Balrum: First Impressions

I've played this game for about 15 hours, starting over several times as is my wont. I'll rate them to how I personally feel about each.Here are some random observations:

Good: There are gobs of subsystems to play around with; cooking, crafting weapons and/or armor, farming, building, mining, alchemy etc.

Better: None of those are required. It is just as easy to pick one or two jobs and use those to purchase the needed items from other crafts. Let's say I use mining and sell off my extra ore to buy food and stay at the inn. If you choose to work every craft, you will be more powerful than someone who only dabbles, but they'll be out exploring while you are at home baking

Indifferent: There is almost an unlimited amount of stuff to find. From manure to diamonds, treasure can be found everywhere.

Better: Good treasure isn't only in chests. Mining will yield diamonds occasionally instead of stone or ore.

Best: There is a day/night/weather cycle and NPCs have schedules. Weather can cause both good and bad status conditions. It is easier to be electrocuted in a storm, yet fireballs are almost worthless

Good: Books and scrolls can create quests without ever talking to anyone.

Horrible: Quest directions and the map. The map is way, way, way zoomed out. For instance, the whole village where you start is about a 2 inch area on a full screen map. Individual buildings are tiny dots. You can label said buildings, so it's not a total loss. There are no quest directions. The game assumes that you know all that your character would know. You can press a key to show names, but it's not a good system.

Character presentation: You are a tiny little blob and can become a slightly bigger blob at max zoom in. However, the blob does change based on what you wear. There is no character customization as far as race, looks, etc. You are a human male in his early twenties.

Overall: I'm not sure if I'm having fun or not. There is a lot to do; almost too much. Most of it is very tedious: pick up herbs, mine rocks, water/manure plants, eat, drink, and even shit (there are outhouses). I haven't noticed any re-spawning yet.

crpgnut said:

I've played this game for about 15 hours, starting over several times as is my wont. I'll rate them to how I personally feel about each.Here are some random observations:

Good: There are gobs of subsystems to play around with; cooking, crafting weapons and/or armor, farming, building, mining, alchemy etc.

Better: None of those are required. It is just as easy to pick one or two jobs and use those to purchase the needed items from other crafts. Let's say I use mining and sell off my extra ore to buy food and stay at the inn. If you choose to work every craft, you will be more powerful than someone who only dabbles, but they'll be out exploring while you are at home baking

Indifferent: There is almost an unlimited amount of stuff to find. From manure to diamonds, treasure can be found everywhere.

Better: Good treasure isn't only in chests. Mining will yield diamonds occasionally instead of stone or ore.

Best: There is a day/night/weather cycle and NPCs have schedules. Weather can cause both good and bad status conditions. It is easier to be electrocuted in a storm, yet fireballs are almost worthless

Good: Books and scrolls can create quests without ever talking to anyone.

Horrible: Quest directions and the map. The map is way, way, way zoomed out. For instance, the whole village where you start is about a 2 inch area on a full screen map. Individual buildings are tiny dots. You can label said buildings, so it's not a total loss. There are no quest directions. The game assumes that you know all that your character would know. You can press a key to show names, but it's not a good system.

Character presentation: You are a tiny little blob and can become a slightly bigger blob at max zoom in. However, the blob does change based on what you wear. There is no character customization as far as race, looks, etc. You are a human male in his early twenties.

Overall: I'm not sure if I'm having fun or not. There is a lot to do; almost too much. Most of it is very tedious: pick up herbs, mine rocks, water/manure plants, eat, drink, and even shit (there are outhouses). I haven't noticed any re-spawning yet.

Click to expand...

There's no respawn. Enemies are places by hand, as are the treasures and chests.

crpgnut said:

Overall: I'm not sure if I'm having fun or not. There is a lot to do; almost too much. Most of it is very tedious: pick up herbs, mine rocks, water/manure plants, eat, drink, and even shit (there are outhouses). I haven't noticed any re-spawning yet.

Click to expand...

Great synopsis... except that last line.

Cracked me up. You don't know if you are having fun? Thats an odd statement after 15 hours.

Not really. I bought it with the idea of giving a review. I watch Blind Spot? with my wife and I can't stand television. I'm doing it for a reason other than fun. I bought Balrum because others had purchased it and weren't going into enough detail to suit me in the forums here I've posted more about the game than supposed fans.

As odd as it might sound, I am not sure if I'm having fun too.

I'd like to read more opinions from the watchers.

Here's the deal with why I might not really be having fun:

I've rolled a mage and want to cast spells. You can cast your beginning spells 4 times before running out and there is a very slow mana regen. To make a potion of mana regen takes a lot of herb gathering and alchemy and the bottles are expensive. You cannot kill any hostile creature in one cast as the average damage of your spell is 90-120 and a low level spider/wolf/rat has 1000 hit points. In most cases you cannot totally kill a creature with your magic at all, but will end up using your sword. Not fun. If I use my sword to kill, I'm a warrior.

However, this may change. My mage may become powerful enough to kill a rat after several level ups in the various skills. It will be a race to see if the tedium of crafting outpaces the joy of spell-casting. Every skill costs LP, like Gothic. Simple skills, like cooking, cost 2 LP to learn and then 3 LP to level to 2, 4 LP to 4, etc. More complex skills like Arcane Lore, which improves your spellbook, cost 500 Gold and 5LP to learn. However, you can't rely on just Arcane Lore as you need alchemy for potions, and mining to find enough things to sell to pay for everything. For every 5 minutes, I get to cast spells, I average an hour of other stuff that isn't as fun...

...but I'm just in the beginning area. I'm willing to invest more time to see if it might be fun.

Okay, let's say you want to make a iron staff or sword. In most games you find a piece of metal and perhaps place in a fire and bang on an anvil and you're done. In Balrum, you mine some iron ore. Okay, let's take it to the anvil and bang on it to make a sword. Nope. First, go cut down several trees. Place the logs in a fire and get it hot; adding the ore to the oven. This will make iron bars. Quickly take the iron out of the oven because if it cools off, you have to reheat it. Make sure your oven and anvil are close, they normally are if you are using the smithy. Now if you want your sword to have any other effects, you have to add each one of those, but I'm not sure if you can do several things at one time. I don't have all the necessary skills yet. I can just make a bar. Making a bar is time consuming and not fun. If I can make a powerful weapon soon, it will become fun.

Well, I was getting a little frustrated with the lack of learning points, so I fixed it. Balrum is linear and the game does not encourage replays. You could play another class but other than killing things, which rewards very little xp, the game will play out the same each time. However, there are tons of skills in the game that would require several replays to see all of them.

I found an exploit that allowed me to have as many LP as I desire. I've taken all of the miscellaneous skills and now the game is fun. I went from about ready to put it away, to really enjoying myself.



Note, the frustration wasn't from the fighting, this game is fairly forgiving if you are a patient collector. You will always have more healing than the monsters have HP. I just wanted to be able to mine AND farm AND make potions, etc.

Glad you figured out you are having fun

I had to cheat to have fun, but I'm having a blast now.

Wisdom said:

Glad you figured out you are having fun

Click to expand...

Hey, it takes some of us longer than others

Once you have enough LP, there is a ton of fun to be had making recipes for the various crafts. For instance, I like playing mages, so I have made custom gear that gives my character +1 Int and +1 Wis on every piece of armor. Now +1 isn't much, until you put it on 4 rings, a necklace, helm, torso, leggings, gloves, weapon, and boots. Now, my mage has +11 Int and +11 Wis. Mana goes up from 530 to 1000+ and I regenerate fast enough for a mage to become a viable way of fighting. Without the gear, a mage just cannot match the damage of a fighter.

Once I level up my weapon and armor crafting, those +1's can become +2 and then my mage will become a true powerhouse.

Alchemy also becomes pretty powerful starting at level 2 and you'll need smelting/mining to take advantage of the better crafting recipes. That's why I didn't understand the limits on LP. You need a lot of LP to do stuff that was built into the game. Earlier betas had more LP and less cost for the crafts. They changed it for some reason, but I find the game much more fun with all the bells and whistles. Combat can still be tough even with all of the crafting skills.

If I were to play the game straight, I'd definitely get armor crafting as my primary craft. The ability to buff your gear is just too much fun.

One more thing that I haven't mentioned yet: Balrum is huge. There are two large outdoor maps, each having multiple sections. Most dungeons are fairly small, but you do have several multi-level structures too. I thought I was almost done with the game and found out I was only halfway.

Seems you got hooked up

I drink too much. I tried eating cereal but my spoon wont even get the bowl

And how do you get unlimited LP ?

muhabor said:

And how do you get unlimited LP ?

Click to expand...

Yes tell us please ..

Unlimited XP is just storing books of knowledge in a container and then swapping out the .sav file of the map you stored them in:

Well, if you don't mind cheating, sure.
1. Go to a place that has a known LP book.
2. Make 2 saves. You can name them book and nobook for example
3. Grab book and save in one of the spots.
3. Exit to main menu.
4. In the game that you saved after taking the book, delete the mapname.sav file where you picked up the book. For instance darkforest2.sav. Copy the same file from the nobook save and paste into the book save. Now you have the book, but the book will be back in the game since you copied over the data from before you took the book.
5. Each time you do this, the number of books will go up by one. Once you have 5 books or so, you could move to a new map, drop the books into a container and save two copies. Then you'll go up by 5 LP books every time you do the save swap.

This is tedious, but I didn't want to replay the game 5 times to see all of the different crafting elements. I now have farming, cooking, smelting, carpentry, alchemy, craft weapons, and craft armor all in the same game. To be honest, it really doesn't make the game much easier, but it does make it more fun as I can swap between the various crafts once something starts to get repetitive. You'll probably want at least 30-40 books if you want to take every craft. It is about 7-8 LP to learn the first two levels. If you want all four levels then you'll need to dupe a 100 books or so

It takes me about 15 seconds to spam a LP book; most of that is waiting for the game to load.

Now with all of this said, if you're starting a game, I can just give you a safeplace.sav file where I stored 180 books or so. Believe it or not, you will need all of those points if you want all the non-combat skills. Let me know if you are interested.

What you would want to do is rename your safeplace.map or safeplace.sav file...I can't remember what it's called.

1.Copy my file into your game directory, when you are NOT at your safeplace.
2. Enter my/your safeplace.
3. Grab the books out of the chest in the nw corner of my little house. There are several chests with alchemy and crafting ingredients, that you can ignore unless you want a massive advantage.
4. Leave the safeplace and save your game.
5. Exit to main menu and then delete my safeplace file and replace it with your own.
6. Load your save.
7. Return to your safeplace and store the extra books. You probably don't want to give yourself more than 20 LP at any given time. I keep a stack of 64 books on hand and read the books before buying a skill.

I find Armor Crafting to be the most useful skill and it requires smelting, so that's another important skill. Also, note that you can only level up the first two levels of any skill until you get into the Balrum maps. The game is basically two sets of maps. The Darkwood maps and the Balrum maps. Each has 4 quadrants and several sub-maps.

Are those books the only source of LPs in the game?

Nope.

You get 5 LP every time you level. Leveling is on a curve though and there are no respawns.
There are probably half a dozen boss monsters that award an LP on defeat.
There are also the books of knowledge, which are mostly very well hidden. You have to be a master pixel hunter to find them.
If you look on the steam thread about skillbooks, you'll see that they're hidden pretty well. A random log, a burned up desk, a shelf behind some rubble, etc.