In the latest RPG from Dreamside Interactive, you not only have to complete quests and kill enemies, but also collect herbs, cook your own food, craft better weapons from scratch and build a shelter from the icy element. Time waster? Definitely. But is it worth giving it to the game?
Naked and cheerful
Beginnings are always difficult. Frozen Flamewe start with a short tutorial that teaches how to run, jump and fight, and then move on to choosing the appearance of our character. In thin rags (and a female character with breasts on top) we enter Arcana – a beautiful, colorful fantasy world, where the first character we meet will ask us for help in finding a stolen backpack. And since the backpack is in the Forsaken camp, you will have to kill them. I will explain my first death by the need to study the game mechanics in depth, although throwing myself at three black characters with a small ax in my hand and being almost naked may have had more to do with it … But okay, nothing happened. On the second approach, I stormed the monster camp more carefully, collected my carcass and returned to the NPC for more tasks. It is necessary to fill them
With a makeshift hatchet and practically in my underwear, I’m off to do my first quest
How not to be a thin pain
First: extra skills. Increased hit points, faster stamina regeneration, higher jumping, stronger attacks? To unlock new attributes, we need the title frozen flames , which we gain with experience. Adding skills is possible at special altars, which also provide the option to reset all points and redistribute them.
Second: weapons. There are three ways to fight in the game – melee with a sword/club/axe (and other weapons, provided you can afford the recipes) and ranged – with a bow or a magic staff. In RPGs, I always go for the barbarian style – assault, kill, forget – or a silent killer in the shadows. However, until I learned how to dodge and dash away from an opponent, melee combat was quite difficult (add the weak armor to the equation) and the archery mechanics were a bit irritating to me. So I bet on throwing fire from a magic stick – and I have amazing fun with it (monsters are on fire to fight me). It’s also nice that I can switch to other weapons at any time out of curiosity and I will definitely do it again (a bone ax, larger than my character, is very tempting).
Selfie with the lady sorceress
Third: better clothes. At the beginning, we only have material elements of armament at our disposal, but as we discover more lands and unlock better workshops, we will be able to sew armor from good quality leather, carve from bone or forge from iron.
Fourth: sham! There’s nothing like a wild boar kebab eaten during a fight to boost your HP. The game is rich in flora and fauna, which can be freely mixed in the cauldron to create sophisticated dishes. It is worth having fish soup or fruit cake in stock if you lack potions.
Fifth: shelter. The world of Frozen Flame is bright and colorful and so fun, isn’t it? Yes, yes, until the sun goes down… With dusk, not only does the color palette become darker, but most of all, the earth begins to be covered with deadly ice. Walking around the world without a torch threatens to frostbite your limbs, so it’s better to stay overnight in a house, which of course we have to build ourselves.
I finally got dressed and found a nice helmet
Running, teleporting, bird
The world of Arcana is huge – as promised by the manufacturer, we are dealing with an open world genre after all . We can cover the road from one monster to another by running, without even burning so much stamina, but trusted portals known from every RPG come in handy over longer distances. What distinguishes Frozen Flameagainst this background, it is the possibility of turning into a great bird. This is a skill necessary to travel between the levitating islands that make up the second world, which we unlock relatively quickly. Flying between the suspended areas is quite a puzzle – the bird has limited stamina, so the route to the destination island must be planned, either by making stops or heading into the regenerating whirlwinds. Sounds complicated? Undoubtedly, this is an interesting element of the game and I still wonder if it annoys me more that I can’t just find myself where I need to be, or if I am fascinated by the need to think and combine in several ways how to reach the goal.
Will I come or will I not?
Hungry, cold and far from home
In 15 hours of playing Frozen Flame , I did rage quit twice- precisely because of the size of the Arcana, the inaccessibility of teleports and the distance between the air islands. My staff broke, my torch burned out, my breeches ripped off, and all that was left of my food was insect porridge. While the lack of reinforcements and sources of fire are not a problem at the end of the world (fruits and elements needed to light a bonfire are plentiful at every step), in the case of a complete destruction of the main weapon, you won’t be able to achieve much without a special workshop. The only thing left is to throw yourself into the abyss in despair, set off on the arduous road to the base or start building a house in a new place. I chose ALT+F4, but I didn’t sit still for long and just had to go back to playing. I got to my base and decided it was time to build. And so I discovered that I can craft a special crystal that will allow me to teleport from ANYWHERE in the world. Later, however, I found a way to finally make myself health potions and stamina – finally, no more running away from the battlefield and quickly eating wild boar stew in the bushes. There is so much to discover in the game that I can’t wait for more quests, NPCs, spots and annoyingly strong bosses.
The game is so extensive that I haven’t managed to mention the audiovisual setting yet. The graphics based on the Unreal Engine (for which the game received the “Innovative Use of the Tech” award) are more colorful than I would prefer (as a rule, I choose darker climates), but in terms of animation and details, I have nothing to complain about. The audio setting is excellent – ambient sounds build the world of Arcana, and the music creates a beautiful fantasy atmosphere – guitar, harp, flutes, violin sometimes energetic, sometimes sad, sometimes sublime.
Solo or with others?
Currently, Frozen Flame can be played by selecting one of two options on the start screen – locally and on private servers. Public servers are not yet available as part of Early Access and developers are heavily criticized for this in the first published reviews.
“Local” doesn’t mean LAN, it’s just launching a campaign on your Steam account to which you can invite your friends from the platform. With private servers, we have a choice: set up your own (the developer provides instructions on how to do it) or buy on one of the paid services (e.g. GPortal). It should also be added that the game is constantly being developed, and the developers listen carefully to the complaints and comments of the players and release updates and hot-fixes from time to time, e.g. fixed their mistake of making the possibility of setting up a private server available only through paid platforms.