This game is almost like a new genre to me, or at least a new combination of them. It's a fast favorite and I find myself wondering what else there might be that could come close to this experience. It reminds me quite a bit of Star Traders: Frontiers which is also a favorite. I could play a whole lot more games in this genre, and I definitely have a long way to go in this one before I am satisfied with what I've done; I'm 30+ hours in and feel like I'm not half way done doing what I want to do. Not everything is intuitive and there is a bit of a learning curve. My first game I played as a fairly evil "slaver" and invested heavily in Gor'gorro, an orc companion who did not appreciate my Vagrus' behavior, so I ended up frustrated with that and started a new game after he left my comitatus. Be careful not to spend any of your insight on a companion who might not stick around! Pick one or two who seem compatible with one another to invest in initially.

Bit frustrating at first, but pretty fun after you get the hang of it.

If you like this game then you like doing chores. Chores is what you live for. Doing laundry while sweeping and mopping your floors and listening to Kenny-G play in the background while dusting your chandelier is your idea of a good day.

Me? I like to play video games and this is not a video game. Every minute of this game is spent managing some kind of system that is designed to make you lose. Every one of these systems is definitely manageable and "winning" in this game means successfully navigating all of these systems simultaneously.

I know right? If you are one of those formers, you are totally turned on right now! And good for you! You deserve a game designed for you too! If you aren't though do yourself a favour and stay away!

I don't want to go into any more detail about each system but I will say that the only true area of enjoyment of this game for me was the companions (named NPCs that you can recruit and develop) and when I finally got around to looking up the game's Wiki and I discovered that in the entire game (the world is fairly big) there are only about 12 NPCs that you can find and recruit I stopped playing right then and there.

Playing Vagrus is like doing your tax return, or like aquiring stockholm syndrome from an abuser.

Why do i say this? Because the game is a constant source of frustration with a skeric of enjoyment in those rare moments that things go right for you, and yet somehow despite the frequent anger i feel about the frequent failures of the game, i find myself going back to it to be abused more.

Yes, the developers have specifically outlined that the game is meant to be hard, but the truth of the matter is that the game isn't hard at all. Once you know some basic trade routes, it's easy to make lots of Bross quickly and get your cargo to maximum capacity. All you need to do to ensure this is to spam save when you get an outcome that is finally positive, and spam load when you get an outcome that is negative, which is probably 80% of the time. This entirely breaks the immersion of the game, rendering it a fustercluck where you spent probably 30% of your time in the menu screen.

Some people will say "But the game isn't intended to be played that way. It's meant to be brutal, and you are just meant to deal with the constant bad rolls". Except that's a load of crap. Play the game 'as the developers intended' and you will quickly find yourself dead and having to load anyway. Let me provide an example...

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You leave the city of Deven on your way to Ash to deliver some dyes and travel the back country, because if you travel on the roads, you can't hunt or forage, and are likely to encounter the tax man that will take a substantial amount of your Bross. While hunting and foraging on the first camp night, you roll two critical failures, losing vigor, a scout and a slave or two. You brush it off despite the frustration at having such bad luck, pick up your party and take the next day in your stride. During the travels of your next day, you encounter an enemy bandit party, and since fleeing never works without losses anyway, you decide to stand and fight. You are meant to have a far superior force, and yet a large enough number of your fighters die in the process and your companions are injured despite the win. You win nothing except a couple of hides and a pittance of coins. Since they had no items of value, apparently you were beaten solidly by a bunch of unarmed bandits that were mostly naked. Seems legit... Now you don't have enough fighters to cover the protection of your party so that by the time you camp that night, you can't fully protect your party. Oops! Just bad luck right?

On the third day as you briefly cross over the road, you get screwed by the tax man and lose a large enough portion of your wealth. Oops again! You pass by Sun rock and it's off to Ash. On the second day from Sun Rock to Ash, you run into an army of specters. There's no fighting them because they are invulnerable without certain blessings and items, and you can't escape. You're dead. Now you have to go back to your original save game and attempt the run all over again hoping that along the way you don't encounter that single situation or series of situations that completely screw you over. Rinse, repeat, scream in anger and frustration!!
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And it's not just this. It's other things as well, such as:

- Investing many hours into the game only to find out that maxing out your main character's stats is a stupid idea instead of increasing the stats of your companions because they get additional benefits from items. Boy i wish i had known that before i wasted all those points on my own character. Did i mention that there's no option to respec your character to fix this issue that you cou'd not have possibly known about? Guess i will have to START ALL OVER AGAIN.
- Maxing out your character's authority to +6 which costs 15 insight to get to max level, only to be gifted +1 authority as part of a quest chain to deliver a slave to the prefectus from Auguros to Avernum. Why is this a problem? Because you get NO INSIGHT CREDITS, meaning that the 15 insight you spent to get your authority to 6 was completely wasted and you get nothing back when you get the authority point from the prefectus. Whose stupid idea was it to not to include a credit system?
- Combat is utterly broken. It consists of your supposedly battle experienced party missing repeatedly whilst being forcibly penetrated by what should be inferior enemies and ultimately dying. For instance, I have watched my supposedly tanky Orc companion Gor'Goro whose backstory is as a hardened gladiator get slapped down in a couple of rounds by a couple of emaciated wraiths. Seem legit? Oh of course...
- No matter how high you get your stats for foraging, herb lore, hunting and beast lore, you will always suck at foraging and hunting and repeatedly fail rolls. So no matter how late in the game you progress, you will always be spam saving and loading. Get used to it.

I could go on, but simply put this game in summary is one that repeatedly abuses you for no reason whatsoever and kicks you in the scrotum when you're lying down. Unfortunately since i now have developed said Stockholm syndrome i find myself unable to detach myself from completing the game, but you don't have to suffer the same fate. I recommend running away as fast as you can to preserve your sanity.

Vagrus has a lot to offer in terms of world building and storytelling, the basic gameplay loop - while punishing - feels good once you've invested enough time to overcome it.

However, it's that same punishing style translated into hidden mechanics, invisible event flags, and plain unlucky dice rolls that will corner your run and negate hours of otherwise enjoyable play. Save-scumming (reloading an old save for a new roll on an outcome) is often an option and given how suddenly progress can turn to failure, the game must be designed with this in mind. More to the point, the lack of transparency in event flagging, basic explanations of how X leads to Y, that will leave you running in circles only to find that a secret timer has already expired and locked in your failure without informing you.

The end result is a game that can and will waste your time, which is a real shame since there's otherwise so much worth seeing.

Hop on the Yrg!