One of the great things about PC gaming is how many unique types of games that can really only find their audience on the most freeing platform imaginable. One genre that has always found success on PC has been the illustrious Computer Role-Playing Game (CRPG) with such classic titles like Baldur’s Gate, Planescape Torment, Divinity Original Sin, and Fallout. They have strong focus on strong Role playing mechanics often deriving from Dungeons and Dragons and have huge worlds to explore and tough challenges that will utilize your characters skills and abilities to give a really unique experience. Lets add the recently released Banquet of Fools which is one of the most unique takes on the genre with a bold visual identity and a strong focus on party based active combat.
A Strange Bizarre Land
Banquet of Fools premise is rather simple at first glance with you having to create a party of four adventures that you get to create from scratch or you can choose some pre-selected party compositions that work well enough. Of course I decided to make my own party with two of my party members being focused on melee combat with one using clubs and the other a giant spear. I then have the obligatory stealthy swordsman along with a magic based creator that does damage with thrown elixirs that do splash damage. I’ll get back to the complexities of character building and how it affects gameplay later but the important thing is I made my heroes, and our job is to investigate a mysterious island that many of its recent residents up and vanish by mysterious circumstances. Perhaps it could be monsters, mad deities, or foul play. It’s your job to find out what the heck happened.
The main story is pretty solid but it’s not the part of the game that really thrives in Banquet For Fools. It’s the worldbuilding and individual stories that are peppered throughout the game world. You could be helping a guard clear out a dangerous cave filled with giant rolly pollies, collecting berries for a local who wants to bake some pies, or even delving into crypts filled with ghosts and grave robbers. Each of these quests are really well written and add so much to the size and scope of the world. You get a look into the denizens of each little town and village you visit and what their unique problems are. Between the major cities you also encounter plenty of forests, wildlands, and caves that you can explore which can net you loot or precious EXP for leveling up your party members. It feels very reminiscent of the old Fallout games but vastly expanded to make traversing this world feel arduous but in a good way.
Leveling Up Your Merry Band Of Misfits
Like I mentioned earlier you can create four unique guards that act as your party for the entirety of the game. These are completely custom characters that you can create into the type of character you want whether it is a pagan mage that use vine magic, a warrior that uses clubs and can enhance the party’s weapons, or the tried and true thief with a penchant for lockpicking and sneaking around. It’s pretty tough deciding the stats and skills you want to prioritize and what race would be best for your party. The game does have prebuilt parties that give you examples of how you can build your party but that kind of ruins the fun of creating your party. You should experiment and see what works, which can create a unique memory of your party and why you made them the way you did. My recommendation is that you have at least one magic based character and some strong physical characters so you don’t get your clock cleaned like I did when I started playing the game.
It doesn’t end with creating your character in the beginning of the game though since building and developing your party members never stops as you level and earn points which you can put into one your attributes and your skills. You can even put a learning book on a skill you want to learn more quickly than others. Depending on your three most used skills you can even triple the upgrade speed of your skills which encourages you to build up your party members in unique ways. My one problem with this system though is that some skills are hard to build if you don’t have at least some points already into them like lockpicking and binding which can only really be trained if you can actually accomplish those tasks. My wasted attempts at lockpicking don’t really count as experience and left me just leaving those tasks for my rogue.
The cool thing though is that quests are a great way for you to upgrade the skills and attributes of your characters. You’ll get this cool animation of the party earning points into a certain skill or attribute relating to the quest at hand which feels awesome whenever it happens.
Flexible Characters, Great Writing
Now a question I can see forming in your head is, “doesn’t making your party from scratch mean that none of your characters have any personality or identity?” Thankfully, Banquet For Fools solves that problem by coming up with their unique take on conversations. Whenever you engage in a conversation with a character you will see the character rendered in the games engine along with four boxes representing your party and any member of the party could have a piece of dialogue to say which could lead to information or even skill checks based on your parties experience. The writing for these dialogue sections is articulated very well and the choices fit so well and give you a way to roleplay and see how your party members would best handle a conversation so you never feel like they are blank slates. Your mage might have something to say about magic, while your thief might be more cynical and might try to end the conversation.
The writing in general is top notch and it never feels like the game is holding your hand and spelling out everything. The game even gives you an in-game notepad which allows you to write important information that you might want to remember for later as this game has a very hands off approach to quest design and exploration. This allows for more organic encounters and the sense of exploration is really rewarding and never feels like your being funneled towards a specific challenge. If I had describe the way this game feels to me, its like a really good DnD campaign where the dungeon master gives you enough breadcrumbs and descriptions to make you feel lost in this world but allows you to make your decisions on what to take away from the experience.
A Cruel, Cruel World
I need to be very clear that when going into this game it can be a very cruel experience sometimes and you may feel discouraged at certain points about how brutal it can be. With the world design being so open it can result in you stumbling into enemies or encounters that you are dangerously outmatched for and can feel very defeating. One time I rested in the wild to recover some health and I was ambushed inside a cave with a bunch of spiders on crack who beat my party into next week and I had to go back to my last save which was 10 minutes ago. Another time I stumbled into a fort that was filled with tons of thieves that just overwhelmed my party and there was no way I could retreat to make up a plan for a second try. It can feel very discouraging at times to explore and be rewarded with a butt whooping that you couldn’t realistically defend against.
What doesn’t help this is the combat system which takes a lot from more action based games. How it works is every action you take in battle takes stamina, which is in the form of an ATB bar on the bottom of the screen. Certain stats determine how long it takes and can determine the flow of battle. When you attack you press the right click button which pauses the open action and if the enemy is in your reach cone then you can attack by using your weapon or casting a spell. With enough experience you can even learn advanced techniques like pinning, kicking, evading, and ramming enemies which have their own uses in the heat of battle.
Where the difficulty comes in is making sure you finish a fight before you take too much damage because the game can be very stingy when it comes to healing items. The only way to get healing items consistently is to purchase individual bottles in the canteen which is usually in any village you visit but the problem with that is that you go through these super fast especially when you have back to back fights. You can also rest with the use of a blanket but the problem there is that you may be ambushed into your sleep into another fight which can drain even more resources. It would have been nice to have a more consistent way to heal with magic, which to my knowledge is not possible.
Unique CRPG Made by Two People
I haven’t made my way through the whole game as this is a massive game that has definitely had years and years of development. It’s not just another fantasy game with elves and orcs, it’s a game that has a very unique visual identity. The world is very dark and drab, but the characters of the world are filled with life and I was never bored of what I was doing and wanted to see more of the world. The game isn’t perfect with probably the most contentious for me being the brutal difficulty and the pretty inconsistent combat at times, but perhaps it’ll grow on me.
Banquet For Fools is made by two passionate developers who have a very clear vision for this game which is super encouraging to me as someone who has played tons of these types of games and was looking a fresh take on the genre. The writing is tight and the world is massive and dangerous. Give this game a shot and I guarantee you will not be made out the fool.
9 — Superb
Review copy provided by developer/publisher/PR group.
