I bought the game from the dev's site when it first came out in 2011. I played through the entire game in one marathon session, which took me 20ish hours. If you like old school dungeon crawlers, you will love this game. You have a premade party, which seems like it was done to make the story work, but it's pretty open to how you develop each character's abilities. The game is very tongue-in-cheek, and the characters sometimes break the 4th wall. The dungeons are very well designed and many contain secrets, hidden areas, and puzzles(The Tower of Almost Certain Death is the best IMHO). The game is balanced around attrition, so if you never use consumbables or make poor decisions you will be going back to town to rest or reloading a lot. Most of the mainstream reviewers complained about this, but I didn't really have a problem with it. Judicious use of "liquid nap" potions and drama stars will keep you from going back to town constantly. It's obvious that the designer has a deep love and understanding about what makes old school RPGs work, which many devs who try to make new games with older styles don't understand. The only thing I have bad to say about it is that the UI isn't great. It's not horrible, I never had any problems figuring out how to do what I needed to do, but it could have definitely been more streamlined. Still, that is a minor quibble for what was overall a great experience. I'm looking forward to FK2.

edit: spelling

This game gives me the 3-D explore feeling of Bard's Tale, the repetitive combat of Final Fantasy, and the spells, traps, and combat engines of Elder Scroll games. Oh, and then it's got the character personality of Three's Company.

Frayed Knights is clearly a labor of love done by gamer enthusiasts in their spare time. It's the genuine indie article, and the developers did a great job bringing it to life.

This review is mostly about game play. You play this game for an RPG dungeon crawler. You don't play it for graphics and looks. The graphics do their job, but the beauty is in the mechanics, the characters, the humor, and the story.

This is a dungeon exploring game, with heavy emphasis on combat encounters. You will fight, gain xp and loot, level up, customize your character abilities, solve some light puzzles, and fight some more. Along the way you will also fight things. After that, you'll wander through a few zones fulfilling quests while fighting things. It will be a rare 60 seconds of wandering that doesn't have an encounter... and by that I mean more fighting.

You play a party of four adventurer-wanna-bes with a loser reputation. Each character is already pre-classed, and the balance is good: A fighter, a rogue, a sorcerer, and a priest. As you level up, you can customize them in any way possible, making the rogue a magic user, for instance, but the party you're given will save you some time and calculating. Many events in the game trigger entertaining dialog among the characters. It's the kind of tabletop style banter that is snarky, while still providing exposition, and makes you feel like you know the inside jokes they're tossing around. I never laughed out loud, but I smiled a lot and I liked the characters. I think the programmers had fun with this.

There are about 4 or 5 major zones in the game, one of them being a town. Each zone has a couple of "dungeons". Some quick, many are optional, but there's a lot of variation. The dungeons usually aren't starkly linear either, which is refreshing. The town is really boring, though. It's Elder Scrolls Morrowind boring. I wish it had all the same characters and one-third the size, with no superfluous buildings. I'm sure it was built for immersion, but you don't run very fast in this game so it became tiresome.

Combat fatigue is the main mechanic in the game. It controls everything. As you adventure about, you will experience random encounters, ambushes, and monsters walking about. Combat is turn-based, and each action your characters take uses up endurance. At any time you can rest to recover endurance, but you never fully rest up. The more that you cycle through your endurance meter, the more fatigued your character gets, until finally, the character cannot recover any more endurance by resting until he/she sleeps at an inn. The trick of the game is maximizing your character abilities and balancing combat choices to be endurance efficient so you can stay away from town longer. Rather than cast the giant overkill of a maximized sorcerer fireball, you can cast the efficient but slow-killing disease over time while your fighters whiddle down the baddies.

The combat system throws you a few bones though. One of them is a novel game mechanic called drama stars. Your stars fill as you win battles and stuff, then you can redeem them any time for stat buffs, resurrections, healing, or my favorite, a full endurance meter top-off. These are a neat perk, keep you adventuring longer, and they're meant to be used as you get 'em. If you load a savegame, you lose the stars. If you continue a game after quit (not the same as loading), then your stars stay intact. It's an incentive to not reload save games every time something bad happens. An RPG first!

Combat takes time and deliberate thoughtfulness. You will never get so strong that you have a one-shot "I-Win" button. Even very powerful AE spells never really take out a whole group. It's pretty much the essence of the game, and it's not meant to be a cakewalk. It can be hard.

There are an ample amount of potions and consumables that you can loot and buy. USE THESE. Use them all day long and do not hoard them! They let you win more battles with minimal endurance spend.

Your inventory is unlimited and this is handy. You just don't have to worry about returning to town to sell things or playing inventory tetris to make room for things. The merchants never refresh their sellables anyway, and most equipment upgrades will come from loot, treasure, and quests. Your money will be used for potions mostly.

A lot of time and energy was spent building a trap and lock mini-game. Well, it's not really a minigame, but there are endless ways to disarm traps and unlock chests. Do you want to disarm the trigger? or neutralize the trap payload? or perhaps some mechanics in the middle? It's cool that so much thought went into such a small part of the game, and it is far better than some of the lockpicking dexterity checks I remember from Elder Scrolls games.

The spell system is probably also overkill. I felt throughout the first 5 or 6 levels that I only had small percentage of useful spells. Then suddenly after a few more levels I had too many spells to choose from, and boosters for my oldest ones so they never became obsolete. There are just a lot of spells. I played the whole game and never cast all the spells that I had. I enjoyed the spell effects for what they were, and the witty descriptions, but it became tiresome to search through spell books all the time. A better spell interface may have helped here. There are spell casting hotkeys, but only for 3 spells. As the game needs a keyboard and mouse anyway, three hotkeys was too few. Ten would have been better.

As you level up, the game opens up in terms of character class customization. Just as with the spells and disarm options, there are a LOT of feats, skills, and abilities. Maybe too many feats. It doesn't matter. Pick fun things to do with your characters and do those things. I spent a little time microgaming and trying to optimize it, then I just said screw it and picked stuff that looked fun. I'm glad I did. Maybe all the options add to replayability, or to the RPG factor, but there's just no way you'll even get most the skills and feats available on any one character. Definitely get the feat that allows you to detect random encounters. If combat gets too repetitive, that feat will possibly save your interest in the game.

The graphic user interface itself is clunky and needs polish, but it is manageable. There are buttons in weird places, and it takes too many clicks to get to spells or inventory. It's also heavily dependent on keyboard/mouse. Luckily, the most common combat functions have keyboard hotkeys. A suggestion for next time would be tiny interface buttons for each character that you can drop in consumables or spells, a la Diablo.

So try the game out. Get past the graphics and the UI, and enjoy the billions of combat options.

A final note, there's humor in this game at every turn. It's subtle, it's smart, it's the kind of humor I would use with my own gamer friends. You're supposed to have a good time with this.

Thanks for reading.

This is a game by Jay Barnson, aka The Rampant Coyote, who does a great blog on CRPG game development. Essentially what you're getting here is a fun, humorous CRPG. The combat system is fairly complex, so you'll find much to enjoy if you like stats. You won't mistake this for Skyrim, but the graphics are pleasant enough and evoke a Might and Magic 6 vibe for me (one of my favorite CRPGs). Movement is first-person and combat is turn-based. Considering that all of this is the work of Jay and a few friends, it's really amazing what he's accomplished.

I posted a review of this game on my YouTube channel - just look for "Matt Chat 203: Frayed Knights."

If you can get past the UI and occasional lack of polish you'll find one of my favorite RPGs in a long time. While the storytelling is lighthearted and fun, the core game is deep and challenging. The combat is heavy into resource management and tactics often revolve around limiting the energy you spend while still overcoming the threats. The drama star system does a great job of helping you turn things around even when crap is hitting the fan and is far more satisfying than the average Save scum victories old-school RPGs are known for. If this isn't enough to satisfy you, there is quite a bit of customization that you can do to make the pre-made heroes your own.

I love this game and highly recommend it to anyone who still enjoys old-school RPGs.

I bought this game a little while back direct from the creator, I had a great time playing it. (and look forward to future sequels!)

This is one of my favourite games, due to it's mix of old school RPG goodness with great party banter, genuinely funny. It has various innovative features that I liked, the Drama Stars feature giving various bonuses and encouraging you to live with mistakes over reloading being one of my faves. The characters are very customisable, you can specilise or diversify as you like, if you want your Fighter to be a Paladin go for it.

So highly recommended, go for it! Watch out for the Rats of NOM!!!:D

Daniel.

So, here's a question for you, guys. Did you like games like Might & Magic VI, Wizardry 8 and Wizards & Warriors? Well, this game is nothing like those. Only it is. In a way. See, Frayed Knights is a parody game. But it looks so old school that it's really hard not to love it. Well, at least for the old farts like yours truly. Because modern kids? They'll probably feel like the game is plain ugly. But for those who remember the games above? It'll be a nice little surprise.

Don't expect any depth here, though. What we have here is a pretty small and limited experience that ends with a cliffhanger (it's really, really sad that sequel never happened). We have four pre-made characters who'll often say cheesy jokes, we have dungeons to explore, chests to loot and bosses to kill. Also, a lot of traps to kill you. You know... all the fun and adventurous... stuff. After all, the good adventurer is a dea... wait, that's from my evil manifesto. Forget you've read that. Anyway, that's pretty much it. Like I've said, it's a parody game without any depth. No big world (we only have one village full of filthy peas... I mean, good and kind villagers), no advanced casting mechanics (“I wanna cast Magic Missile!”), no complicated dialogues (“Swords, not words!”), nothing like that. The lock picking is probably the most complicated thing here. So, if you're one of those sneaky little hobbitses, you'll be right at home here.

There's still something fresh about this game, though. I'm talking about so-called drama points (Ah, the drama!), which will help you to survive now and then. Long story short, the game will reward your for your performance in battle and you'll be able to use the reward points for stuff like replenish your stamina points. Simple. Cute. Useful. The best thing about Frayed Knights, though, is just the fact that it feels good. Again, mostly for those who remember a certain time period, but still. The dungeons are fine, the battles are basic, but fun, puzzles are limited, but nice, etc. Frayed Knights is like Dink Smallwood for those who liked Might & Magic and Wizardry. It's one of those cute parody games done right. And even though I don't think I'll want to return to it any time soon, I totally enjoyed my stay here. The price is also pretty low. So... yeah. Worth it!

Overall a good tactical party-based RPG. Funny without being corny. It not only takes itself lightly, it mocks some of the common tropes of the genre.

Graphics are mediocre, dialogue is hilarious and riveting, and quests are often surprising.

Combat is not simply about killing the enemy, it is also about resource management. The more spells or attacks you use, the more tired your characters become.

Characters start with defined roles (thief, fighter, priest, sorcerer), but with open customization you can make them whatever you want.

If you want a good RPG but aren't afraid of a little sillyness, give Frayed Knights a shot.

So ... Frayed Knights.

It is one heck of a good game! It has it's pros and cons though. But I beat it, and here is what I think.

Let's get the bad stuff out of the way first.

1. Items and spell descriptions - Some of these can be totally wrong (I'm looking at you Peel Armor and Potion of Resist Disease), so it can get confusing. But once you figure out what they are, it isn't bad.

2. Quick spell slots - Only 3? That's right. So most of the time, you'll forget about your other spells. That is a pain. I'd suggest priniting out a spell list for yourself.

3. Stars - Though this mechaninc is neat in itself, losing it when you have to quit the game because of an emergency or something else while in battle ... and you LOSE all the stars you got? I can live without that.

4. Skill descriptions - Some can be pretty easy to figure out while others? I still have no idea what they do. Eh ...

~~

But the story (which I was very sad to see end) was great. There was a few twists in there that caught me off guard, and my dad and I had a few discussions over dinner on what we thought was happening and who the bad guy/girl was.

I did a Let's Play of the game on my You Tube channel which you can check out here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMRlAJ5VsPJWTIk-cWHFKiUyr4sgxy_Ed

Also, I did a bit of research, since at the end of the game, the party had hinted at a second one in the works. I found this page on the creator's blog http://rampantgames.com/blog/?p=7763 which was back in 2014. I tried contacting them about it, but no luck.

So if the developer reads this, I hope you continue to make Frayed Knights 2! Arianna, Dirk, Ben, and Chloe are all ready to continue their adventures.

A fine blobber with lots of witty banter. The only part of the game that I disliked were the random encounters - too many of them can be resolved simply by mashing the attack button for a minute or two until the enemies are dead. That kind of gameplay is not fun or interesting in any way; for the sequel, I'd prefer to see fewer, more complex encounters instead.

On the technical side: the game not very alt-tab friendly - the graphics can bug out and the fps can drop down to 3 FPS when you change back to the window. There's also a small bug where taking items with the "inventory" button (or by hitting the space bar) fails to trigger certain states. To be on the safe side, you should always use the "done" button when looting unique items.

A surprisingly deep dungeon-crawler, a-la Wizardry, with humorous writing and tons of quests. It's a bit dated, but if you're someone who likes old-school gameplay with a more modern spin, then you'll enjoy this game. Grab it when it's on sale.