Falkenherz: Since my review doesn’t seem to show up on the game page, I post it here again:

HunchBluntley: I think reviews can sometimes take a while (even several hours) to finally show up on the game page.

Falkenherz: Yeah, that’s true. But I also have written reviews in the past that have not shown up until today, despite months having passed since.

Maxvorstadt: Oh, the game has a real story? Never managed to survive long enuff to see it, even on the easiest settings! Hm, does there maybe exist a fan mod which turns down the difficulty?

lepke1979: The story is mostly through the lore you find. The lore is random so I believe you need to play it more than a few times to get everything. Some can also be bought at shops. Lore will also unlock some classes too I believe. I forget what it's called (hidden fortress?), but the area where you can access your vault also has an area where you can access all the lore you have found between characters.

As for survival...You can either change the difficulty to Easier or set Permadeath to Exploration. The latter, you need to have donated/bought the game. Not sure if you needed to have donated/bought the game to change the difficulty.

Falkenherz: Since my review doesn’t seem to show up on the game page, I post it here again:

Tales of Maj’Eyal is a great game. That is until you reach the last third of the campaign where the game degenerates into a mire of convoluted, drawn-out, tedious battles that feel more like work than fun. Elite monsters with more than twenty talents, against whom devising a strategy equals writing a dissertation; buggy Enternal Bone Giants that resurrect endlessy despite the tool tip saying it should only work once (a bug which has been know for years and not fixed despite several updates); items with dozens of different stats each, coming from a pool of hundreds of different stats, making comparing them a dissertation again.

I've finally managed to beat the game on Normal/Exploration with a Cornac Berserker. My character was wiping the floor with enemies for the first two thirds of the game, only to get thrashed over and over again in the orc levels and High Peak despite healing, phasing and teleporation (and don’t get me started with the Fearscape). Hard to believe that any legit player ever managed to finish the game on Adventure or Roguelike Normal mode without wasting years of their lives by creating spreadsheets and flowcharts of possible actions and reactions every ... single ... turn.

So again: great start and middle, but the game should have ended after two thirds. Otherwise, playing the game in Exploration mode would have been a strong recommendation from me for people who like Diablo-style turned-based RPGs with a major focus on character development, equipment and fighting.

Maxvorstadt: Hm, maybe I reinstall the game, just to try it out a few times more. I wish, the game would be more like Hammerwatch, which is very hard but not as unfair as this game. :-)

cdnred: I haven't got far enough to judge the late (likely not even the middle) of the game, but I really enjoy it. I had played until recently on Normal Roguelike, but I decided I wanted to see a little more of the game and switched to Normal Adventure. The extra lives help a ton for those situations you end up in over your head.cdnred: I don't really feel like this game is unfair, though I definitely see why people would say that. You can be mopping the floor with everything you see and then all the sudden from off screen something nearly one-shots you. That's almost always (in my case at least) due to feeling over-confident and not playing cautiously. I haven't played Hammerwatch, I'll have to take a look.