I picked up Karnage Chronicles the other day as a part of a VR Bundle sale (Incidentally it's also 60% off in the Steam store at the moment), and it's really good! It feels a lot like Vanishing Realms (which I've talked about in passing before), but with what feels like a bigger budget of a game studio behind it instead of a solo dev company. In fact after a quick peep at their LinkedIn Page, Nordic Trolls, seems to be a small 2-10 person team located out of Beijing.
Immediately what grabs you in Karnage Chronicles is the art style and the embodied choices for game selection. To choose one of the two classes, Warrior or Archer, you simply walk through a doorway. To choose a difficulty (easy, normal, hard, or impossible), you, again, simply walk through a doorway. That's great. Nobody wants clunky, ugly UI elements in a VR space . . . unless you're in Roblox. I jest. Even in Roblox it sucks.
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Being in this world feels like being inside a fantasy amusement park ride. Everywhere you look at a rock wall, there's also some kind of bioluminescence that gives the world a fanciful Underdark kind of charm. Just like in an amusement ride, there's pockets of decoration off to the side for you to look at. The puddles on the ground reflect this bioluminescent glowing as well. Around every corner is some kind of urn or bottle to break with a bow or even pick up to throw. It's just a fun world to be in. They've done really well making the cave system wind and turn and open up into natural rooms.
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The inventory system feels like a complete rip off of Vanishing Realms, but they've made some improvements to it. You can stack similar items! It's easy to drop and sell! But at the end of the day, it's exactly like the inventory in Vanishing Realms, which is good! I'd love to see someone innovate beyond this system, but as far as VR RPGs go, this is as good as it gets.
To be honest, live action melee combat is really hard to pull off in VR. It's super easy to get inside the middle of an enemy and slice around in a strange haphazard fashion that doesn't necessarily feel cool. Karnage Chronicles suffers from this. Archery in VR, on the other hand, always feels cool. In Death Unchained is still one of my favorite games in VR. I've raved about it before. Likewise, I love shooting arrows at things in Karnage Chronicles.
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So far I've been exploring Wyvernscale, which appears to be the first of three areas. In fact, as of writing this blog post, I believe I've just entered the second area Caves of Decay. Little hint if you play this game, there is nothing more valuable than the scroll of Town Portal. Every time you go to town, be sure to buy a new one because you won't stumble on a replacement while out adventuring. I can't tell you how many times I've been bogged down with a full inventory. Meh, inventory, the bane of all RPGs. Am I right?
At the beginning of the Caves of Decay, you run into an orcish innkeeper, a full size NPC, that is absolutely amazing. They really handled him well as a character. All in all, I'm really impressed with the art and sound in this game. It's just done extremely well. The way the sound echoes around the tunnels is amazing in a 3D space and completely unnerving in a good way. Immersion is the name of the game, and they pulled it off extremely well in this game.
Best part of this game of course, is that you can play it with friends. I'm pretty sure a group of us at work is going to jump into this game and play it together over lunch breaks. It seems to integrate really well with your Steam friend list. Because of that, I'm sure I'll have plenty more to write about Karnage Chronicles in the future. It's one of the great ones!
Happy Dueling!
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