How offended I was by “Immortal”. Tales of Old Rus'“

Before I start the story about love and hate in Russian game development, I’ll tell you a little background.

It’s worth starting with the fact that I didn’t have any hopes for the game Immortal. Tales of Old Rus‘ . I’m very far from Papsuev’s universe, and I missed the game’s early access, so the release of a card roguelike in a Slavic setting didn’t particularly interest me. But everything changed after I visited Red Expo. There were always a lot of people at the game stand, and they were clearly passionate about the process. I looked at some nice art, felt the atmosphere, and even stole a beautiful poster. And then, by a happy coincidence, the key to the game fell into my hands. And unexpectedly for myself I fell in love.

I unironically began to enjoy it from the first minutes of launch. Before I knew it, I had played for 6 hours in two sessions, although it seemed like I had just turned on the computer. But this is rather a merit of the original: Slay the Spire was addictive like a drug. While I had it on my phone, I couldn’t do anything other than play it. Damn game… So the authors of Immortal did not break what was already working well, and the main mechanics were carefully transferred to the SSR.

What do we have? This is a nice card roguelike. There are four heroes with attack, defense and unique skill cards around which their tactics are built. Each hero has his own little plot: find his sister, take revenge on an old enemy and… something else. The plots are not of particular value and are not going to compete with novels. I have already forgotten some parts, and this is not the main thing – after all, the ultimate goal of the game is to defeat Koshchei (this is not a spoiler, his name is literally in the title). The main thing is that it’s fun to play. The cycle “Start the game, level up your character, lose/win, open new cards” is addictive.

Even a quick glance reveals that this is a hybrid of Slay the Spire and The Darkest Dungeon. The authors took a lot, but did not forget to add unique features. I won’t go into them in detail – there is a cool material about this from Katerina Krasnopolskaya. I was captivated by the setting.

The setting of old Russian fairy tales is very familiar and pleasant. Colorful characters and monsters delight the eye. Objects familiar from children’s fairy tales evoke warm feelings, and how wonderful it is to play for your favorite hero – Dobrynya! True, evil spirits sometimes deviate greatly from traditional Slavic folklore and turn either into a product of Cthulhuism or into an element of Gothic fantasy.

Video backdrops of forests, fields, swamps and other places of folk battles, along with a wonderful soundtrack from the author of Pathfinder, left me no chance not to fall in love with this game.

I spent 23 hours in the game and was determined to write something laudatory. Talk about the disadvantages, but convey to the reader that the game is cool! Of course, during this time I noticed some shortcomings.

No matter which character you play as, you will have the same tactics. Yes, Varvara can move opponents around the field and drag them to her side; Dobrynya, like a real hero, can give strong slaps and wrap himself in armor so that even a cannon shot cannot penetrate him; Vasilisa has fairy mothers who are charged from played cards and can both shoot with fire and protect from misfortunes, alternating this with unimaginable buffs; and Alyosha (local Geralt) has a unique mechanic for overheating a wooden pistol… which multiplies its damage. It seems to sound like each hero is unique, and so it is, but this uniqueness is of little use.

To a lesser extent, https://jammyjackcasino.uk/bonus/ it all depends on what cards you collect on your journey or which of the three options you choose at a classic fairy-tale crossroads. The main role is played by local curiosities – artifacts with passive skills that can be obtained as a reward for battle or bought in the store. You can collect a great set of cards, but get useless artifacts and have difficulty getting through the second boss out of four. Or you can assemble such an “imba” that you can easily demolish even the last boss. And for every hero this rule is the same.

Essentially every run is the same. You see a pendant icon at a crossroads and go there in the hope that something good will happen. But it didn’t spoil my enjoyment of the game.

It wasn’t spoiled by confusing descriptions of card effects either. There could be such a situation: cards impose a unit of “Bleeding”, “Burning” or “Dizziness”. Attention, geeks, try to guess what each of these effects does? The correct answer is the same. They all deal damage equal to the number of effect points. And I still don’t understand what the difference is between “Fortify”, “Starting Armor” and “Toughness”, or between “Finishing” and “Crush”. There is a difference, but minimal.

But every skill – positive, negative, every gift, boss skill and condition – has a small icon. Some icons are unique to certain mobs. And the further you advance, the more effects you impose on yourself, and the more difficult your opponents become. As a result, at the final boss the screen may be littered with two dozen such icons.

The screen is not mine, but the picture is clear. These yellow, green and blue icons are a small part of what can be on the screen.

And it’s hard to navigate. At the average difficulty level, you simply apply positive effects to yourself and negative effects to the evil spirits. All this works until the final boss – Koshchei. But my patience ran out on him.

Pay attention to this picture.

It depicts the paths of heroes. You need to go through a small chain of quests to unlock Koshchei. And solely on the desire to defeat the enemy and see how the story ends, I dragged myself and went through the same cycle of races over and over again. And so, when 20 hours later I got to the main evil, the game politely told me – “Go through the game 4 more times.”. And not just to go through, but for each hero several times". And from such a disregard for stretching out the final stage, my patience ran out. How many more times do I have to do the same thing before they show me the unfortunate end credits??!

And you might think that you just need to put together a more impressive build and demolish the boss, but no. The game has a limiter. If you haven’t defeated every final boss for every hero, then Koschey is so awesome that even if you had all the wonders of Old Rus‘, you won’t survive even his tenth attack.

And I decided to count how many identical runs must be made to beat the game. A moment of entertaining mathematics!

Each hero has 5 mandatory points. You can’t do them in one run. Even if you met the conditions at the very beginning of the journey, the next stage is at the next race.

4 heroes, 5 stages each – 20 races. Ideal, provided that you did not lose, did not miss the task and successfully completed the run. The margin of success in my case was approximately 25%. T.e. to open up the opportunity to fight Koshchei, I made at least 25 identical forays. And if you consider that at first I was just learning to play, the number is a little higher.

But let’s stop at 25. 25 identical games and the boss is open to your helpless attempts. Final fight and game over. But no. Now, be so kind as to make 2-3 more forays for each of the heroes in order to collect the final bosses and a more or less normal build. That is, another 8-12 attempts + 3 errors.

In total, the game wants me to beat it at least 40 times. Moreover, all content ends on the twelfth attempt. There are no new mobs in the game, no modifiers, no bosses, no skills. Just kindly repeat until you go crazy or run out of patience.

I ran out of patience and successfully deleted the game. Perhaps someday I will return and try to defeat the Immortal. But for now, this is the most mediocre and blatant waste of time I’ve seen in a long time.

Yes, this is not an analytics post, but an ordinary whining of a person who is upset in the game. At the beginning of the passage, I sincerely wanted everything to end as rosy as it began. But everything was ruined either by the inexperience of the developers or by poor balance, which makes the final boss impassable even on the most immaculate build.

I will gladly buy the art book and soundtrack to support the developers, because their project still has more pros than cons. And I really love the Slavic setting, so I cannot be indifferent to projects that glorify folklore that is close to me.

Have you played Immortal?. Tales of Old Rus‘? Tell us about your journey. Maybe it’s just me who is so armless, and the game is actually very easy and fast.