The Necromancer's Tale Review

Greetings from the Van Elstrik manor, the site of your homecoming in The Necromancer's Tale. There are ghostly apparitions, hissed whispers, a potential murder scene, and a dangerous spellbook that’s yours to keep, but honestly, that’s just a handful of the weird, morbid stuff you’ll encounter on this journey.

Death and reanimation are as common as breathing in this narrative-driven, top-down RPG, so it’s no surprise the undead appear as early as the prologue. To win a six-year-long war waged between Venice and Rulsthen in the early 1700s, your father, alongside two other Rulsthen generals, obtained a spellbook to cast wicked incantations. The result? The dead walked the Earth, destroying the Venetians. It was a world-altering triumph, instilling fear of black magic in nobles and commoners alike. That victory also changed you, before you even knew it, as it solidified a path of revenge and necromancy that you wouldn’t be able to escape.

Despite what’s out of your hands, you do have plenty of choices when it comes to shaping your character. Through the interactive prologue, you get to select how you handled pivotal life moments before the start of the game, determining what attributes and career background you’ll take into the main narrative.

If you’re itching to jump right into the action, however, you can skip the short story and instead quickly set your skill points across nine categories: Strength, Agility, Constitution, Acuity, Knowledge, Investigate, Analyse, Impress, and Convince. What you invest in will determine what dialogue skill checks you can succeed at, and it’ll also set whether you’re an Academic, Military, or Diplomat, affecting how other characters interact with you.

Well-crafted stories can have their own gravity, pulling you in with every twist, every turn, just as The Necromancer’s Tale does. I’ve enjoyed the expanding plot, as it moves from investigating your father’s death to battling your ever-growing madness and need for power. The evocative writing makes the long descriptions a joy to read, from your character’s inner monologue to details about dark rituals, building the gothic atmosphere and tension in an immersive manner.

It is a lot of reading, as I said, so be prepared to settle in like you would a book. If you typically dislike visual novels or games that go heavy on raw text, then this might not fit the bill for you, especially since noticing small details within descriptions and dialogue can go a long way in making sure you’re not completely lost during your playthrough.

Across each chapter, you’ll have to translate a ritual or potion recipe from the aforementioned black magic book, which usually requires finding notes or a tome that decodes the language. With that done, you’ll source the spell’s components, such as bark or animal skin, and how you get those ingredients feels like solving a puzzle with many answers.

I love the variety of paths you can take to obtain what you want: blackmail, breaking and entering, purchasing from shady suppliers, and more. Early on, it was quite fun figuring out who to talk to and where to go, but that said, the loop did start feeling tedious in later chapters, as you have to do a lot of back-and-forth travel inside and outside the city.

The game’s Trust system is the main way you’ll develop your relationships, as you’ll garner a reputation with many factions and individual characters. I, honestly, did not take this as seriously as I should’ve in my first five to 10 hours, and ultimately became distrusted by nearly everyone, which caused me to restart my playthrough. Believe it or not, you can’t necessarily just ask every person you see about supernatural ingredients or talk openly about suspicions surrounding your father’s death (whoops).

The Necromancer’s Tale causes you to think carefully about what information you discuss, which immersed me deeply into each interaction — once I realised how frequently I could say the wrong thing. I found myself wondering what I could ask my friends or pondering which strangers I could trust in a much more serious manner than I’ve done in other RPGs. This strength can also turn into a frustrating aspect of the game, as well, though. Sometimes the decrease in Trust feels far too high a punishment when compared to the dialogue option taken.

While The Necromancer’s Tale drew me in with its layered writing, the turn-based combat was surprisingly dull and simple, but easy to pick up. As you’ll learn from the tutorial, your movement and attacks are connected to your Action Points (AP) while your spells draw on Mana; you can carry up to three unused AP points to the next turn. You don’t yield EXP from killing enemies, and usually there’s nothing to loot, unless you’ve killed human foes such as Brigands, which leaves most battles a bit unrewarding. Enemy variety is also lacking.

Additionally, fighting can be especially rough for certain builds. For my diplomatic character, being caught in melee range equals death, so my solution was to create distance and shoot with a ranged weapon. The problem is, ranged weapons shoot once and have a high AP cost to reload, so if you only have six points per turn and need eight to fire again, you’re forced to spend your turn simply getting your musket or crossbow ready. The solution to that problem is to carry several ranged weapons and swap them out rather than reload. However, to do that, you need to manually select the item from your inventory, which feels annoying to do multiple times mid-combat.

Battles get easier later when you have undead allies on your team (you are a necromancer, after all), but to use these minions, you need to spend Mana Points (MP) to control them. You can only activate one Skeleton at a time, for instance, with each activation costing two MP. After casting the spell to control your minion, you need to move and attack, spending their AP before passing control back to your character. This added step to simply direct your companions mid-battle adds to the clunky, slow feel of combat, especially when you amass a large number of followers. It would be smoother if, once you end your turn, the game automatically moved to an ally, giving them a separate turn.

There’s little more to say about the combat. For more than 30 hours, it remains rather basic, which won’t satisfy those looking for deeper tactics, and what is there is clunky to use. On the bright side, you’re not being thrown into fights every minute. Those sections are sparse, as you’ll mostly be interacting with NPCs and fetching ritual items.

Though I didn’t feel satisfied taking down Guls or Zombies, what did feel rewarding was exploration. Whether I stumbled upon stashes of alcohol, lovers having an affair, or first edition books to steal, The Necromancer’s Tale’s world had many fun discoveries and noting specific details about your environment can be helpful in later chapters. I did wish that physically navigating the world was more enjoyable, though. The city layout is a bit too easy to get lost in, lacking intuitive paths and distinct landmarks to help you find your way. Additionally, interiors were tight, so I got caught on furniture and other characters frequently.

Unfortunately, I did experience a few technical hiccups during my playthrough, such as crashes or my character falling through the ground and into the void. There were also a couple of times where my character would continue walking even after I stopped pressing movement keys, which sent them into walls or off-screen.

The Necromancer’s Tale is a well-written game that could do with an improved combat system, but if you’re looking for a story with secrecy, regrets, coercion, seduction, and murder, then you’ll find it here. Even when I hit the 30-hour mark of my playthrough, I was gripped by the amazing story unravelling before me, making up for its rougher gameplay edges.