Solasta: Crown of the Magister (2021)
According to Steam, I have spent just over 90 hours completing my first run through of this game, so while it's a game that can be completed in less time than that, don't be put off by speedrunners claiming it's a 'short' game. There's plenty to do in the game if you're not in a rush and enjoying the content enough to take your time taking everything in.
The game has a few things which I would say are not perfect for a perfect D&D PC game, but then what D&D PC games have ever been perfect, or even that close to being perfect. I would conclude and came out of the game feeling very satisfied with my time in the game and a bit sad that the adventure had come to an end, I would happily have played for many more hours before getting burned out.
So the not perfect things are:
Strangely enough, bugs aren't actually much of an issue. There are a couple here and there, but not anything game breaking. About the normal amount and kind of bugs you expect from any D&D PC game, as in the odd dodgy spell description, quest items that get locked into your inventory instead of being removed after the quest ends, weapons and items that claim to add +2 but when you identify them they are suddenly +1, that kind of stuff. Zero crash to desktops.
The only major bug I came across was while in the trading screen with a vendor, which ties into another not-perfect aspect of the game - that of the vendor inventory being tied to individual characters instead of the whole party. Difficult to explain in words, but when you sell things you have to sell all of character A's items before looking at character B's items they might want to sell, because when you click on character B's inventory while in the vendor window the game removes any items you've already put in the shop from Character A. And on more than one occasion this resulted in Character A's items vanishing completely into the ether.
This doesn't matter too much because you will mostly be selling junk items for the first half of the game as itemisation via loot doesn't play much of a part in this game, which is another non-perfect aspect, so you wont lose too much of interest when it first happens to you and you get to learn to adapt to the dodgy vendor windows.
The game wants you to either craft loot or buy your loot from factions that serve no purpose other than to sell you loot. As such, instead of filling its world with cool loot, it fills its world with crafting loot and junk items you can convert into gold and items that can be exchanged specifically for faction favour (gradually expanding their available stock). You can find the odd piece of nice equipment out in the quests, but not enough to be satisfying by itself. And, of course, there's not enough faction loot in the game to get max favour with each faction. And, of course, crafted loot will be gated by whatever is the rarest ingredient.
As such the excitement of looting is not as strong as it could be, at least in the immediate moment of looting a chest of powerful monster. Instead the excitement is a delayed one where you more often have to finish a dungeon with what you started with then once you've been back home and sold-up and restocked you can then start the next quest with marginally better gear.
Staying on loot, the 5e rules determine that even when you do start to get access to lots of cool loot, like the classic gauntlets of Ogre Power or the Amulet of Health and etc, you are only allowed to equip a maximum of 3 magical items that require 'attunement'. Not all magical items require attunement, just most of them. So you can't wear two rings, an amulet, a cloak and a nice set of bracers, you have to decide which 3 items most help your character. So when one quest awards you with 4 magical rings it's more like "well that's a bit useless now" as by that point everyone is already maxed out on magical items. And it's a bit tedious constantly taking short rests to re-attune items to be specific to any combat which might potentially be benefitted by a minor change in Magical items.
Now staying on the 5e rules for another non-perfect aspect, most of the spells require 'Concentration'. And you can only 'concentrate' on one Concentration spell at a time. So unless you have 2 Clerics you can't even cast Bane and then cast Bless, you have to do either one or the other and then that's all the Cleric can do buff or debuff-wise for the whole battle without breaking that spell. Some spells don't require concentration, just most of them. Mages have the same issue, as do rangers, etc.
So both the restrictions on magical items and the restriction on spellcasting make for a much greater sense of a regression from previous editions of the ruleset in terms of character building and general options. A sort of equal and opposite overreaction to the extreme buffing routines and loot pinatas of 3rd edition.
You might expect the argument to have the above is to help make combat harder and less obvious how the party is to win their combat encounters, however, this isn't the case. It's still very easy to end up with a party that can steamroll the content too easily with mages and Paladins still too overpowered even with the above limitations. and the rest of the character classes are still overpowered in their own ways too.
While it is most player's DNAs to want to go for whatever is the recommended strong party mix, I'd recommend doing the opposite for this game. Whatever people say is easy mode, go for the opposite. Make it hard for yourself rather than easy. Try to roll rubbish stats, go for characters without Darkvision and try to pick whichever subclass of each class looks or has the reputation to be the weakest. If you're already very experienced with D&D games and you like a bit of a challenge that is. Even with a strong party there'll still be some tougher encounters, but if you like the thrill of difficulty to be more consistently present than weakening your own party will be more efficient at this than anything in the difficulty options.
There's something a bit wonky going on with the dice rolls that goes beyond irrational bias, though specifically how to word it is too difficult at this point as the specific thing wrong with it is as yet not nailed down. But the enemy will rolls a gazillion more 20s than 1s and the human player will roll lots and lots of strings of very low rolls, etc. I didn't want to ruin my first run with pen and paper notations of the rolls but when I did the game consistently proved that the average enemy roll was always larger than the average party roll. Perhaps this was a tweak to make the game mildly harder.
All these things added together were not enough for me to dislike the game. Quite the opposite, I really enjoyed my time travelling around Solasta.
What we have here is a delightful and charming low level module that provides enough content of a good enough standard to be well worth the price of admission. It is probably more suitable as an introduction game to the genre than it is a niche game designed for pure hardcore D&D fans, but that doesn't concern me at all as it's just so nice to once again play a proper D&D game in the D&D universe after so many years of neglect.
Don't make the mistake of comparing it to Baldur's Gate 2 or Planescape Torment or even Pathfinder. It's a specifically low level adventure and should only really be comparable to BG1, IWD and ToEE, to which it's more polished and better paced than ToEE was at release, it's slightly harder and more detailed than BG1 was on release but not as hard as IWD, not as unique as BG1 and not as atmospheric as ToEE.
It's quite a jovial glossy game that might veer too much into the cartoonish for some people, but I think it has a nice balance between sincerity and buffoonery. Perhaps even a perfect balance. For me, the slightly wonky character models and dialogues added the perfect amount of charm to this overall aesthetic.
While the game might not fully satiate a life-long D&D game pro, it's nice to have a good modern example of the genre that would be very easily recommendable as a perfect first entry for anyone wanting to try out a D&D game for the very first time.
8/10