This is a tough one to write. I know it says “Recommended” up there, but bear with me, it gets a bit more complicated than that.

First things first: this game is a sort-of sequel to the Quest for Glory series of point-and-click/RPG hybrids from the 80s and 90s, and if you haven’t played those, then I can only recommend skipping Hero-U for now and playing the QfGs instead. They are wonderful, timeless games which, while they have their own quirks and their ups and downs, are some of the finest retro gaming experiences you can have – and twenty years later, there still isn’t anything quite like them out there. I love them dearly.

And this brings us to Hero-U: a kickstarted game intended from the start to bring back the unique blend of gameplay styles and charm that the QfGs were so famous for. And if you’ve played the QfGs, you’ll feel immediately at home here. The elusive spark that the Coles’ earlier games had is very much present and accounted for. If you haven’t played the QfGs, though, it’s going to be quite a different story, I’m afraid.

The basic idea is fairly simple and best described as QfG2 meets Harry Potter. You’re a student at a fancy fantasy school in a large mysterious castle and the game story develops over the course of two terms during which you have to constantly split your attention between your everyday studies, relationships with your classmates and the occasional scripted emergency that you need to handle. It’s an elegant structure and it works… up to a point. But we’ll get to that in a bit.

It’s immediately clear that we’re looking at a low-budget production here, but the budget wasn’t wasted. I’m not terribly fond of the 2D art style, but the 3D looks quite nice and works well. Confining the entire game to a single location is a logical choice and there are more pathways in the castle than it seems at first glance, and while the number of characters was obviously kept to the absolute bare minimum, no one can complain there aren’t enough words on offer and the characters are often an interesting bunch (the major exception being the Draco Malfoy substitute who is entirely one-dimensional and surprisingly irrelevant to the story).

And this is also where I will happily call the game a success – just like the QfGs were ultimately about friendship and about people getting together to make the world a better place, Hero-U remains profoundly cheerful, optimistic and warm. It’s often silly and very fond of its endless bad puns, but even when it gets slightly more serious, it never loses its charm. I love that about it.

And finally, while we’re talking about successes, the idea of a school game with gameplay wrapped around a strict schedule and a constantly ticking clock as well as the trademark combination of RPG-light and point-and-clicker are both solid and lead to interesting situations and decisions. Good! That’s all good!

So why was the first paragraph so hesitant, I hear you ask? Well, here comes the unpleasant bit:

Hero-U has two major problems, both impossible to ignore. The first? The game is long. Very long. Far, far, far longer than it had any right to be. And while it can be very enjoyable at the start, when you’re still learning the ropes and figuring out when is the best time in your schedule to sneak in some extracurricular activity, this soon gives way to routine and routine quickly becomes mind-numbing tedium. The game is spread into an incredible 50 days, which I’d argue is about twice as much than it should have been, particularly considering that most of the interesting stuff happens in the first term and the second is mostly dedicated to dungeon crawling. Lots and lots of dungeon crawling.

And speaking about dungeon crawling, let’s talk about combat – it’s not like the turn-based combat system is bad, it’s not (though it seems to me that it would work a lot better with a party than a single character; giving you various options and tools is nice, but at the end of the day, a turn in which you’re not dealing damage does not bring you any closer to victory), but it’s also not terribly interesting. And there’s just so much combat, so much more than you’d expect and so much more than would be reasonable, that it’s bound to get annoying sooner or later. Probably sooner. (You can, in theory, bypass all combat by sneaking. This would be nice if sneaking wasn’t so excruciatingly slow, making even milquetoast combat far preferable.)

And then there’s the second big problem – the school terms are heavily scripted. If something is to happen on day 36, it will happen on day 36, no matter what you do. Unfortunately, being a Rogue is often about breaking rules, something that you’re very much encouraged to do, leading to a constant tension between which rules can be broken within the game world and which are actually absolute commandments of the game designer and as such unbreakable.

To give an example – one of the first major events is spread over several nights in which Stuff Happens. You are told you need to stop this Stuff, repeatedly, and it’s the kind of Stuff that you’d very much expect to be able to stop, so you explore and you talk to people and you try everything you can think of and keep reloading and wondering what is it you’re doing wrong, until you give up and proceed with the game and eventually learn that it's literally impossible to stop said Stuff from happening until you reach a specific day and the game designer gives you the go-ahead. Options that never existed suddenly spring to life and there you go; the task was actually perfectly trivial. The very worst case of this is a task that you receive, with some urgency, quite early on, to break into a location that you just know you’ll have to break into eventually, but you can’t… until day 49 out of 50 when the solution to the conundrum is handed to you on a silver platter. It’s pretty much the last thing you do in the game. And all your earlier attempts were a complete waste of time.

But, on the other side of the spectrum, there are also tasks that have a very narrow window of opportunity and if you miss them, they’re gone forever – one of them with some pretty major consequences. And how can you tell which of these two types of tasks you’re looking at? Well, you can’t. (It seems to me the rule of thumb is that if something doesn’t appear in your journal’s “To Do” list, it’s not actually doable yet, but it took me almost until the end of the game to figure this out.) So a lot of the game is spent in a state of confusion – is this a puzzle I can’t seem to crack or is it not even a puzzle at all? Am I wasting my valuable in-game time by trying to solve this puzzle or am I wasting my valuable in-game time by ignoring it? Is this decision going to haunt me ten hours of gameplay later? (In fairness, it probably isn’t, but the feeling is very hard to shake off.)

This isn’t helped by the game’s extremely uneven pacing, again largely dictated by the ridiculous 50-day length. There are periods that are far too intense and where every minute counts, and periods where there’s nothing to do – such as the very last week which, instead of building to a crescendo, is spent just idly roaming about and wondering whether you’re missing something very obvious or whether there really isn’t anything else and the game might have easily ended hours ago. And at the end of it all is a rather deus ex machina ending that wraps up things quickly and unsatisfactorily. And all that’s left is a sad conviction that if this game were half or even third the size, it probably wouldn’t have taken so long to develop and it would have been so much better.

Hero-U amused me and delighted me and bored me to tears and annoyed me almost in equal measure. It’s definitely not a failure, but it’s not quite a success. Recommended? I honestly don’t know.

I still do recommend the Quest for Glory games, though. So much.

In this game, you play the part of Shaun, a "Disbarred bard" (because there are no rogues) at a school for heroes.

Much like the Quest for Glory series by the same creators, Hero-U is on the "RPG" side of the Adventure RPG spectrum. Rather than pure adventure games where the core loop tends to focus around acquiring and combining items to solve puzzles, the core loop of this game is focused around improving your skills and stats, and passing skill checks to advance.

Fundamentally, time is the currency in this game. Every action from talking to your classmates, to improving your skills, to walking through a dungeon consumes a fixed amount of time (standing still does not). Shaun's semester has a set number of days, and events will happen on certain days. Much of the game revolves around making good use of each day in order to balance gaining the skills you will need with solving the problems that Shaun and his friends are faced with.

Overall, if you liked the Quest for Glory series, this is an excellent game for you to try.

Pros: The story is entertaining, with a good cast of interesting and memorable characters. There are typically different ways to solve problems, whether that be by brute force, stealth, or smarts. The game has the same wry humor that was found throughout Quest for Glory, without detracting from the rest of the game. Combat, while not the key focus of the game (and in fact entirely avoidable) is pretty good, and there are an assortment of runes, traps, and items that make combat about more than just "pointy end goes in the other guy".

Cons: Events and quests happen on a fixed schedule, and in one case, it's not clear to the player that in order to progress further on this particular quest, you must wait until more days have passed - it can be frustrating to try to solve a problem that can't (yet) be solved. The UI can be a bit clunky in that all item and object usage is effectively through dialog-style interactions with objects in the world.

I would absolutely recommend Hero-U: Rogue to Redemption - and not just becase I backed it (2x) on Kickstarter.
This game is a mix of really thoughtful puzzles and those fun old school Princess Maker games - It sounds weird - I know - but it works. And if you loved Quest for Glory - this will give you a ton of throwback feels.

You are a young man - Shawn - who gets sent/sentenced to a few semesters at Hero-U a prestigous school where you are not prestigous at all. During the start of the game you only have access to a small area but there is so much to do you will find yourself running and running out of time each day.

Each day you attend class and then find things to do that improve your character
- do you want improve agility and climbing - walk the tightrope in the gym
- do you want to learn how to open all those pesky locked doors - first you have to get in the locked lock room
- do you want to learn magic - attend an elective - but you'll have less time to do anything else
- do you want to earn money - get a job - work in the kitchen, kill some basement mice
- do you want to have an adventure - find a secret passage - solve a mystery

The more your skills increase the easier it is to earn money and figure out secrets about the school and your very well written classmates.
Just remember you have limted time each day to get everything done.

I really enjoyed this game so far - it is not a quick afternoon game - you will spend alot of time with Shawn and some things are triggered by the day and time in game. You never know what skill or conversation will be important in the future. That apple you stole could save the school. Give it a try!

Well I’m only a few hours in so this review will probably be updated over time. I’m a huge Quest for Glory series fan, so much so that I run a Quest for Glory Website[blakessanctum.x10.mx] that tributes all the awesome QFG related fan projects out there, and I’m also the creator of the Quest for Glory IV 3D Hexen project:
https://youtu.be/d7HBenoe_Lc?list=PLZqnaGtTZxFYPoZDeuw0YobE6gBd_w9Z9
So yup, I’m pretty sure we can all agree I’m a QFG addict lol!

When the first kickstarter arrived I wasn’t massively impressed with what I saw but I supported out a loyalty to the Coles and to thank them for all the years of joy their previous games had given me, I even promoted Hero-U on many sites but deep down I was worried I would not like Hero-U at all. The second kickstarter abated some of those worries as the product started looking a lot better like a proper Coles adventure RPG game but I was still a bit worried.

Well now the game is finally here and I am very relieved to see that my fears were not necessary as the final project is a great game that plays very much like a modernised Sierra game of old and most importantly it has that great QFG feel to it.

One of my favourite pastimes in the quest for glory series was to break in to someone’s house at a thief, save my game and then find out all the different hilarious ways to die eg step on a cat, play some music, turn the lights on, and open the bedroom door etc. So I was quite thrilled to see the opening scene in Hero-U recreated this experience perfectly. It really took me right back to the old granny's house in QFG1 haha. You get a nice piece of artwork for all your failures/deaths so now I pretty much want to find all the ways to die just like in the sierra classic of old. DEATH BY BUNNY FU lol!

The school is a massive place to explore and there are lots of interesting quirky characters to interact with. A recent patch has slowed down the game clock giving you more time now to explore the world around you and get up to no good. ;)

I’m having a lot of fun and will write more soon. At this point in time I definitely recommend it to others, especially fans of the Sierra/Lucusarts classics and retro gaming. :)

Pros:
- Really recreates that classic sierra point & click adventure game look and feel
- Has the cool RPG exploration and combat elements of the Quest for glory games.
- Full of awesome QFG & Sierra references that will have you examining every painting, statue and book for awesome Easter eggs.
- Full of great characters and the classic punny humour we loved in the Coles previous games.

Possible Cons for some players:
- Graphics look great to me but judging by feedback from others, some modern AAA gamers might feel it’s a bit primitive.
- Slightly feels like your parents made this game. Because well.. in reality someone’s parents actually did make this game haha! Expect lots of mum & dad jokes and a main character who has an annoyingly 'cute' face with bright pink cheeks lol.
- Similar to QFG2&5 (my 2 least favourite in the series) the game is very locked into a timed events system which means you can miss things or not developed your character as much as you want. EDIT/UPDATE: A recent patch has greatly improved this by slowing down game time. Everyone should be able to hopefully do what they want now without feeling like they’re missing heaps.

So then..
Will I finish this game? YES (I usually prefer to wait until a game has finished being patched before I finish it so don't time me on this lol).
Do I recommend this game to others? YES
Will I back a crowd funding campaign for the sequel 'Hero-U: Wizard’s Way'? YES

This game really feels like a love letter to the fans of the old Quest for Glory games. I can't get enough of it.

You've got the old progression system where you gain skills by doing them, you've got the scripted events that still give you a sense of personal agency throughout.

It's like sitting down at the Cole's table and playing D&D with them as the Dungeon Masters.

The writing is decent. Playful, doesn't take itself too seriously. Maybe too many puns. If you don't like puns, you'll haaaaate the dialogue. But it still sets a good tone.

The school that the plot centers around feels small at first, and then you start to see more and more of it. The game rewards you for pushing your own boundaries, but never pressures you. You can easily get lost in the day to day, talking to your classmates, avoiding filthy Terk the Jerk. The joy when you realize you can break into his office. The sheer malicious JOY.

But really, Hero-U feels like an early 90's Sierra game. I didn't know how much I was craving more Quest for Glory until I played this. Those games always had a sense of wonder to them. It FELT like a good fantasy setting where anything is possible, along with a sense that you have to work to surpass the obstacles in front of you...

I pray this does well enough that there's more. I will be there for every single one. And if you like slower paced RPGs with an emphasis on dialogue, and a more intimate, clever adventure, this is the game for you.

If you learned English by obsessively typing “PICK UP DAGGER, THROW DAGGER” a hundred times a day, forever, this is for you. If you followed a White Elk into the forest and fallen in love with a Dryad and the Gods listening in on Erana’s Peace, this is for you. Made unapologetically for the die-hard Quest For Glory fans, Hero-U exceeds the sum of its parts to deliver an experience that is part journey through time, part heartfelt tribute to an innocence you believed long lost and a damn addictive game in its own right.

The Coles could have rested on their laurels and produced another clone of their widely popular Quest for Glory 1-4 and glided on nostalgia, but instead they decided to expreiment with new mechanics, similar to what they tried to do in Quest for Glory 5 (which had mixed reviews), and for that alone they deserve respect.

However, unlike QfG5, Hero-U is a lot more successful. Long time QfG fans will find the familiar sense of humor, continuation of the world building of Gloriana, puzzles with multiple solutions, and RPG elements. However, where the older games were essentially adventure games with RPG elements, Hero-U tips a lot more towards RPGs with a bit of visual novel thrown in. And it works quite well! Also the combination of a huge map and a real time system gives you a sense of urgency we last saw in QfG2, which is something that new comers might find a little bit daunting at first. Time management becomes just as important as exploration and puzzle solving. Do you continue searching the catacombs, or do you call it a night since it's late and you have class in the morning? This kind of decision making keeps the game from becoming just a repetetive "school sim".

The game is not prefect. There are still some bugs, the game world can sometimes feel too open ended, and some puzzles can get a bit frustrating especially since time is ticking (travelling from one location to another takes time) which limits your ability to meander around.

All in all, it's a rewarding game that encourages multiple playthroughs and a worthy successor to the QfG name. I for one cannot wait for its promised sequel!

Note: this review is based on the pre-release beta version.

An engaging story, fun characters, enjoyable character building, meaningful choices. Lots of puns and Cole humor. A couple of warning, there are some puzzles that are time locked, although it feels like you should be able to solve them earlier, and other puzzles with an easy-to-miss deadline if you fail to see a turn in the caves or catacombs. My real beef with it, though, was just how short it was! There's clearly more to the story, and I would love continue! Definitely supporting future games.

Hero-U: Rogue to Redemption is a combination between a RPG and a Point & Click adventure game with (optional) turn-based battles. It comes from the creators of the successful series Quest for Glory (Sierra).

Within this game there are many allusions to older games, thus creating an entrancing atmosphere for many players who experienced memorable moments in those games as well.

The game begins in the prologue, when you are introduced to Shawn, the MC who you shall follow. He needs to steal something specific from a house in order to become a member if the Master Thieves Guild. The theft is meant to proof his worth as capable thief; however, things do not always go as planned.

The following scene sees Shawn in a school of sorts. This is a school for educating heroes, where the adventure really begins.

Like in any other P&C game you can interact with much of the environment. This game allows you to interact with quite a significant number of them as well.

The game also gives the player plenty of freedom. Your play style and your response to multiple choice questions lead you down very different paths within this agme. Your decisions will determine your future actions, your enemies, your battles (if that’s your style), etc.

There are many NPCs with whom you try to build up your reputation within this game. Your interactions with them and the choices that you make determine how much they like you, and thus your reputation. These individuals are shown on the left side of the screen, making them easily accessible.

There is a full character menu showing you your abilities and skills. These can be upgraded by performing various tasks, answering questions accordingly. In here, you are also shown your reputations with the other NPCs, as mentioned above. In addition, you have an inventory for storage of environmental objects as well as equipment. There are many predetermined equippable slots that you can use for your character to customize your playing style or to try to tackle the game in a specific manner. In addition, you have a journal that shows you what tasks you have completed and what else you will need to do. Your notable achievements are also listed.

The setting of the school is a castle. And this castle is very big, there are many places to go and plenty of things to do.

Hero-U has a continuous clock for your days, there are days and nights, people’s move to different locations based on time and situation. And you have to eat at specific times. There are also curfew rules that will incur a penalty, should they be violated.

A downside of the game, in my opinion, is that you only have a limited number of days (I think it was 50 days) This made me feel I need to rush things and cannot examine everything, which is not a good thing in these kind of games, at least not for me. You do have plenty of time, to do a lot, just not enough to do everything. I think this gives you your selective adventure for your run, and you can replay for other aspects to your liking.

The character movement can be a bit slow in this game, even if you use the faster moving option provided. While this unlikely to change, the count down in days and the continuous time flow in-game makes the slower movements seem a bit more stressful.

If you decide to participate in battles, all of them are turn-based.

You have multiple save slots, and you should save often. A bad decision could easily lead to a game over!

This game is fully playable with only a mouse.

There are no voice-overs in this game. Which is a pity, it would have fit this game very nicely. Much humour is to be found in the text, be it your MC’s own self-musings or interactions with NPCs. While this game is very story heavy and involves a lot of reading, the humour and developement keeps the game lively.

The music is pleaseant to listen too.

I really liked the graphics, all of the settings and backgrounds have so much detail.

Anyone who looks at this game will notice its high price tag. Is it worth the price? The gameplay is long and it has a good amount of replayability, because you can easily make different decisions in subsequent playthroughs to showcase different aspects of the game, and even change the fundamental way that you are playing the game. So although the game is pricey, I still think its worth the price.

If you like P&C games and want something more challenging and different or you were a fan of the old Quest for Glory series, I would highly recommend this beautiful game. I only wished to have a function to turn off the time flow component because it adds too much stress for me. It is also worth mentioning that there is a really well-made game manual that you can access from the Steam store page, go check that out! I really miss the old days when games each came in its box with such a manual. I am really glad they decided to create one for this game.

First look at "Hero U: Rogue to Redemption" (RPG adventure): gameplay video, no commentary
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rH5V0ffrb_c

Disclaimer: The copy of the game was provided by the publisher, however, it did not influence my opinion in any way.

Let's start with the big questions:
Is this a true Quest for Glory successor? Yes.
Is this a Quest for Glory successor we (or at least I) have been waiting for? Probably not.

Hero-U is closest to Quest for Glory 2 and 5 in the sense that both plot and gameplay are structured around timed events and your (and other characters') daily schedules. For obvious reasons, the schedule part is even more prominent here - which kinda makes sense: since your character is a rogue who's supposed to work around (or break) the rules, there have to be some rules to break in the first place. It reminded me of the survival elements in Heroine's Quest in the sense that it adds some challenge at the beginning stages but quickly stops being a problem. Same goes for money: there were a couple of times where I was a bit short on it, but it's also quite easy to remedy.
While you only get one class, unlike the Quest for Glory series, the game still gives you a considerable leeway in how to play. Roughly, I would say that you can play the game as a fighter (engaging in straightforward fighting), proper rogue (stealthing around the fights) or a talker (never going to adventuring areas and focusing on building reputations instead). In my experience, fighter would be the hard mode, while staying a true rogue is the easy one - although I didn't care about the school sim parts too much, so I don't know how hard this part is. There are very few mandatory events, and the only plot-critical skill is lockpicking, so in some ways you get even more freedom than in Quest for Glory. Most of the time the game does a decent job of keeping track of and acknowledging your past actions, but sometimes it doesn't.
The combat system is definitely an improvement over Quest for Glory series, and is generally pretty decent for a single-character game. It's not terribly deep, but you get a nice variety of combat tools and some situations (particularly in the catacombs) where you kinda have to use your brains a bit.
What I really didn't like on the other hand is the switch from point-and-click to text menu-based interactions. I can see that the Coles tried to work around the inherent no-brainer-ness of text menus: lots of quests (especially the ghots' ones) are quite vague and require a bit of exploration, and there are a ton of nominally-interactive hotspots that eat up time, so you do have to do a bit of thinking instead of blindly clicking through every text line. But it's still a lot less challenging and satisfying than figuring out which item to use on which hotspot. The ubiquity of such hotspots and text menus also gives off the impression of the game being over-written, but at least the writing is good. While the density of puns per pixel approaches that of a black hole, I genuinely laughed at some of them, and it doesn't happen often.
The timed nature of the plot and the class schedule also has quite a few obvious downsides. First, there's literally nothing to do in the beginning of the game other than train. It's kinda funny if you think of it - grinding has always been the Achilles heel of Quest for Glory games, where you had to perform senseless actions just to get your skills up for the relevant checks. So rather than solve this problem, the Coles decided to legitimize it by setting the game in school and make grinding a prominent gameplay mechanice. The second downside of scheduling the plot is that quite a few times I've figured out what I needed to do ahead of the plot, but still had to wait for the right day to do it. Then, when you are allowed to explore ahead of the plot, the game sometimes punishes you for this. For example, the Advanced Magic elective was largely a waste of time for my character, because it mostly dealt with anti-undead spells, and I've finished exploring the catacombs long before that.

So the bottom line is that it's a charming and entertaining game, but no masterpiece. Of the Quest for Glory series, I'd rate it about on par with QfG2, above QfG5 but below the rest. Of the recent QfG-likes, Heroine's Quest is definitely a better game, and I haven't played enough of Quest for Infamy to judge - the juvenile humor really puts me off (which, I guess, would put Hero-U above it in my personal rating).