The Sword of Voldiir

Adapted from a Review-A-Thon 25 Review

Style: RPG/choice-select
Played : 7/20/25
Playtime: 30m

I have previously asserted that High Fantasy is not my chosen fabulist genre. Nor, to the extent that I have engaged TTRPG, is DnD my chosen system. To the extent I have engaged these things before… which, I live in this world in this time, don’t I? To the extent I have engaged these things it has been predominantly as a Rogue. Make of that what you will. Collectively, these dynamics suggest that High Fantasy DnD where I cannot play a Rogue is going to face an uphill climb with me.

Which was my experience here. Interestingly, if I squint a bit, I can see an experience just adjacent to SOV that would engage me. SOV sets the table with some interesting dynamics: possibility to romance other characters, including full gender selection; a plot that subverts dungeon crawl into a more dynamic scenario TAILOR MADE FOR ROGUING; legitimately interesting and diverse characterizations of two of your three companions. These bright spots highlighted something I kind of knew: when I TTRPG, I am much more enamored of the RP than the G. DnD’s mechanical systems (predominantly combat) I find pretty fiddly and uninteresting in their own right. They are a randomizer delivery system, whose main benefit is to unpredictably alter the story’s progression and provide RNG optimization puzzles to solve/survive.

Here, the implementation consistently (though not uniformly!) steered into those aspects that hold the least fascination to me. Let’s start with its exploration mechanism. At various points you are presented with multiple choices, directions to explore. Pretty consistently, there is no context to those choices, no knowledge that informs the possibilities. Meaning, you are going to need to try them all until you find the one that works. This is not inherently a bad mechanism, it emphasizes the ‘exploration’ nature of the setup. It is, however, not so rewarding when the construction is ‘dead end,’ ‘dead end,’ ‘objective.’ Would be nice to have incidental encounters, sidequesty wonders to experience, or even clues, anything to justify the diversions. Otherwise, what is the point of the choice? Instead, it becomes a fairly mechanical ‘try until success’ exercise.

Similarly, combat was rendered not as an open-ended, interactive challenge. Instead, it was a series of die rolls (without opportunity to change approaches mid-combat!) that just played out. That parenthetical part is crucial to what I perceive as the appeal of of TTRPG combat. The ability to try wild things, to adjust based on how things develop, heck to run away before grinding to death on bad rolls. Here, you get one choice at the start, then die roll your way to a finish. Happily, my playthrough I survived all encounters, however if truly left in the hands of cold Dame Fortune, it seems unsatisfying death, as a result of no choices on my part, was a real possibility. Randomization is not the compelling part of these mechanisms, its the agency to mitigate and optimize the random effects that are. That feels missing here.

Where the work is most alive, is when interacting with NPCs. Lorelei and Aenwyn are both rendered as pretty specific personalities, whose agency and drives are nicely varied. In this short demo, Cassian suffered a bit, feeling more like Lorelei-minus than a unique thing of his own. It feels like the romance is teased in this early going, but not really fruit-bearing yet. This is fine, enough of the romance mechanics are introduced that the flavor is there, and while not cutting new ground (yet) is certainly serviceable enough. Non-romantic character interactions are pleasant enough too, in particular when the opportunity reveals more NPC character. Other, non-mechanic-tied choices feel a bit better too. Things like player-driven investigative approach, whether to lean into DnDs brand of casual murder or not, these spice up the proceedings in a welcome way.

So yeah, a mixed implementation bag for me, but none of that is my overriding impression of the work. Hovering over it all is what I can only describe as a “first draft feel.” The work is rife with typos, awkward grammer and coding bugs. I captured examples of these as I went, and communicated samples to the author. Beyond a wealth of spelling, verb tense and clumsy wordings, there were some specific technical issues: a gender variable appearing untranslated in text, even an alarming warning about unclosed markup. It all added up to an unpolished vibe, that could’ve benefited from playtesting and more editing.

So, where do we land here? For all prospective audiences, I would recommend another round of polish, bugfix and editing. For a DnD-philic audience, this seems to reasonably hit expected beats, and augment it with character and plot development in a nice way. For me, those augmentations are more interesting than the game’s bones, which just tells me there is a more squarely targeted audience out there.