Every once in a while you find a game that exceeds the individual pieces that make it up. and this is one such game. It's jank and the graphics are more Mount and Blade than Witcher 3, and yet... it is genuinely well crafted with open licence for imagination in a way I haven't seen in a while.

Do you want to clear a local mine? Well, you can finesse a local bunch of bandits into murdering the guards there, or betray them, or poison the guards and kill them yourself. Or sneak in overnight.

There's no VA, so it's story rich, but it uses it well and I already think I'll be back for another go.

I cannot for the life of me recommend this game to anyone. I want to like this game, the setting is amazing and the basic idea behind the game is equally so. The problem comes with the execution.

The most grievous problem is the dialogue skill use as you either have enough invested and win or not and you're useless. Play a dialogue heavy character and get into a situation that lets you beat it with having 6 diplomacy and 5 streetwise. If you have 5 diplomacy and 6 streetwise you're screwed. Everyone says that "you have to focus your skillpoints and specialize" and "you spread your skills too thin and that's why you didn't succeed", but it's really easy to specialize and still get screwed.

Second issue is that you can easily just get lost and have zero idea what to do, especially if you've taken a break from the game and don't remember every single piece of instruction you've gotten. "You need to find this dude in this city", problem being the city is massive and no one seems to have related dialogue options.

I really really really wanted to like this game, but it's just a really bad game. With more polish and a LOT more content in terms of quests and such might have helped the game to feel like you've always got something you can do to improve your situation, but as is this game is not worth the time and the effort.

Do you like suffering? Boy howdy have I got a game for you. Age of Decadence falls into the "Misery Simulator" category of games like Pathologic, This War of Mine and Fear and Hunger. You're not supposed to enjoy the game, but instead suffer though it. Combat is clunky and unsatisfying. Even with a build optimized for combat you can fail the first fight 6/10 times. The plot is incoherent and delivered in massive multi-paragraph info-dumps. In an attempt to avoid the atrocious combat I re-rolled as a character specialized in persuasion and streetwise, in order to talk my way though, but that just turns the game into running back and forth between multiple NPC's and clicking dialog selections over and over and over again. I'm rarely this harsh on games but my word, this game is the opposite of fun.