unplayable to anyone but the person who thought it up.